14 ms·

Related: recent studies have shown that there are people with "musical anhedonia", and that this condition may affect 3 to 5% of the world population [1]. These

by lqet 8y ago

Related: recent studies have shown that there are people with "musical anhedonia", and that this condition may affect 3 to 5% of the world population [1]. These people "get" music, meaning that they can learn to sing or play an instrument, remember and recognize melodies etc., but they are completely unable to receive any pleasure from it. As someone who gets a significant amount of his daily joy from listening to music and who always believed in music to be a universal language, I find this astonishing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia

rimunroe 8y ago
Whoa! I had no idea this was a thing! I'd always thought it was just some weird thing about me. I don't really get a whole lot of pleasure out of music, or get moved by music much. I almost never listen to music. When I do listen, it's usually to drown out external noise or help me focus, but in that case I usually just listen to the same song on a loop.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  I'm really curious about this. Have you ever fiddled around, learnt or messed about with any musical instrument, and if so, how did you feel? I recall that when I was learning my first instrument, and started learning a lot of songs, a lot of the other instruments didn't really make sense. For instance, if I was learning a guitar part from a rock song, the bass/drums/keys sort of sounded like a background mix that I couldn't identify into their individual instruments/parts.
  - rimunroe 8y ago
    I played the viola and sang in chorus in middle school. I really enjoyed both--especially the viola--but I think my enjoyment was more of the mechanics of it rather than the actual music we were making. I also really enjoyed playing Guitar Hero in college in the same way. I've thought about taking up the guitar or piano since then, but haven't ever gotten around to it.
    - Kagerjay 8y ago
      You sound like me, I get stuff done in dead silence. Music actually distracts me, playing songs in same loop helps out though. I still like practicing singing in the car though on the way to work, and guitar hero is fun to me too. Looking to learn to play the ukelele. I have like almost no musical intelligence, I can't remember song lyrics very well at all
      - rimunroe 8y ago
        Ditto on finding most music distracting! Also, I often sing nonsense songs when I'm doing stuff around the house.
      - LyndsySimon 8y ago
        > Looking to learn to play the ukelele Funny you should say that - I've been slowly trying to learn guitar for a couple of months now. I picked up a ukulele last week on a whim and can't seem to put it down! It's simpler than a guitar, but there's still so much to learn: the chords themselves, of course, but also how chords are created and how that relates to the way the instrument is strung; strums/rhythm; fingerpicking; the way different types of strings change the character of the sound... it just goes on and on. I'm not expert, but contact me if you want to chat sometime. My username is my real name, which is also my homepage's domain ( plus '.com') and my username on every social media service I use.
        Kagerjay 8y ago
        I'm down for that :) I still have a long ways to go, I can barely play basic chords properly
      - akvadrako 8y ago
        It’s very normal and maybe universal for music to be distracting. The only difference is some people don’t realize it.
- qznc 8y ago
  Me too. And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356
  - drblast 8y ago
    This is fascinating! Can any of you with musical anhedonia watch either of these songs and explain how you feel? https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk
    - irrational 8y ago
      I watched them. Honestly I got nothing out of them. It's just noise. I could see that the guy with black hair on the left in the first video was really getting into it, I just don't know what he was getting out of it. In the second one, I felt pleasure looking at the pretty girls, but their singing did nothing for me.
    - qznc 8y ago
      Looked a minute into the first one. Did not recognize the song but since I'm not into music, I don't know that much. I find myself distracted by the body language of the guy on the left (and later the one to the right). It is more interesting to me to watch how people behave than to listen to the music.
    - jrowley 8y ago
      Nice selection of tunes btw, at least they resonated an emotional response with me, but I love music.
    - firdak 8y ago
