Some People,completely Blind to Music!No Emotional Response to any kind of Music

[Cosmos]

A new study has just been released.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098221400133X

Dissociation between Musical and Monetary Reward Responses in Specific Musical Anhedonia

Highlights:

- Healthy people with specific musical anhedonia are identified
- These individuals do not find music pleasurable, but enjoy other rewarding stimuli
- They show normal autonomic responses to monetary reward, but not to pleasant music
- Specific anhedonia reflect the existence of different access to the reward system

Summary:

Music has been present in all human cultures since prehistory [1,2], although it is not associated with any apparent biological advantages (such as food, sex, etc.) or utility value (such as money). Nevertheless, music is ranked among the highest sources of pleasure [3], and its important role in our society and culture has led to the assumption that the ability of music to induce pleasure is universal. However, this assumption has never been empirically tested. In the present report, we identified a group of healthy individuals without depression or generalized anhedonia who showed reduced behavioral pleasure ratings and no autonomic responses to pleasurable music, despite having normal musical perception capacities. These persons showed preserved behavioral and physiological responses to monetary reward, indicating that the low sensitivity to music was not due to a global hypofunction of the reward network. These results point to the existence of specific musical anhedonia and suggest that there may be individual differences in access to the reward system.

A german article about it:
http://www.scinexx.de/wissen-aktuell-17303-2014-03-07.html

Now I guess it would be interesting to do some follow up studies on those music blind people.

 

[anothermagyar]

Interesting, very much.
What kind of music were they presenting for this study?

The other thing is I have experiencing decline in classical music.
Less and less people interested and I am not surprised, generally the whole world is getting more and more insane.
People more interested listening of a type of "music" which imo just noise.
I grew up in a family where both my parents (my mom and stepfather) were opera singers and I love classical music and part of my life.
I also became an opera singer.

Thanks for posting this.

 

[SeekinTruth]

That's really interesting (and very weird too). I find it kinda sad, as I can't imagine having such a lack of pleasure and lack of connection to music. FWIW.

 

[Voyageur]

Interesting, very much.
What kind of music were they presenting for this study?

The above just said "pleasurable music", which could have many avenues, yet I am suspecting that it had a wide spectrum of tastes presented.

Was kind of surprised at the findings, too. Yes "weird", SeekingTruth, cannot imagine those who cannot find any pleasure ("no autonomic responses") in what the vast majority do in how music can move the spirit.

 

[Laura]

That really is weird. I'm having a hard time imagining it myself since music is practically like air for me. I'm wondering about the declaration that their reward system is "intact" because they respond to money. Hmmm...

 

[Seppo Ilmarinen]

I've read before of amusia, which is neurological condition, where person is incapable of distinguishing tones or rhythm, and therefore hear music as a noise. I've never heard before of people who can't get pleasure from music, despite having normal musical perceiving capacity. Strange.

 

[3DStudent]

That really is weird. I'm having a hard time imagining it myself since music is practically like air for me.

Yeah really, and literally too. It's air moving at certain frequencies and rhythms. You would think that at least in a mechanical way that music can be stimulating. Such as frequencies that vibe well with the body. I'm thinking along the lines of 110 hz or something similar.

 

[trendsetter37]

Not trying to jump to conclusions here but is there a particular reason that they focused on the fact that their reward mechanism still responded to money and not something else. What would the results yield using visual art or nature photography?

I find this strange as well. But less strange if I ponder other individuals that are primarily motivated by money and nothing else. Just my two cents but if this research leads to more tools in unmasking psychopaths i'm all for it. BUT again this could just be some genetic or other anomaly which would make my "black and white" supposition null and void.

Interesting to say the least.

 

[Iron]

An individual motivated by money, would be in essence motivated by the desire of comfort, because money equals comfort and power in our reality.

I wonder, if this is true, that they stumbled upon a method of detecting Organic Portals?

 

[theos]

An individual motivated by money, would be in essence motivated by the desire of comfort, because money equals comfort and power in our reality.

I wonder, if this is true, that they stumbled upon a method of detecting Organic Portals?

