Innate responses to music
2014-03-06 18:44:51.132813+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
For future digging in to: The Verge: Bad brains: some people are physically incapable of enjoying music: Research shows that people who say "I don't like music" aren't just trying to sound cool looks like your usual bad rewrite of a press release:
The study's results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn't show physical or emotional reaction. They didn't shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.
But the paper appears to be Individual Differences in Music Reward Experiences Ernest Mas-Herrero, Josep Marco-Pallares, Urbano Lorenzo-Seva, Robert J. Zatorre and Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 31, No. 2 (December 2013), pp. 118-138, and is available in PDF form off of Josep Marco-Pallerés web presence.
I'm particularly interested in this because I strongly suspect I'm somewhere on that spectrum...