      The first one is interesting - if I heard it on the radio I wouldn't think twice about it, but seeing a video is different. Watching the guy play the guitar gives me a sense of how difficult it must be to play - which means I appreciate the music because I appreciate the technical skill of the person playing it. The second one does nothing for me - it's just dull. Can you explain how you feel when you listen to those songs?
- irrational 8y ago
  You're not alone. I'm just glad I now know the name for my "condition" (which I sincerely hope there is no cure for).
  - moyya 8y ago
    Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?
    - irrational 8y ago
      From what I can see, there is no upside to enjoying music. People spend so much time and money (attending concerts, paying for streaming services, buying music, buying instruments, practicing instruments, listening to the music, etc.) that I'm able to happily use elsewhere. If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things.
      - root_axis 8y ago
        > If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things. If you were enjoying it then how would it differ from any of the other variety of things you already enjoy that you spend money on?
        moyya 8y ago
        Honestly, I can't tell if the poster is just trying to live up to his/her username or not. The comments make little sense.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      I like who I am, and am perfectly happy the way I am. If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?
- gwern 8y ago
  Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors. I sometimes wonder what people with pain asymbolia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia) or aboulia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia) make of the rest of us talking abut pain and wanting things. Some links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 Also, while I'm at it: when your nose is stuffy but which nostril it is seems to cycle over the course of the day, you're not imagining it and that's called the 'nasal dilation cycle' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle ; those things you see crossing your vision are also real and part of your eye fluid, called 'floaters' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater ; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination is probably self-explanatory.
  - rimunroe 8y ago
    > Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music. > it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors. I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters. I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild! Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.
munificent 8y ago
I was riding with a new coworker to lunch. Trying to get to know him better, I asked what kind of music he likes. Music is such an important part of many people's life that this is often a good opener. He hesitated for a while and said, "I don't know... quiet I guess?" I think his response caused a full hard reboot of my cranial OS. It was the first time I'd ever met anyone whose relationship to music was so fundamentally different from mine.
- irrational 8y ago
  This is me. I can't understand why people want to listen to music in their cars when quiet is so much more pleasurable. Though, I also can't understand why people want to listen to music at all. It has no emotional response for me. I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one since it seems like everyone else likes music for some reason.
  - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    I feel sorry that you don't gain the joy and pleasure that I get from music, but on the other hand I'm guessing you also don't suffer from the utter distaste and even hatred of boring, repetitious pop music that you get exposed to when out in public.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      It has its perks :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- posterboy 8y ago
  I think his response was low effort as much as the question. Might have been expecting a different conversation and defaulted to the lowest common denominator.
- dvh 8y ago
  Maybe he only listen to anime soundtracks and was embarrassed to tell you
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
There are also people who can't concentrate while listening to music.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Neither can I but that's because I get very easily overwhelmed by music.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
tvanantwerp 8y ago
I think I enjoy music, but I've never seemed as interested in it as other people are. I usually find a few things that match a mood and listen to it on repeat. I never listen to music just for fun, and effectively never go to concerts.
irrational 8y ago