Hmm, interesting. But I'm sure that there are a number of OPs who are in the music industry and create music. However, just creating it can be purely mechanical as well and doesn't really say much about the amount of pleasure they derive from music itself.

I can't grok people who get no emotional response to music. I've sometimes played the "would you rather be" game with people, as in "would you rather be deaf or blind?" I always lean toward blind just because life without music would be unimaginable to me.

I even find people who just listen to the radio and and like whatever is fed to them and don't have a music collection or any personal preferences towards music to be a little weird.

 

[irjO]

Its is hard for me to think about it, I'm a musician and music means a lot specially when I get emotional or want to meditate about something, music its always something that I use to feel better or to put me in a better mood to do something! I think people who don't have any reaction from music are more like mechanical.. OPs? psychopaths maybe? something similar?

 

[Andromeda]

Wow, that's a really weird condition. I know that some people have bizarre taste in music, but to have none at all?

 

[l apprenti de forgeron]

Its is hard for me to think about it, I'm a musician and music means a lot specially when I get emotional or want to meditate about something, music its always something that I use to feel better or to put me in a better mood to do something! I think people who don't have any reaction from music are more like mechanical.. OPs? psychopaths maybe? something similar?

Yeah, could be. Or it can be people with conscience, but that having the genetic body more information turned off that the common people (even by some accident) can not vibrate with the music. It's really strange.
Also, although we certainly are sts, it's not clear to me that the pleasure, or the absence of it, has to be always associated with the reward system. Seems a financial prejudice. Maybe it has to do with lack of emotions for other reasons (the above, OP or psychos, and any beast responds to rewards). Well, surely there are deeper issues to discover related to the study.
Thanks for sharing, Pashalis.

 

[H-KQGE]

I've read before of amusia, which is neurological condition, where person is incapable of distinguishing tones or rhythm, and therefore hear music as a noise. I've never heard before of people who can't get pleasure from music, despite having normal musical perceiving capacity. Strange.

Yes. Something seems off here, something missing. Neurological, genetic, I don't know, a breakdown from Wikipedia might offer us insight, questions still remain though. Anyone can "Wiki it", but I thought to just put it here for ease. First, we start with "auditory agnosia" Hold on, its slightly long...

Auditory agnosia is a form of agnosia that manifests itself primarily in the inability to recognize or differentiate between sounds. It is not a defect of the ear or "hearing", but a neurological inability of the brain to process sound meaning. It is a disruption of the "what" pathway in the brain.[1] Persons with auditory agnosia can physically hear the sounds and describe them using unrelated terms, but are unable to recognize them. They might describe the sound of some environmental sounds, such as a motor starting, as resembling a lion roaring, but would not be able to associate the sound with "car" or "engine", nor would they say that it was a lion creating the noise.[2] Auditory agnosia is caused by damage to the secondary and tertiary auditory cortex of the temporal lobe of the brain.[3]

Types of auditory agnosia:

There are three primary distinctions of auditory agnosia that fall into two categories.

Semantic-associative
This type of auditory agnosia is caused by lesions to the left hemisphere of the brain, specifically the temporal lobes and Wernicke's area.[4]

Linguistic (or verbal information or Wernicke's) agnosia indicates that the subject can't comprehend words, although they can understand words using sign language and words from reading books, and are themselves capable of speech (and even of deriving meaning from non-linguistic communication e.g. body language)[5] the particular sounds associated to each word are meaningless.[3]

Discriminative
This type of auditory agnosia is caused by lesions to the right hemisphere of the brain.[4]

Classical (or pure) auditory agnosia is an inability to process environmental sounds, such as animal noises, industrial noises, or the like. An airplane roaring overhead would not be understood to be related to the idea of "airplane"—indeed, the person would not even think to look up.[6]

Interpretive or receptive agnosia (amusia) is an inability to understand music. The term "amusia" covers a broad spectrum: from those with a mere deficit of rhythmic ability (mild dysrhythmia), to those with heavy all-encompassing amusia, including the recently coined "distimbria"; sufferers regard music as simply "noise", often compared to drainpipes or drills, or other invasive forms of background noise. Vocal singing can be understood, but is simply seen as "odd tone of voice".[7] The standard is considered to be that amusics with a "normal" intensity of amusia are cortically unable to distinguish pitch changes of less than three semitones (when it includes a pitch-deficit; it is contentious whether without this symptom it can be considered amusia). They may appreciate or enjoy listening to or performing music, but some can not tolerate it or find it irritating.[8]

That last part is interesting. As is this.

