When we hear a new song for the first time, we might immediately love it, we might knee-jerk hate it, and we might feel nothing at all about it.

This initial response is predicated on our existing musical taste and to some degree on our perception of our taste (we understand what kind of music we tend to like, and if a new song doesn’t have obvious earmarks of that type of music, we might discount it immediately as “not for us”).

Our internal reaction is also informed by our circumstances at the moment in which we’re exposed to the new song: the weather, if we’re working in an office or lounging on a beach, whether we’re well-hydrated, inebriated, hungry or full, in love or in the midst of a bad breakup.

One of the most powerful determinants of whether we’ll like a song or not, though, is how often we hear it, because our brain rewards familiarity and predictability.

So if we hear a song once, we may respond neutrally or negatively, but if we hear the same song three or four or more times, our brains may begin to flash the reward signals associated with “I like this!” because it’s fond of being able to predict the next note or lyric in a song, and we may consequently realize, hey, this song is actually pretty good, I’m into it.

This is why record labels push so hard to get their artists’ new singles on all the radio stations and onto all the algorithmically generated playlists: what we like is partly (and powerfully) shaped by exposure and repetition. And this can be manipulative and even scary to think about, especially if you ponder just how many of our likes, our personal tastes, were probably fashioned by exactly this sort of psychological exploitation; marketing is a powerful force, and much of what we think of as uniquely “us” (especially in terms of taste) actually originates with these sorts of campaigns.

That said, I appreciate the idea that what we like (and are capable of liking) is malleable, because that suggests we have the capacity to like more things, perhaps even intentionally, should we choose to do so.

There will of course always be things that we reflexively don’t like, and there will be (probably many more) things we don’t like because it’s trendy or statusful not to like them.

I tend to believe that liking more things can be beneficial, though, because it allows for the appreciation of a larger variety of experiences, and upon such appreciation are holistically fulfilling lives built.

There’s a good chance that you’ve never tasted your favorite food before because you haven’t been exposed to it yet. There’s just a lot of food out there in the world, and the likelihood that you’ve randomly been exposed to your all-time favorite by happenstance is negligible.

Being open to more things makes it a lot more likely that you’ll eventually discover your favorite everything (food, music, location, friend, career, hobby), because there will be fewer biases and self-imposed limitations (“I don’t like sushi”) standing between you and that discovery.

That expanded surface area for discovery is, itself, a strong argument in favor of liking more things. But I’ve also found that challenging my own dislikes—attempting to identify positives about music genres or foods I’m not fond of, or people who initially rub me the wrong way—helps me perceive more roundness in everything and everyone. I tend to notice more potential likes when I’m looking for them, and I experience more like-related benefits when I give myself permission to violate my reflexive don’t-like responses.

None of which rids the world of music and people and food that I consider to be annoying or rude or disgusting. But this approach, making this kind of effort, does help me understand why some people are the way they are, and why some things that I consider to be not great (or abysmal) are enthusiastically celebrated by other people who probably find my own likes to be just as confounding as I find theirs.

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