Sensation

Music is such an important cultural and personal phenomenon that most of the people I know believe their lives would be vastly different--and significantly decreased in quality--if there were no such thing. I've never felt this way.

Music is enjoyable, but not something about which I am passionate, that informs part of my identity, or that causes me oodles of pleasure. My family seemed rather shocked when I mentioned this fact at Thanksgiving. After all, I used to go to local shows two to four times a week and attempted to play a couple of instruments. I even started a band. Despite these seemingly music-oriented tendencies, I feel like a bit of a deviant in my total lack of passion for music.

I've come to a tentative conclusion about why I am this way, but it's opened up some even more perplexing questions for me.

I realized recently that I don't experience any sort of passive sense of pleasure from aural sensations. Hearing music (or voices or nature sounds) isn't very inherently pleasurable to me--at least not in the way that other sensations are. When I smell or feel or taste something I really like, I automatically experience a pretty powerful sense of pleasure, with associated chest-tightening, shallow breathing physiological responses. Eating a fresh, ripe peach at the end of August is just about as pleasurable to me as anything could be.

Sounds just don't do this for me without some sort of active engagement. I have to consciously activate cognitive processes to get anything like that same pleasure from aural sensation. Right now, I am listening to Weezer's "Only in Dreams," which is a pretty awesome song, but it is only when I stop writing and begin thinking about the song that I gain any pleasure from it. Otherwise, it is just pleasant but ambient noise. The smell of basil wafting through house, however, would be enough to completely disengage me from whatever I was doing and prevent me from returning to it. It has an incredibly intense automatic effect. To enjoy "Only in Dreams" in a way that even approximates my enjoyment of the smell of basil, however, I would have to choose to abandon my writing and actively focus my attention on the song, and I could switch back to writing just as easily as I abandoned it, without being distracted by the music. The basil, on the other hand, would make continuing writing very difficult.

I don't miss music when it is not there. I do miss delicious foods, soft fabrics, and aromatic candles when they are not there. Aural stimuli affect me at a cognitive level; if I think about it, I can enjoy it. Tactile, gustatory, and olfactory stimuli affect me at a physiological and affective level; I enjoy them without intending to.

This makes me wonder if I am handicapped in enjoying music. Do those who passionately love music experience the same kind of pleasure from it that I get from eating a peach or smelling basil? Does hearing music make them involuntarily experience intense sensations of pleasure?