Funny that you are asking about this because I have some experience with this in 2018. I'll keep it short.
I have as long as I can remember always enjoyed music and felt a lot of just enough strong emotions when listening to it and enjoyed it quite a bit. However I've had accidentally experienced two things that turned the enjoyment down drastically.
1. t-DCS: Anodal stimulation of the right inferior frontal gyrus-ish, and with the cathode on the identical opposite site. It lessened the musical emotions drastically (opposite to what I expected(!)) and seemed permanent until I reversed it with another montage (cathode over ventromedial PFC and anode over the left occipital gyrus/angular gyrus. That made made the emotions/appreciation return to base level.
2. Probiotics: I was trying a 25 bacteria strain probiotic that I bought from Swanson vitamins and noticed that my appreciation of music was basically completely gone for a couple of days until it gradually returned after about a week. I tried it 3 times in total and the last time in june I tried it for a little longer and that caused the effect to be pretty much permanent after I stopped. I'm guessing from an overarching alteration in the gut microbiome that was too profound to reverse itself back on it's own or something. It's been 6 months like this basically. I haven't been able to reverse it with t-DCS either. But I'm waiting to get my microbiome tested to see if I can reverse engineer this thing.
Consumption of Fermented Milk Product With Probiotic Modulates Brain Activity
https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC3839572/
BACKGROUND & AIMS
Changes in gut microbiota have been reported to alter signaling mechanisms, emotional behavior, and visceral nociceptive reflexes in rodents. However, alteration of the intestinal microbiota with antibiotics or probiotics has not been shown to produce these changes in humans. We investigated whether consumption of a fermented milk product with probiotic (FMPP) for 4 weeks by healthy women altered brain intrinsic connectivity or responses to emotional attention tasks.
METHODS
Healthy women with no gastrointestinal or psychiatric symptoms were randomly assigned to groups given FMPP (n = 12), a nonfermented milk product (n = 11, controls), or no intervention (n = 13) twice daily for 4 weeks. The FMPP contained Bifidobacterium animalis subsp Lactis, Streptococcus thermophiles, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, and Lactococcus lactis subsp Lactis. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging before and after the intervention to measure brain response to an emotional faces attention task and resting brain activity. Multivariate and region of interest analyses were performed.
RESULTS
FMPP intake was associated with reduced task-related response of a distributed functional network (49% cross-block covariance; P = .004) containing affective, viscerosensory, and somatosensory cortices. Alterations in intrinsic activity of resting brain indicated that ingestion of FMPP was associated with changes in midbrain connectivity, which could explain the observed differences in activity during the task.
CONCLUSIONS
Four-week intake of an FMPP by healthy women affected activity of brain regions that control central processing of emotion and sensation.
The four types of bacteria used in this study are included in the probiotic that I took, among others.
So there's a couple of things you could try if you are experiencing distress from what you're describing, but you have to be really careful. There's no studies on the correlation between these things and musical appreciation and the derived emotions per se, but modulating the strength of the appreciation of music and aesthetics by means of TDCS and probiotics is a reality if you ask me. Some of the brain areas mentioned in the study above are the very same areas mentioned in studies where they are mapping the brain areas that are activated when listening to certain types music and experiencing music in general and specific types of emotions.
Mapping aesthetic musical emotions in the brain.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...pubmed/22178712
You're doing these things on your own risk of course. You have to be very careful with what you're doing, and how much you do it, because what you're looking for is uncharted territory. You only want to tone the musical emotions down slightly, and not kill them completely, because you may not know when you're getting it back, depending on what you do to yourself. A route could be for example trying just a few strain probiotic, doing only one dose to begin with and evaluate the effects and so on. Or trying a fermented yoghurt. Those could possibly cause brain fogginess, so be careful about that too though. Brain fog and bloating: https://neuroscience...-bloating-9659/
By the way, you had anhedonia in the past. What happened for you to get it, and how did you get relief from it?
Edited by Sleepdealer, 02 January 2019 - 08:39 PM.
