Is Musical Enjoyment in Our Genes?
Does our ability to enjoy music have a biological basis? A genetic twin study, published in Nature Communications, shows that music enjoyment is partly heritable. An international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, investigated how genetic and environmental factors influence our enjoyment of music.
Music plays an important role in human emotion, social bonding, and cultural expression. But not everyone feels the same way. Why, for example, do some people enjoy music more than others?
“The answer to this big question has the potential to open a window into more general aspects of the human mind, such as how experiences become pleasurable”, says first author Giacomo Bignardi of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. “We wanted to understand whether genetic differences between individuals can result in differences in the pleasure that people derive from music and what these differences can tell us about human musicality in general”.
To determine whether genetic factors contribute to music enjoyment or ‘music reward sensitivity’, the researchers used the twin design, which compares similarities between identical twins and fraternal twins. Put simply, if identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, genetics should play a role. In collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the team was able to use data from more than 9,000 twins, including self-reported music reward and general reward sensitivity, as well as their ability to perceive musical features such as pitch, melody and rhythm.
The results show that the ability to experience pleasure from music is partly heritable: using the twin design, the researchers were able to estimate that 54 percent of the variability in the Swedish sample is associated with DNA differences between individuals. The team also found genetic influences on music reward sensitivity to be partly independent of general (non-musical) reward sensitivity and music perceptual abilities. This means that differences in how rewarding we personally perceive music, cannot be explained solely by individual differences in our general human reward system, but are partly determined by separate genetic influences. Beyond that, the team discovered that distinct genetic pathways influenced different facets of music enjoyment, such as emotion regulation, dancing along with a beat or playing music with others.
“These findings paint a complex picture. They show that our enjoyment of music does not depend solely on our ability to perceive musical sounds or to feel pleasure in general”, says senior author Miriam Mosing from the MPIEA. “Rather, it seems that there are specific genetic and environmental factors that influence our musical appreciation”.
While this study utilized data from Swedish twins, the MPIEA in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, has recently founded ‘Gertrud’, Germany's first nationwide twin registry. This initiative aims to establish a comprehensive resource for research in Germany on the interplay between genes and environment underlying individual differences. Twins interested in contributing to scientific advancements and participating in research studies are warmly invited to register at www.gertrud.info.
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