Your Genes Can Determine How Well You Dance
By VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL
CENTER
Since moving in time to musical rhythm is so effortless, individuals often aren’t aware of the meticulous coordination required of our bodies, minds, and brains.
Reyna Gordon, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of
Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and co-director of the Vanderbilt Music
Cognition Lab. Credit: Vanderbilt University Medical Center
“Tapping, clapping, and dancing in synchrony with the beat — the
pulse — of music is at the core of our human musicality,” said Reyna Gordon,
Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck
Surgery and co-director of the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab.
Gordon and her colleagues have uncovered a key finding on the
biological foundations of musical rhythm as a result of a recent study
conducted by researchers at the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute in partnership
with 23andMe, a personal genomics and biotechnology company.
The research, which was published in the journal Nature Human
Behaviour, is the first comprehensive genome-wide association analysis of a
musical trait. Gordon and Lea Davis, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and
co-senior authors on the findings, along with Maria Niarchou, Ph.D., research
instructor in the Department of Medicine and first author of the paper, co-led
a team of international collaborators in novel groundwork toward understanding
the biology underlying how musicality relates to other health traits.
This study identified 69 genetic variants associated with beat
synchronization — the ability to move in synchrony with the beat of music. Many
of the variants are in or near genes involved in neural function and early
brain development. “Rhythm is not just influenced by a single gene — it is
influenced by many hundreds of genes,” Gordon said.
The research also discovered that biological rhythms such
as walking, breathing, and circadian patterns share part of the same
genetic architecture with beat synchronization.
These new findings emphasize relationships between rhythm and
health and give insight into how biology influences something as culturally
distinctive and complex as musicality. Importantly, the researchers emphasized
that the environment unquestionably plays a significant influence and that
genetics only partially explain the variability in rhythm abilities. The
complexity of those potential genetic impacts on musical abilities can only now
be studied with very large numbers of people participating in this study.
In this case, the study used data from more than 600,000 research
participants. From that data, the researchers were able to identify genetic
alleles that vary in association with participants’ beat synchronization
ability. 23andMe’s large research dataset with millions of individuals who
consented to participate offered a unique opportunity for researchers to
capture even small genetic signals, said David Hinds, Ph.D., a research fellow and
statistical geneticist at 23andMe.
These new findings represent a leap forward for scientific
understanding of the links between genomics and musicality.
“Musical beat processing has intriguing links to other aspects of
cognition including speech processing and plays a key role in the positive
effect of music on certain neurological disorders, including on gait in
Parkinson’s disease,” said Aniruddh D. Patel, professor of Psychology at Tufts
University, an expert not involved in the study.
“Using such a large dataset allows researchers to find new
insights into the biology and evolutionary foundations of musicality. While
recent years have seen a growth in neuroscientific and developmental work on
beat processing, the current study takes the biological study of beat
processing to a new level,” Patel added.
Reference:
“Genome-wide association study of musical beat synchronization demonstrates
high polygenicity” by Maria Niarchou, Daniel E. Gustavson, J. Fah
Sathirapongsasuti, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Else Eising, Eamonn Bell, Evonne
McArthur, Peter Straub, 23andMe Research Team, J. Devin McAuley, John A. Capra,
Fredrik Ullén, Nicole Creanza, Miriam A. Mosing, David A. Hinds, Lea K. Davis,
Nori Jacoby, and Reyna L. Gordon, 16 June 2022, Nature
Human Behaviour.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01359-x
This
study was funded in part by an NIH Director’s New Innovator award #DP2HD098859.