Finally, I have a name for it! If all of music simply disappeared right this second and there was never again a melody, song, etc. forever more, I wouldn't miss it for one second. I understand music evokes something in other people, I just don't understand why or how or what that "enjoyment" consists of. It does absolutely nothing for me. I've tried just about every genre of music that I've been aware of, but it's all just noise.
- Luxyadian 8y ago
  Interesting I was wondering why there is "ear candy" that would catch me, even though I did not understand most of the song meaning or background or history. And I was caught by the ear candies of different genres except folk. Folk would not catch me much. Most of the 1 hit song of some band or singer would catch me. (lll￢ω￢)
KozmoNau7 8y ago
I absolutely love music as well, I can't imagine living without it, and I generally go to 4-5 concerts every month. The idea that something I find so pleasurable does absolutely nothing to some people is really interesting to me.
- Balgair 8y ago
  (I think) I'm anhedonic and it's interesting to me that you can get pleasure out of just the music. To me, it's nice to have things on in the background, or to watch people do something they love. Sometimes, when the lyrics of a song are good and the setting is right (like when driving) that's good too. Like, you can sway the car to the beat, and that's fun. But otherwise, I dunno, there really isn't anything there for me, it's the same as a washing machine, or a desk fan, or the birds singing. I've twiddled with a guitar before, and getting the chords right is pretty neat, but more from a 'look, I did a thing' sorta way. I think I've felt the hedonia before, but only a handful of times, and only in extreme environmental/psychological settings. If it helps, I REALLY like to dance and have alright rhythm, but I like the dancing not the music. Dancing without music is just as enjoyable to me, personally, but I understand that music hides a lot of the sounds my body makes and that makes it better. Something about the swaying is fun to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/slomo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/slomo.html
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    I don't know exactly why it is pleasurable, but to me it's sometimes about the sound itself. I just find some sounds pleasing, like the vibration of a cello string being bowed or a dirty electric guitar riff with tons of distortion. Very specifically I love the distortion produced by the Boss HM-2 pedal, which a lot of my favorite metal bands use. Perhaps it's something about the "texture" of certain sounds that I find very appealing. It's not just the sound itself though, there's also something about a good riff or a well-written chorus. I don't get music that's too free-form, like improvisational jazz or stuff with way too many tempo changes. There has got to be a groove, a rhythm, a flow, a drive and a connection between the instruments, so they're playing together, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. There is obviously also something to be said for emotional connections to specific songs or passages. As an example just off the top of my head, I read The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as they were published when I was 7-9 years old, they were part of my formative years, as you might say. So when I listen to Tuomas Holopainen's 2014 concept album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge, it just touches something in me, I get all emotional and well up, especially at this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k I obviously don't expect other people to have quite the same reaction, but to me, aside from being a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, it also tugs deeply at my childhood nostalgia, and elevates the music to a whole new level for me.
bane 8y ago
There's also a small percentage of people (maybe <10%) who experience musical frisson [1][2]. I'm one of them. It's a related, but entirely different phenomenon to ASMR. In some people who experience it, it can be an absolutely overwhelming experience -- like strapping your brain to wings made out of lightning bolts. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson 2 - http://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-orgasms-from-listening-to-music-59719 http://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-...
- sizzle 8y ago
  How does this compare to an orgasm?
  - hnzix 8y ago
    It's maybe a little like the aftershocks of one, or someone nibbling on your ear / nipple. It's an all-over skin tingle, felt especially on the arms and scalp, and a transcendental emotional feeling.
    - bane 8y ago
      > and a transcendental emotional feeling Yeah, the feelings along those lines are really really powerful...and slippery, they slide away as the frisson goes away. :(
  - bane 8y ago
