A genetic twin study published in Nature Communications, shows that some of why we like the sounds we like is heritable.
An international group including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, found genetic factors that affect how much you enjoy music, which were in some portion independent of genes that affect one’s enjoyment of other rewarding experiences or one’s musical ability. At a primal level, music is integral to human emotion, social bonding, and cultural expression. As Darwin already observed, music “must be ranked amongst the most mystery with which he is endowed”. But what is the basis of musical enjoyment?
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The answer to this big question could give us more general insight into the workings of the human mind, for instance, on how experiences are made pleasurable,” says first author and PhD candidate Giacomo Bignardi. “We wanted to investigate whether genetic differences between people can explain differences in the pleasure that people get from music and what these differences can tell us about human musicality in general.
The researchers employed the twin design, which compares similarities between identical twins and fraternal twins, to examine whether genetic factors contribute to music enjoyment or ‘music reward sensitivity’. In other words, if identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins, then genetics should be part of the picture. Working with researchers from the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the team had access to data from over 9,000 twins, including self-reported music reward and general reward sensitivity and their ability to perceive musical features like pitch, melody and rhythm.
The outcomes reveal that the capacity to derive pleasure from music is partly heritable: leveraging the twin design, researchers were able to estimate that 54% of the variability through the Swedish pattern is attributable to DNA differences between people. The team also demonstrated that genetic influences on music reward sensitivity were partially independent of general reward sensitivity and music perceptual skills and that different genetic pathways shaped different aspects of music enjoyment, like emotion regulation or moving with a beat or playing music with other people.
“These findings put forth a complex scenario in which partly overlapping differences in DNA modulate different component processes of music enjoyment,” concludes Bignardi. “Future studies examining what portion of the human genome relates most strongly to our ability to enjoy music could help elucidate the human faculty that baffled Darwin himself most deeply, and which continues to baffle us today.”
People use music for all sorts of purposes, from regulating their emotions and relaxing to social bonding. And although there are massive inter-individual differences in the enjoyment of music in humans, the origins of such differences are poorly understood.
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Here, we unravel the genetic basis of this variation.
We measure multiple dimensions of music reward sensitivity, as assessed using the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, as well as music perceptual abilities and general reward sensitivity in a large cohort of Swedish twins (N=9169; 2305 complete pairs). Genetic effects account for up to 54% of variance in music reward sensitivity, with 70% of these effects independent of music perceptual abilities or broad reward sensitivity.
Indeed, multivariate analyses demonstrate that genetic and environmental contributions to the various dimensions of music reward sensitivity are somewhat independent of each other, revealing different ontogenetic routes to the enjoyment of music and different patterns of genetic associations with objectively measured music perceptual skills. These results present a more nuanced view in which partially distinct sources of variation influence different dimensions of musical enjoyment.