Special Cases

A seventy-four year old man named "M" had a special case of auditory agnosia.[9] "M" suffered from, "unilateral left posterior temporal and parietal damage", (Saygin, Leech, & Dick, 2010, p. 107) including Wernicke's Area. These areas of the brain are associated with language processing. He had a stroke when he was 62 and went through intensive speech therapy for twelve weeks to help him recover. He was able to regain his language capacity, but when tested at age 74, he had great difficulty in recognizing non-verbal environmental sounds. He did not have either verbal comprehension deficits nor peripheral hearing problems (p. 107). His condition was very rare because auditory agnosia for nonverbal sounds is usually associated with the right side of the brain. "M" was able to identify familiar Christmas songs and some animal sounds. When he heard music, he couldn't distinguish individual instruments or voices, but he knew it was music. fMRI scans show that after the stroke, his brain re-wired itself through neuronal compensation to account for the damage.

Which is pretty amazing, even if they didn't provide all the details. Here's the entry on amusia..

Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch, but it also encompasses musical memory and recognition.[1] Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music processing anomaly at birth.

Studies have shown that congenital amusia is a deficit in fine-grained pitch discrimination and that 4% of the population suffers from this disorder.[2] Acquired amusia, on the other hand, may take several forms. Patients with brain damage may experience the loss of ability to produce musical sounds while sparing speech,[3] much like aphasics lose speech selectively but can sometimes still sing.[4][5] Other forms of amusia may affect specific sub-processes of music processing. Current research has demonstrated dissociations between rhythm, melody, and emotional processing of music,[6] and amusia may include impairment of any combination of these skill sets.

Now the third paragraph of this next part is very interesting..

Basics of music processing:

Neurologically intact individuals appear to be born musical. Even before they are able to talk, infants show remarkable musical abilities that are similar to those of adults in that they are sensitive to musical scales and a regular tempo.[2] Also, infants are able to differentiate between consonant and dissonant intervals. These perceptual skills indicate that music-specific predispositions exist.[2]

Prolonged exposure to music develops and refines these skills. Extensive musical training does not seem to be necessary in the processing of chords and keys.[2] The development of musical competence most likely depends on the encoding of pitch along musical scales and maintaining a regular pulse, both of which are key components in the structure of music and aid in perception, memory, and performance.[2] Also, the encoding of pitch and temporal regularity are both likely to be specialized for music processing.[2]Pitch perception is absolutely crucial to processing music. The use of scales and the organization of scale tones around a central tone (called the tonic) assign particular importance to notes in the scale and cause non-scale notes to sound out of place. This enables the listener to ascertain when a wrong note is played. However, in individuals with amusia, this ability is either compromised or lost entirely.[2]

Music-specific neural networks exist in the brain for a variety of music-related tasks. It has been shown that Broca's area is involved in the processing of musical syntax.[7] Furthermore, brain damage can disrupt an individual's ability to tell the difference between tonal and atonal music and detect the presence of wrong notes, but can preserve the individual's ability to assess the distance between pitches and the direction of the pitch.[2] The opposite scenario can also occur, in which the individual loses pitch discrimination capabilities, but can sense and appreciate the tonal context of the work. Distinct neural networks also exist for music memories, singing, and music recognition. Neural networks for music recognition are particularly intriguing. A patient can undergo brain damage that renders him/her unable to recognize familiar melodies that are presented without words. However, the patient maintains the ability to recognize spoken lyrics or words, familiar voices, and environmental sounds.[2] The reverse case is also possible, in which the patient cannot recognize spoken words, but can still recognize familiar melodies. These situations overturn previous claims that speech recognition and music recognition share a single processing system.[2] Instead, it is clear that there are at least two distinct processing modules: one for speech and one for music.[2]

And the symptoms?