    It's a different kind of experience, but definitely clustered in the "feelings of intense pleasure" cluster. I'd say that musical frisson is much more of an emotionally driven feeling that encompasses a much larger part of the body. The intensity ranges all over the place from a small feeling of "nice!" to intense, almost physically disabling, feelings of absolute bliss that have left me weeping like I'd just experienced an overwhelming introduction to an infinite god. But most of the time it happens it's just a crawling feeling of pleasure waves along the upper back, shoulders, back of the neck and arms and a general feeling of happiness and joy. In my case, there's sometimes feelings of "consciousness expansion", and "universal connection", similar to stories I've read from among various drug users or people who've experienced intense religious experiences -- at times I've felt intense focus, explosive creativity, and an "overclocked" sensation like my brain had been turned up to a faster performance ratio -- often for those moments of he frisson I can be intensely productive in creative pursuits. But it falls away as the frisson dissipates. I do not know if this is universal or not, there's pitifully little understanding of this phenomenon and sharing of information. It's a very personal feeling, I don't know that I could ever do it with other people around, and it's tied to very specific passages of music that seem unique to the frissoner. As you can guess it's very addictive, and when I was younger I would spend hours auditioning albums looking for "frissonable" moments I would play over and over again for hours -- usually just a few seconds of some passage that would trigger it. However, pursuing this seems to "use-up" the feeling and after a while the passage would lose its triggering power. If the universe was about to end, and I was allowed to have one final pleasurable experience replayed, selected from any orgasm of frisson I've ever had, I'd definitely pick from among my most intense frissons.
firdak 8y ago
> As someone who gets a significant amount of his daily joy from listening to music... I, in turn, find this somewhat astonishing. Not only is it so different from my own experience, it's difficult to understand. When you're enjoying a piece of music, you can at least imagine what it would be like not to feel anything. For me, though, when I see people enjoying music, it's so confusing. What am I "supposed" to be feeling?
- lgats 8y ago
  the beat!
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  You really ought to try acid sometime.
- plaguuuuuu 8y ago
  Music is a form of communication. What I experience in certain pieces of music is a connection with a particular set or category of feelings that verbal language is simply unable to describe with an equivalent clarity and it's a sort of empathy shared with the composer. edit: Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws
  - firdak 8y ago
    > Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws That's a difficult one. It didn't make me feel anything, so I really do have to guess what other people might feel. For example, I have to think about occasions on which similar pieces of music are generally used. A solo piano like this piece is often sad, but on the other hand, this piece has a higher tempo than most sad songs.
garmaine 8y ago
This is me. I can listen to and appreciate music in the same way regular people can learn to appreciate art or fine wine. But I usually prefer listening to silence, and really don't get why people on the whole are so obsessed with music. I've been to a concert exactly once, enough to know it's really not my thing. Interestingly I'm also clinically tone-deaf, meaning that I'm utterly unable to tell what note is played or make anything resembling song with my voice. Don't invite me to karaoke. I cannot tell that the pitch of my voice doesn't match the song accompanying it. But don't feel any pity: you guys are the weird ones :P
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I'm also convinced that tone deafness is a spectrum, not a binary thing, and that a lot of people, perhaps most are at least a little bit tone deaf. Or it's possible that tone deafness is a default trait that can only be changed by being exposed to music. The inevitable trend in pop music to becoming simpler and simpler and more homogenized to me is a symptom of the de-evolution of people's taste in music (on average) because they are not exposed to more sophisticated music, so they never develop a taste for it. I think it's probably similar to how spelling and grammar seem to get worse every year, corresponding with the decline of reading actual books. But that may be just because I suffer from terminal Grammar Naziism and my sensitivity to it increases overtime.

