This rarely discussed neurological condition makes you dislike music

Not a music person? Don’t worry, you’re not weird: You might actually have a neurological condition that prevents you from enjoying music.

Specific musical anhedonia is a real condition that prevents someone from deriving pleasure from music. People with the condition don’t have the typical emotional response to music that others do.

In a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers studied how the brain’s reward centers (i.e. the stuff that tells us something is good) connect to the brain’s auditory processing centers (i.e. the place we hear and interpret sound.)

The study found people with musical anhedonia have far less connectivity between those two areas than the average person.

“We found some of these individuals, there’s not very many of them but they do exist. ...They’re just indifferent to the music. said Dr. Robert Zatorre, a neurologist at McGill University.

Zatorre stressed that, while the condition is real, people shouldn’t consider it to be a form of mental illness. Every brain is different, after all.

“I try to be careful not to call it a disorder, he said. “The people I’ve spoken to who have musical anhedonia actually say they’re really grateful to the research. They’ve said to me, ‘All my life I thought I was weird, but now you’ve shown me that there are other people like me.’

So if you’re not that into music, don’t fret: It’s just science!