Brought to you by Music24

For most of us, listening to music gives us a feeling - something happens. We’re moved emotionally, mentally, physically - all of them. But there is a flip side to it, that until about three days ago, we hadn’t really considered too much.

The flip side is that hearing music causes no reaction, nothing. No taste in music, no good song/bad song, it just gets heard and then nothing. And it’s not that they hear the music and say ‘oh that didn’t do anything’, the moment just simply doesn’t exist.

So here is what is important: it’s not that they dislike music. Because that would mean there is something attached to it in one way or another. And it wasn’t that long ago that the name for it was ‘invented’. The first documented case goes back to 1993, when the patient in question had a right temporoparietal lesion. With a full understanding of the pattern in the music they were hearing, they had zero emotions for it. And we also have to ask, they’re not tone-deaf either.

It wasn’t until 2011 that the term musical anhedonia started to come into action. The term Amusia means real tone-deafness; it means you can’t perceive tones. This isn’t that. Anhedonia is a different beast. Processing is all there, the tone, melody, harmony, pitch - all of it, processes and understands - the pleasure that almost all other listeners get just isn’t there. And, it is only music that happens with.

For anyone, this type of ‘affliction’ is interesting, but when you have time and money, you can look more into it. Which is what Ernest Mas-Herrero and Robert Zatorre did. Putting 45 people into an fMRI scanner and having them do two things - gamble a little bit, and listen to music. People who scored low on musical pleasure, measured with something called the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (go take it for fun, but keep in mind they don’t give you a score - score under 65 across the 20 questions is technically anhedonia territory, so just kind of eyeball it based on your own answers), showed weaker functional connectivity between their auditory cortex and their nucleus accumbens.

That's the wiring between "the part of your brain that hears the song" and "the part of your brain that goes this is good, more please."

But when they won money? Everything lit up as it should.

It is estimated that between 3-10% of the population has this (without a brain injury). But that is a huge variation in numbers. It’s not as rare as you might think, and statistically speaking, you’re probably friends with someone who has it, but has never said, because they don’t know.

They don’t know what they’re missing because they never had it to miss it in the first place. Twin studies put the heritable component of musical reward sensitivity - how much pleasure you get, not how musical you are - at about 54%. Which is significant, but it means that we personally make up the rest.

We’re going to take a guess and assume that since you’re here, and you probably got here by transferring playlists, and have chosen to stay, you’re not in the minority that don’t feel anything for music.

You can’t really test yourself; you’re here ‘cause you love music, but you can consider all of the people you’ve met in your life. Ones happy to drive in silence, ones that nod and smile when you show them a track, but it’s not landing - they will never understand. It can be frustrating, and the assumption is that you have different tastes in music.

Well, potentially they have no taste in music, because it doesn’t matter to them. (Which might be worse… and a bit scary).

A playlist for those who feel stuff? Of course.