by lqet 8y ago

rimunroe 8y ago

Whoa! I had no idea this was a thing! I'd always thought it was just some weird thing about me. I don't really get a whole lot of pleasure out of music, or get moved by music much. I almost never listen to music. When I do listen, it's usually to drown out external noise or help me focus, but in that case I usually just listen to the same song on a loop.

throwaway8879 8y ago
I'm really curious about this. Have you ever fiddled around, learnt or messed about with any musical instrument, and if so, how did you feel? I recall that when I was learning my first instrument, and started learning a lot of songs, a lot of the other instruments didn't really make sense. For instance, if I was learning a guitar part from a rock song, the bass/drums/keys sort of sounded like a background mix that I couldn't identify into their individual instruments/parts.
- rimunroe 8y ago
  I played the viola and sang in chorus in middle school. I really enjoyed both--especially the viola--but I think my enjoyment was more of the mechanics of it rather than the actual music we were making. I also really enjoyed playing Guitar Hero in college in the same way. I've thought about taking up the guitar or piano since then, but haven't ever gotten around to it.
  - Kagerjay 8y ago
    You sound like me, I get stuff done in dead silence. Music actually distracts me, playing songs in same loop helps out though. I still like practicing singing in the car though on the way to work, and guitar hero is fun to me too. Looking to learn to play the ukelele. I have like almost no musical intelligence, I can't remember song lyrics very well at all
    - rimunroe 8y ago
      Ditto on finding most music distracting! Also, I often sing nonsense songs when I'm doing stuff around the house.
    - LyndsySimon 8y ago
      > Looking to learn to play the ukelele Funny you should say that - I've been slowly trying to learn guitar for a couple of months now. I picked up a ukulele last week on a whim and can't seem to put it down! It's simpler than a guitar, but there's still so much to learn: the chords themselves, of course, but also how chords are created and how that relates to the way the instrument is strung; strums/rhythm; fingerpicking; the way different types of strings change the character of the sound... it just goes on and on. I'm not expert, but contact me if you want to chat sometime. My username is my real name, which is also my homepage's domain ( plus '.com') and my username on every social media service I use.
      - Kagerjay 8y ago
        I'm down for that :) I still have a long ways to go, I can barely play basic chords properly
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      It’s very normal and maybe universal for music to be distracting. The only difference is some people don’t realize it.
qznc 8y ago
Me too. And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356
- drblast 8y ago
  This is fascinating! Can any of you with musical anhedonia watch either of these songs and explain how you feel? https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk
  - irrational 8y ago
    I watched them. Honestly I got nothing out of them. It's just noise. I could see that the guy with black hair on the left in the first video was really getting into it, I just don't know what he was getting out of it. In the second one, I felt pleasure looking at the pretty girls, but their singing did nothing for me.
  - qznc 8y ago
    Looked a minute into the first one. Did not recognize the song but since I'm not into music, I don't know that much. I find myself distracted by the body language of the guy on the left (and later the one to the right). It is more interesting to me to watch how people behave than to listen to the music.
  - jrowley 8y ago
    Nice selection of tunes btw, at least they resonated an emotional response with me, but I love music.
  - firdak 8y ago
    The first one is interesting - if I heard it on the radio I wouldn't think twice about it, but seeing a video is different. Watching the guy play the guitar gives me a sense of how difficult it must be to play - which means I appreciate the music because I appreciate the technical skill of the person playing it. The second one does nothing for me - it's just dull. Can you explain how you feel when you listen to those songs?
irrational 8y ago
You're not alone. I'm just glad I now know the name for my "condition" (which I sincerely hope there is no cure for).
- moyya 8y ago
  Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?
  - irrational 8y ago
    From what I can see, there is no upside to enjoying music. People spend so much time and money (attending concerts, paying for streaming services, buying music, buying instruments, practicing instruments, listening to the music, etc.) that I'm able to happily use elsewhere. If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      > If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things. If you were enjoying it then how would it differ from any of the other variety of things you already enjoy that you spend money on?
      - moyya 8y ago
        Honestly, I can't tell if the poster is just trying to live up to his/her username or not. The comments make little sense.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    I like who I am, and am perfectly happy the way I am. If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?
gwern 8y ago
Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors. I sometimes wonder what people with pain asymbolia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia) or aboulia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia) make of the rest of us talking abut pain and wanting things. Some links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 Also, while I'm at it: when your nose is stuffy but which nostril it is seems to cycle over the course of the day, you're not imagining it and that's called the 'nasal dilation cycle' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle ; those things you see crossing your vision are also real and part of your eye fluid, called 'floaters' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater ; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination is probably self-explanatory.
- rimunroe 8y ago
  > Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music. > it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors. I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters. I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild! Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.

munificent 8y ago

I was riding with a new coworker to lunch. Trying to get to know him better, I asked what kind of music he likes. Music is such an important part of many people's life that this is often a good opener. He hesitated for a while and said, "I don't know... quiet I guess?" I think his response caused a full hard reboot of my cranial OS. It was the first time I'd ever met anyone whose relationship to music was so fundamentally different from mine.

irrational 8y ago
This is me. I can't understand why people want to listen to music in their cars when quiet is so much more pleasurable. Though, I also can't understand why people want to listen to music at all. It has no emotional response for me. I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one since it seems like everyone else likes music for some reason.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  I feel sorry that you don't gain the joy and pleasure that I get from music, but on the other hand I'm guessing you also don't suffer from the utter distaste and even hatred of boring, repetitious pop music that you get exposed to when out in public.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    It has its perks :)
deleted 8y ago
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posterboy 8y ago
I think his response was low effort as much as the question. Might have been expecting a different conversation and defaulted to the lowest common denominator.
dvh 8y ago
Maybe he only listen to anime soundtracks and was embarrassed to tell you