Symptoms of amusia are generally categorized as receptive, clinical, or mixed. Symptoms of receptive amusia, sometimes referred to as "musical deafness", include the inability to recognize familiar melodies, the loss of ability to read musical notation, and the inability to detect wrong or out-of tune notes.[8] Clinical, or expressive, symptoms include the loss of ability to sing, write musical notation, and/or play an instrument.[9]A mixed disorder would be a combination of expressive and receptive impairment.

Clinical symptoms of acquired amusia are much more variable than those of congenital amusia and are determined by the location and nature of the lesion.[8] Brain injuries may afflict motor or expressive functioning, including the ability to sing, whistle, or hum a tune (oral-expressive amusia), the ability to play an instrument (instrumental amusia or musical apraxia), and the ability to write music (musical agraphia). Additionally, brain damage to the receptive dimension affects the faculty to discriminate tunes (receptive or sensorial amusia), the ability to read music (musical alessia), and the ability to identify songs that were familiar prior to the brain damage (amnesic amusia).

Research suggests that patients with amusia also have difficulty when it comes to spatial processing.[10] Amusics performed more quickly than normal individuals on a combined task of both spatial and musical processing tasks, which is most likely due to their deficit. Normal individuals experience interference due to their intact processing of both musical and spatial tasks, while amusics do not.[10] Pitch processing normally depends on the cognitive mechanisms that are usually used to process spatial representations.[10]

Those with congenital amusia show impaired performance on discrimination, identification and imitation of sentences with intonational differences in pitch direction in their final word. This suggests that amusia can in subtle ways impair language processing.[11]

A lot going on there then. Just a quick note that I'm omitting some parts, though apart from the first entries (on agnosia) the rest is in order so anyone can follow the wiki page. Ok, diagnosis.

The diagnosis of amusia requires individuals to detect out-of-key notes in conventional but unfamiliar melodies.[12] A behavioral failure on this test is diagnostic because there is typically no overlap between the distributions of the scores of amusics and controls.[13] Such scores are generally obtained through the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA),[14] which involves a series of tests that evaluate the use of musical characteristics known to contribute to the memory and perception of conventional music.[15] The battery comprises six subtests which assess the ability to discriminate pitch contour, musical scales, pitch intervals, rhythm, meter, and memory.[2] An individual is considered amusic if he/she performs two standard deviations below the mean obtained by musically-competent controls. This musical pitch disorder represents a phenotype that serves to identify the associated neuro-genetic factors.[16] Both MRI-based brain structural analyses and electroencephalography (EEG) are common methods employed to uncover brain anomalies associated with amusia (See Neuroanatomy).[12] Additionally, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is used to detect anatomical differences between the MRIs of amusic brains and musically intact brains, specifically with respect increased and/or decreased amounts of white and grey matter.[12]

The neuroanatomy is where it gets really interesting.

Overview

Many research studies of individuals with amusia show that a number of cortical regions appear to be involved in processing music. Some report that the primary auditory cortex, secondary auditory cortex, and limbic system are responsible for this faculty, while more recent studies suggest that lesions in other cortical areas, abnormalities in cortical thickness, and deficiency in neural connectivity and brain plasticity may contribute to amusia. While various etiologies of amusia exist, some general findings that provide insight to the brain mechanisms involved in music processing are discussed below.[8]

Pitch relations

Studies suggest that the analysis of pitch is primarily controlled by the right temporal region of the brain. The right secondary auditory cortex processes pitch change and manipulation of fine tunes; specifically, this region distinguishes the multiple pitches that characterize melodic tunes as contour (pitch direction) and interval (frequency ratio between successive notes) information.[19] The right superior temporal gyrus recruits and evaluates contour information, while both right and left temporal regions recruit and evaluate interval information.[20] In addition, the right anterolateral part of Heschl's gyrus (primary auditory cortex) is also concerned with processing pitch information.[21]

