Musings On Music: Seven Insights From Psychology

By Emma Young Music and humans go back a very long way. The earliest accepted instruments, made from bones, appear on the European scene about 40,000 years ago. But for perhaps at least a million years before that, our ancestors had the throat architecture that in theory would have allowed them to sing. All kinds of ideas have been put forward for why and how music came to matter so much to us. But what’s abundantly clear is that it does matter; there isn’t a society out there that doesn’t make and listen to music. And new research is now revealing all manner of psychological and neurological effects… But what about people who don’t like music? Music is a human universal, but it’s true — not everyone enjoys music. In fact, as a 2014 paper published in Current Biology revealed, some perfectly healthy people can perceive music just like anybody else, but their reward-related neural circuits don’t respond to it. (These circuits do still respond to food or money, for example, so it’s not that they’re generally defective). In fact, an estimated 3-5% of people experience “musical anhedonia”, and get no pleasure from music. (To find out where you sit on the music reward spectrum, you could fill in the team’s questionnaire, available here.) Last year, a team that included some of the same researchers published a follow-up study in the Journal of Neuroscience. They found a neurobiological basis for their earlier observations: differences in the white...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Emotion Feature Memory Music Source Type: blogs