0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago

There are also people who can't concentrate while listening to music.

scrollaway 8y ago
Neither can I but that's because I get very easily overwhelmed by music.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

tvanantwerp 8y ago

I think I enjoy music, but I've never seemed as interested in it as other people are. I usually find a few things that match a mood and listen to it on repeat. I never listen to music just for fun, and effectively never go to concerts.

irrational 8y ago

Finally, I have a name for it! If all of music simply disappeared right this second and there was never again a melody, song, etc. forever more, I wouldn't miss it for one second. I understand music evokes something in other people, I just don't understand why or how or what that "enjoyment" consists of. It does absolutely nothing for me. I've tried just about every genre of music that I've been aware of, but it's all just noise.

Luxyadian 8y ago
Interesting I was wondering why there is "ear candy" that would catch me, even though I did not understand most of the song meaning or background or history. And I was caught by the ear candies of different genres except folk. Folk would not catch me much. Most of the 1 hit song of some band or singer would catch me. (lll￢ω￢)

KozmoNau7 8y ago

I absolutely love music as well, I can't imagine living without it, and I generally go to 4-5 concerts every month. The idea that something I find so pleasurable does absolutely nothing to some people is really interesting to me.

Balgair 8y ago
(I think) I'm anhedonic and it's interesting to me that you can get pleasure out of just the music. To me, it's nice to have things on in the background, or to watch people do something they love. Sometimes, when the lyrics of a song are good and the setting is right (like when driving) that's good too. Like, you can sway the car to the beat, and that's fun. But otherwise, I dunno, there really isn't anything there for me, it's the same as a washing machine, or a desk fan, or the birds singing. I've twiddled with a guitar before, and getting the chords right is pretty neat, but more from a 'look, I did a thing' sorta way. I think I've felt the hedonia before, but only a handful of times, and only in extreme environmental/psychological settings. If it helps, I REALLY like to dance and have alright rhythm, but I like the dancing not the music. Dancing without music is just as enjoyable to me, personally, but I understand that music hides a lot of the sounds my body makes and that makes it better. Something about the swaying is fun to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/slomo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/slomo.html
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I don't know exactly why it is pleasurable, but to me it's sometimes about the sound itself. I just find some sounds pleasing, like the vibration of a cello string being bowed or a dirty electric guitar riff with tons of distortion. Very specifically I love the distortion produced by the Boss HM-2 pedal, which a lot of my favorite metal bands use. Perhaps it's something about the "texture" of certain sounds that I find very appealing. It's not just the sound itself though, there's also something about a good riff or a well-written chorus. I don't get music that's too free-form, like improvisational jazz or stuff with way too many tempo changes. There has got to be a groove, a rhythm, a flow, a drive and a connection between the instruments, so they're playing together, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. There is obviously also something to be said for emotional connections to specific songs or passages. As an example just off the top of my head, I read The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as they were published when I was 7-9 years old, they were part of my formative years, as you might say. So when I listen to Tuomas Holopainen's 2014 concept album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge, it just touches something in me, I get all emotional and well up, especially at this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k I obviously don't expect other people to have quite the same reaction, but to me, aside from being a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, it also tugs deeply at my childhood nostalgia, and elevates the music to a whole new level for me.

bane 8y ago

There's also a small percentage of people (maybe <10%) who experience musical frisson [1][2]. I'm one of them. It's a related, but entirely different phenomenon to ASMR. In some people who experience it, it can be an absolutely overwhelming experience -- like strapping your brain to wings made out of lightning bolts. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson 2 - http://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-orgasms-from-listening-to-music-59719 http://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-...