Temporal relations

The brain analyzes the temporal (rhythmic) components of music in two ways: (1) it segments the ongoing sequences of music into temporal events based on duration, and (2) it groups those temporal events to understand the underlying beat to music. Studies on rhythmic discrimination reveal that the right temporal auditory cortex is responsible for temporal segmenting, and the left temporal auditory cortex is responsible for temporal grouping.[22][23] Other studies suggest the participation of motor cortical areas in rhythm perception and production.[24] Therefore, a lack of involvement and networking between bilateral temporal cortices and neural motor centers may contribute to both congenital and acquired amusia.[8]

Memory

Memory is required in order to process and integrate both melodic and rhythmic aspects of music. Studies suggest that there is a rich interconnection between the right temporal gyrus and frontal cortical areas for working memory in music appreciation.[25][26] This connection between the temporal and frontal regions of the brain is extremely important since these regions play critical roles in music processing. Changes in the temporal areas of the amusic brain are most likely associated with deficits in pitch perception and other musical characteristics, while changes in the frontal areas are potentially related to deficits in cognitive processing aspects, such as memory, that are needed for musical discrimination tasks.[18] Memory is also concerned with the recognition and internal representation of tunes, which help to identify familiar songs and confer the ability to sing tunes in one's head. The activation of the superior temporal region and left inferior temporal and frontal areas is responsible for the recognition of familiar songs,[20] and the right auditory cortex (a perceptual mechanism) is involved in the internal representation of tunes.[27] These findings suggest that any abnormalities and/or injuries to these regions of the brain could facilitate amusia.

Other regions of the brain possibly linked to amusia

Lesions (or the absence of) in associations between the right temporal lobe and inferior frontal lobe
Cortical thickness and reduced white matter – in a recent study, voxel-based morphometry, an imaging technique used to explore structural differences in the brain, revealed a decrease in white matter concentration in the right inferior frontal gyrus of amusic individuals as compared to controls.[28] Lack of extensive exposure to music could be a contributing factor to this white matter reduction.[28] For example, amusic individuals may be less inclined to listen to music than others, which could ultimately cause reduced myelination of connections to the frontal areas of the brain.[28]
Involvement of the parahippocampal gyrus (responsible for the emotional reaction to music)[8]

Reading that makes me think how much that is fundamental to being human is taken for granted. Some amazing complexities there regarding affect, but wait, there's more..

Related diseases
Main article: Music-specific disorders

Amusia has recently been classified as a learning disability that affects musical abilities.[33] Research suggests that in congenital amusia, younger subjects can be taught tone differentiation techniques. This finding leads researchers to believe that amusia is related to dyslexia and other similar disorders.[34] Research has been shown that amusia may be related to an increase in size of the cerebral cortex, which may be a result of a malformation in cortical development. Diseases such as dyslexia and epilepsy are due to a malformation in cortical development and also lead to an increase in cortical thickness, which leads researchers to believe that congenital amusia may be caused by the identical phenomenon in a different area of the brain.[35]

Amusia is also similar to aphasia in that they affect similar areas of the brain near the temporal lobe. Most cases of those with amusia do not show any symptoms of aphasia. However, a number of cases have shown that those who have aphasia can exhibit symptoms of amusia, especially in acquired aphasia. The two are not mutually exclusive and having one does not imply possession of the other.[33] In acquired amusia, inability to perceive music correlates with an inability to perform other higher-level functions. As musical ability improves, so too do the higher cognitive functions which suggests that musical ability is closely related to these higher-level functions, such as memory and learning, mental flexibility, and semantic fluency.[18]

Amusia can also be related to aprosody, a disorder in which the sufferer's speech is affected, becoming extremely monotonous. It has been found that both amusia and aprosody can arise from seizures occurring in the non-dominant hemisphere.[36] They can also both arise from lesions to the brain, as can Broca's aphasia come about simultaneously with amusia from injury.[36] There is a relation between musical abilities and the components of speech, however, they are not understood very well.[36]

It's as if we're getting closer to some other psychopathological variant. Memory, learning, mental flexibility, semantic fluency. Hmm.

