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Although 25% of people are music fanatics, and most of the rest of us sit somewhere in the middle, there is a part of the population that simply don’t care about music. They’re not philistines, they just don’t feel anything when they put their headphones on. While you’re weeping to Celine Dion, they’re shrugging their shoulders in indifference.
Scientists have been trying to understand what causes this “music anhedonia” for a very long time, and may now have identified the neurology behind it. Some people simply can’t process music like others. They may not be able to distinguish a wrong note or recognise tunes. But that doesn’t fully account for the proportion of the population that doesn’t like music. Some people hear it just like the rest of us but don’t feel moved by it. This is the group that was a bit of a mystery. Now, a broken pathway between the auditory processing parts of the brain and the reward centre has been identified as the most likely culprit.
It just so happens that we have the perfect playlist for music haters this week – a list of the greatest songs of all time that are less than a minute long. I’ve just finished listening to it and it hardly took a moment. The list is also great for music lovers, too, as it contains some tracks you may not have heard by well-known artists. Thelonius Monk, Kate Bush and Eminem all feature, as does John Lennon, who’s 51-second track My Mummy’s Dead marked the end of
the Beatles.
If you’re developing a sense that the conversation around asylum hotels is getting worse rather than better, it’s worth reading this article about a new way to think about empathy. The goal of the authors is not to moralise about positions for or against the hotels but to outline a cognitive technique for coming to a more accurate perception of other people’s feelings and experiences, in the hope that we might be able to cool down a little on the subject.
Also this week, the sad demise of the last Rodrigues parakeet, the truth behind beauty supplements and quantum alternatives to GPS.
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