I came upon a couple of interesting facts this week. One came as quite a surprise and the other ... well as a matter of fact they were both somewhat of a revelation!
Did you know for instance that about four per cent of the population has amusia – the inability to recognise musical tones or to reproduce them? Or that whether you are good or bad in maths was down to your mother’s hormones?
There are many people who dislike one or another type of music.
However, there are people out there who do not even respond to musical pathos.
A team of researchers from Spain and Canada was trying to develop an accurate questionnaire to gauge people’s sense of reward from music when they found that roughly 5pc of their study subjects reported getting no pleasure at all from music.
So they followed up by testing 30 subjects, grouped by their relative affinity for music.
The bottom group, which expressed the least pleasure in music, also exhibited the least change in heart rate or skin conductivity (proxy measures of emotional response) when listening even to pieces they chose.
“They were not just saying so, but the physiological responses were in accord with what they were saying,” says cognitive psychologist Josep Marco Pallares of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona.
Others, particularly those with depressive disorders and neurodegenerative diseases, suffer from general anhedonia – a pronounced deficit in experiencing pleasure from widely different stimuli.
The study suggests not only that musical enjoyment is not as universal as commonly assumed, but also that the brain’s pleasure response may be somewhat fragmented.
“In general, it is thought that there is a continuum in the degree of pleasure you get from rewards,” says Dr Marco.
“This is not completely true. There are differences, but this kind of activity depends on the type of stimuli. There are different kinds of stimuli which may be more effective in activating the reward system, and some that might not be effective at all.”
These results can help refine musical therapies for stroke victims and could be applied to other therapies.
Anhedonia is a key component of major depressive disorders and is common among those with Parkinson’s disease.
Now for the second fact ... children who are bad at maths could blame their mother!
A study revealed that five-year-olds who had been exposed to low levels of thyroid hormones while still in the womb were almost twice as likely to do badly in arithmetic tests as those whose mothers had normal levels.
Low thyroid levels can be caused by a shortage of iron, a common feature of pregnancy.
Pregnant women undergo regular blood tests to check their levels and are advised to eat plenty of lean meat, green leafy vegetables and dried fruit and nuts to avoid problems. Some are advised to take supplements.
Low levels of the hormone are also more common in those with a family history of the disease and among those with other health problems, such as anaemia and type 1 diabetes and among those with a family history of thyroid conditions.
Researchers from the VU University Medical Centre in Holland studied almost 1,200 children from birth to age five, when they assessed their test scores for language and arithmetic.
They also monitored the mothers’ hormone levels when they were 12 weeks’ pregnant.
Youngsters born to mothers with low levels of thyroxine were found to have lower test scores in arithmetic but their language tests were not affected.
An underactive thyroid, known as hypothyroidism, can cause problems in growth and development of children.
Previous studies have found that undetected or inadequately treated hypothyroidism in mothers was associated with IQ changes in infants.
The average IQ scores were about four points lower in the children of hypothyroid mothers than in children of normal mothers.
The children of hypothyroid mothers were also more likely to have difficulty in school. In adulthood, underactive thyroids can cause tiredness, sensitivity to the cold, weight gain, depression, pain and numbness.
About one woman in 50 and one man in 1,000 develops hypothyroidism at some stage in life.