Anhedonia

In psychology and psychiatry, anhedonia (/ˌænhiˈdoʊniə/ an-hee-doh-nee-ə; Greek: ἀν- an-, "without" + ἡδονή hēdonē, "pleasure") is defined as the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable, e.g. exercise, hobbies, music, sexual activities or social interactions. While earlier definitions of anhedonia emphasized pleasurable experience, more recent models have highlighted the need to consider different aspects of enjoyable behavior, such as motivation or desire to engage in an activity ("motivational anhedonia"), as compared to the level of enjoyment of the activity itself ("consummatory anhedonia").[1]

According to William James the term was coined by Théodule-Armand Ribot.

One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition. "The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it exists."[2]

Anhedonia can be a characteristic of mental disorders including mood disorders, schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia. For example, people affected with schizophrenia often describe themselves as feeling emotionally empty.[3]

Mood disturbances are commonly observed in many psychiatric disorders. Disturbing mood changes may occur resultant to stressful life events and they are not uncommon during times of physical illness.[4] While anhedonia can be a feature of such mood changes, they are not mutually inclusive.

Causes:

Researchers theorize that anhedonia may result from the breakdown in the brain's reward system, involving the neurotransmitter dopamine. Studies by Paul Keedwell, MD, then of King's College, found that the brains of participants who were clinically depressed had to work harder to process rewarding experiences.[5][6] While earlier research believed dopamine to be primarily involved in the subjective experience of pleasure, the last 20 years has seen a conceptual shift, such that dopamine is now believed to underlie various aspects of reward anticipation, learning, and motivation.[7][8][9]

Anhedonia is also a relatively common side effect of antidopaminergic neuroleptics or antipsychotic drugs.

I hope we won't have to wait another twenty years for another conceptual shift. There's a following entry that I'm omitting that sort of indicates bipolar disorder via the DSM, but to conclude:

Primary relevance in schizophrenia & schizophrenia spectrum disorders
Social anhedonia is a core characteristic of schizotypy, which is defined as a continuum of personality traits that can range from normal to disordered and contributes to risk for psychosis and schizophrenia.[47] Social anhedonia is a dimension of both negative and positive schizotypy.[48] It involves social and interpersonal deficits, but is also associated with cognitive slippage and disorganized speech, both of which fall into the category of positive schizotypy.[49][50][51] Not all people with schizophrenia display social anhedonia [52] and likewise, people who have social anhedonia may never be diagnosed with a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder if they do not have the positive and cognitive symptoms that are most frequently associated with most schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.[53]

Social anhedonia may be a valid predictor of future schizophrenia-spectrum disorders;[53][54] young adults with social anhedonia perform in a similar direction to schizophrenia patients in tests of cognition and social behavior tests, showing potential predictive validity.[49][55] Social anhedonia usually manifests in adolescence, possibly because of a combination of the occurrence of critical neuronal development and synaptic pruning of brain regions important for social behavior and environmental changes, when adolescents are in the process of becoming individuals and gaining more independence.

Neurobiological correlates
Researchers studying the neurobiology of social anhedonia posit that this trait may be linked to dysfunction of reward-related systems in the brain. This circuitry is critical for the sensation of pleasure, the computation of reward benefits and costs, determination of the effort required to obtain a pleasant stimulus, deciding to obtain that stimulus, and increasing motivation to obtain the stimulus. In particular, the ventral striatum and areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and dorsolateral (dl) PFC, are critically involved in the experience of pleasure and the Hedonism perception of rewards. With regards to neurotransmitter systems, opioid, gamma-Aminobutyric acid and endocannabinoid systems in the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, and OFC mediate the hedonic perception of rewards.[25] Activity in the PFC and ventral striatum have been found to be decreased in anhedonic individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and schizophrenia. However, schizophrenia may be less associated with decreased hedonic capacity and more with deficient reward appraisal.[68][69] Abnormal functioning of the anterior insula and the parietal cortex is also implicated in anhedonia. Dowd & Barch conducted an Functional magnetic resonance imaging study in which schizophrenia-spectrum disorder patients and control participants made valence and arousal ratings of their own responses to emotional stimuli. They found that higher levels of anhedonia were associated with diminished arousal, but not valence, ratings. Furthermore, they found that, in controls, greater levels of social anhedonia were related to decreased bilateral caudate activation in response to positive relative to negative stimuli. The authors posit that the striatum in anhedonic individuals might be dysfunctional such that it fails to tag the saliency of positive events. Consequently, these individuals may experience blunted emotion.[70]

