Music Won't Always Charm Savage Beasts

There is an intrinsic reward to music when we can listen to Carlos Santana bending a string and it feels like the Gates of Heaven just opened to share the blessings of every beautiful thing.  Scientists don't understand why music should impart this reward but it happens in almost all humans except for three-to-five percent who don't get anything out of it.  (Science Daily:  Lack of joy from music linked to brain disconnection)

Researchers at the University of Barcelona and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University have discovered that people with this condition showed reduced functional connectivity between cortical regions responsible for processing sound and subcortical regions related to reward.

To understand the origins of specific musical anhedonia, researchers recruited 45 healthy participants who completed a questionnaire measuring their level of sensitivity to music and divided them into three groups of sensitivity based on their responses.  The test subjects then listened to music excerpts inside an fMRI machine while providing pleasure ratings in real-time.  To control for their brain response to other reward types, participants also played a monetary gambling task in which they could win or lose real money.

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The research protocol is unusual but they need some creativity in trying to understand how reward networks function in the brain.  The article only mentions the extension briefly but we can easily infer how better understanding of the brain's reward system applies to many things (e.g. drug addiction).

The subject of musical appreciation has come up previously and that has wound up with a discussion of tone deafness.  The research in this case did not cover whether any of the research subjects identified themselves as tone deaf.

It does not appear that tone deafness is the same thing as musical anhedonia since it seems tone deafness still allows for some reward in music but not as much whereas it seems the music doesn't do anything for people with musical anhedonia.  Those are general impressions with unknown accuracy.

Lotho has described himself as tone deaf and the effect comes when there is less ability to differentiate pitch so it shifts more toward a monotone.  We attended many, many rock shows together and he explained his enthusiasm at the shows with the excitement of the crowd and the spectacle and this is a general impression as well since it's tough or impossible to describe his experience.

Lotho is my brother and, amazingly enough, not a research subject but it's still interesting to me that we're packing generally the same genetic kit and yet there's an apparent difference in the effect of music.  The same is true for maybe an even split in the family in which some seem to regard music as one more unusual and sometimes cool thing humans do while the others feel music as every good thing in the world happening at once.

My ol' Dad felt music is life and so does Doc whereas my sisters seem they can generally take it or leave it.  My ol' Mother sang pop songs in the kitchen while she cooked so she definitely felt it too.

That seems it proves genetics had nothing to do with it but how about this:  how about if musical appreciation is the dominant aspect of the gene and tone deafness is the recessive aspect.  If both parents are heterozygous for it (i.e. dominant and recessive) then you will have an equal chance from each one of getting the dominant or recessive aspect so a percentage of the progeny will wind up homozygous recessive for tone deaf and music becomes noise.

That's thin but it's valid Mendel.

Taking this back to the top, music won't always charm savage beasts as it may just be noise when there's not a musical reward system to enhance it and the sound will only piss 'em off.