Is your friend just not into music? Maybe you simply don’t feel the beat? Scientists suggest it’s a disconnect between the areas of your brain that process sound (in the cortex) and the nucleus accumbens, a part of your brain’s reward network, according to a press release by McGill University, carried by EurekAlert. The condition is called specific music anhedonia, and 3-5% of the population has it. The idea of the study came from the assumption that everybody liked music, and it turned out to be indeed just an assumption, Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill and a co-author of the paper, said on WNYC Studios’ weekly podcast Soundcheck (15:33). “These findings not only help us to understand individual variability in the way the reward system functions, but also can be applied to the development of therapies for treatment of reward-related disorders, including apathy, depression, and addiction,” said Zatorre, according to the press release. Think you might have the condition? Take this questionnaire initially given to Barcelona University students.

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