Research further implicates that abnormalities in the circuitry underlying social cognition are also critically involved in the generation of anhedonic symptoms. Individuals high in social anhedonia show less activation in the anterior portion of the rostral medial prefrontal cortex (arMFC), right superior temporal gyrus, and left somatosensory cortex during an emotion discrimination task; these regions are responsible for processing facial emotions.

There was more to that but I'm having trouble with my browser (again) right now. They were taken from "social anhedonia." FWIW.

 

[edgitarra]

I also found some info on brain connectivity and music:

If being musical relates to brain connectivity, does flat affect indicate the amount or location of psychopath brain connection defects?

“Perfect pitch” musicians have hyper white matter connectivity in areas relating to language and other social signals (Loui P, Schlaug G. Investigating musical disorders with diffusion tensor imaging: a comparison of imaging parameters. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1169:121-5 (author manuscript); Loui P, Li HC, Hohmann A, Schlaug G. Enhanced Cortical Connectivity in Absolute Pitch Musicians: A Model for Local Hyperconnectivity. J Cogn Neurosci. 2010 Jun 1.).

But: Those with congenital amusia have a less active right inferior frontal gyrus as well as reduced connectivity with the auditory cortex as compared with controls. (Hyde et al. Functional MRI Evidence of an Abnormal Neural Network for Pitch Processing in Congenital Amusia.Cereb. Cortex.2010; 0: bhq094v1-bhq094)

Recall that the more highly one ranks on a psychopath checklist, the more disconnected the uncinate fasciculus white matter tracts. Flat affect, or monotone, is a sign that something’s not right, and along with apathy, is a symptom of psychotic illnesses. Your loyal bloggist has been told something about not being able to carry a tune in a bucket, but nevertheless we sing with feeling, particularly prison songs. Plus, there are plenty of jolly old psychopaths who talk with a nasally flat affect, perhaps raising or lowering the voice pitch a little, but unnaturally and with an emotion that’s a little “off.” And so, the white matter connections may not be the pitch perfect kind, but this empirical evidence indicates to us that feeling and pitch are perhaps parallel tracts, but separate ones. Perhaps where there’s flat affect along with amoral behavior, there is a global white matter defect, affecting all the tracts.

It would be interesting to see if olfaction is also disconnected in those who have congenital amusia.

Current research has demonstrated dissociations between rhythm, melody, and emotional processing of music,[6] and amusia may include impairment of any combination of these skill sets.

Congenital amusia

Congenital amusia, commonly known as tone deafness, refers to a musical disability that cannot be explained by prior brain lesion, hearing loss, cognitive defects, or lack of environmental stimulation, and it affects about 4% of the population. Individuals who suffer from congenital amusia seem to lack the musical predispositions that most people are born with. They are unable to recognize or hum familiar tunes even though they have normal audiometry and above average intellectual and memory skills. Also, they do not show sensitivity to dissonant chords in a melodic context, which, as discussed earlier, is one of the musical predispositions exhibited by infants. The hallmark of congenital amusia is a deficit in fine-grained pitch discrimination, and this deficit is most apparent when congenital amusics are asked to pick out a wrong note in a given melody. If the distance between two successive pitches is small, congenital amusics are not able to detect a pitch change. As a result of this defect in pitch perception, a lifelong musical impairment may emerge due to a failure to internalize musical scales. A lack of fine-grained pitch discrimination makes it extremely difficult for amusics to enjoy and appreciate music, which consists largely of small pitch changes.

It could be possible that psychopaths may not have emotional responses because they cannot distinguish between tunes.


EDIT: Text Modification