medicine has the capacity to make us well up or to pump us up , but for some citizenry it has no effect whatsoever . No , these melodically resistant individual do not miss a somebody , but instead experience what the authors of a new study call “ specific musical anhedonia ” , meaning their brains simply don’trespond to medicine .
By scanning the brains of 15 people with musical anhedonia and liken them to those who do n’t know this strange phenomenon , the research worker were able to visualise out how neural activity differs between the two groups , thus explaining why some the great unwashed are unmoved by medicine .
Using operative magnetic resonance imagery ( fMRI ) , the squad found that when those with melodic anhedonia take heed to music , they experience much low grade of activity in a brain realm called the nucleus accumbens ( NAcc ) than people without the condition .
Given that the NAcc is part of the brain’sreward circuit , this would seem to explain why these people are seldom uplift by the speech sound of music . However , when take part in a gambling labor , NAcc responses were as solid in those with musical anhedonia as those without it , suggest that their reward circumference works finely and that the government issue is specifically related to music .
The researchers then turned their attention to the level of connectivity between a wages complex body part called the ventral corpus striatum – which includes the NAcc – and theauditory cortexof the mentality , where sound are processed .
Subjects with musical anhedonia showed much lower connectivity along this pathway than subjects with normal reaction to music . A further group of 15 masses with extremely acutesensitivity to musicthen record peculiarly high connectivity between the ventral striatum and the auditory cortex .
Publishing their findings in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the researchers write that “ melodious anhedonia may be associated with a reduction in the interplay between the auditory cortex and the subcortical reward net , bespeak a polar role of this interaction for the enjoyment of music . ”
What causes these differences in connectivity along this primal musical pathway , however , remain unclear .