sizzle 8y ago
How does this compare to an orgasm?
- hnzix 8y ago
  It's maybe a little like the aftershocks of one, or someone nibbling on your ear / nipple. It's an all-over skin tingle, felt especially on the arms and scalp, and a transcendental emotional feeling.
  - bane 8y ago
    > and a transcendental emotional feeling Yeah, the feelings along those lines are really really powerful...and slippery, they slide away as the frisson goes away. :(
- bane 8y ago
  It's a different kind of experience, but definitely clustered in the "feelings of intense pleasure" cluster. I'd say that musical frisson is much more of an emotionally driven feeling that encompasses a much larger part of the body. The intensity ranges all over the place from a small feeling of "nice!" to intense, almost physically disabling, feelings of absolute bliss that have left me weeping like I'd just experienced an overwhelming introduction to an infinite god. But most of the time it happens it's just a crawling feeling of pleasure waves along the upper back, shoulders, back of the neck and arms and a general feeling of happiness and joy. In my case, there's sometimes feelings of "consciousness expansion", and "universal connection", similar to stories I've read from among various drug users or people who've experienced intense religious experiences -- at times I've felt intense focus, explosive creativity, and an "overclocked" sensation like my brain had been turned up to a faster performance ratio -- often for those moments of he frisson I can be intensely productive in creative pursuits. But it falls away as the frisson dissipates. I do not know if this is universal or not, there's pitifully little understanding of this phenomenon and sharing of information. It's a very personal feeling, I don't know that I could ever do it with other people around, and it's tied to very specific passages of music that seem unique to the frissoner. As you can guess it's very addictive, and when I was younger I would spend hours auditioning albums looking for "frissonable" moments I would play over and over again for hours -- usually just a few seconds of some passage that would trigger it. However, pursuing this seems to "use-up" the feeling and after a while the passage would lose its triggering power. If the universe was about to end, and I was allowed to have one final pleasurable experience replayed, selected from any orgasm of frisson I've ever had, I'd definitely pick from among my most intense frissons.

firdak 8y ago

> As someone who gets a significant amount of his daily joy from listening to music... I, in turn, find this somewhat astonishing. Not only is it so different from my own experience, it's difficult to understand. When you're enjoying a piece of music, you can at least imagine what it would be like not to feel anything. For me, though, when I see people enjoying music, it's so confusing. What am I "supposed" to be feeling?

lgats 8y ago
the beat!
staticautomatic 8y ago
You really ought to try acid sometime.
plaguuuuuu 8y ago
Music is a form of communication. What I experience in certain pieces of music is a connection with a particular set or category of feelings that verbal language is simply unable to describe with an equivalent clarity and it's a sort of empathy shared with the composer. edit: Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws
- firdak 8y ago
  > Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws That's a difficult one. It didn't make me feel anything, so I really do have to guess what other people might feel. For example, I have to think about occasions on which similar pieces of music are generally used. A solo piano like this piece is often sad, but on the other hand, this piece has a higher tempo than most sad songs.

garmaine 8y ago

This is me. I can listen to and appreciate music in the same way regular people can learn to appreciate art or fine wine. But I usually prefer listening to silence, and really don't get why people on the whole are so obsessed with music. I've been to a concert exactly once, enough to know it's really not my thing. Interestingly I'm also clinically tone-deaf, meaning that I'm utterly unable to tell what note is played or make anything resembling song with my voice. Don't invite me to karaoke. I cannot tell that the pitch of my voice doesn't match the song accompanying it. But don't feel any pity: you guys are the weird ones :P

ConceptJunkie 8y ago

I'm also convinced that tone deafness is a spectrum, not a binary thing, and that a lot of people, perhaps most are at least a little bit tone deaf. Or it's possible that tone deafness is a default trait that can only be changed by being exposed to music. The inevitable trend in pop music to becoming simpler and simpler and more homogenized to me is a symptom of the de-evolution of people's taste in music (on average) because they are not exposed to more sophisticated music, so they never develop a taste for it. I think it's probably similar to how spelling and grammar seem to get worse every year, corresponding with the decline of reading actual books. But that may be just because I suffer from terminal Grammar Naziism and my sensitivity to it increases overtime.