Reyna Gordon: Is there a ‘music gene’?

Reyna Gordon, Image courtesy of Reyna Gordon

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Reyna Gordon is an associate professor and director of the Music Cognition Lab in the Department of Otolaryngology and the Genetics Institute at Vanderbilt university in Tennessee. She’s the recipient of a prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for her work looking at the underlying biology of why rhythm means so much to us, so who better to sit down with for a chat about music, our brains and our genes. 

Reyna: For a long time now I've been interested in the relationship between language and music in the brain and in how that manifests in behaviour. And those interests eventually led me to genetics to really understand how and why humans develop musical traits and how that then intersects with their language abilities.

Kat: What do we know so far about the extent to which music is in the genes? I come from a very musical family and everyone always says, oh, it must be in your genes. You know, it's your dad and your granny. So what do we know so far? Is there a music gene? How do we go about trying to understand this?

Reyna: Great question. So there's not a single music gene, I will say. There's probably many genes linked to musicality skills and, you're right, people have many intuitions about the genetic and environmental contributions towards music and musicality. So when I talk about musicality, I'm really talking about people's musical behaviour and musical interactions. And that is a very broad definition that includes a person's potential for music engagement and music experience. It can take the form of aptitude and skill, or even the propensity for music training, as well as music listening and other aspects of music engagements such as how much we love to listen to music or how much some of us love it. Right?

Reyna: So it varies. So there are many different aspects of musicality and you're right, that people have these intuitions about the genetic and environmental aspects of this. So we talk about musical talent running and families, but we also talk about how the amount that you practice and what type of music you're exposed to, and the amount of music you're exposed to and the sort of musical culture that you grew up in. How that all may influence your lifetime relationship with music.

Reyna: So we know from the data that there are both genetic and environmental contributions and that for a given individual we can't easily say, oh for you, it's because of genes or for you It's because of the environment. But when we look at populations of people, we can look at how much variability is explained by genetics. And so there are multiple ways that we can do this. We can measure musicality with cognitive tests, with neural methods, even with self-report like with questionnaires. And if we think in particular of the skill and aptitude skill or aptitude aspects of musicality, we can think about tonality and rhythm. So tonality has to do with how you process pitch and melody and harmony and how different pitches come together to create music and how you perceived it.

Kat: Make a tune

Reyna: That's exactly how we get a tune and how we perceive that. And then rhythm has to do with the timing patterns in music and both the tonality aspect and the rhythmic aspect of music are moderately heritable. So what that means, and we know this from twin studies, what that means is that there is a genetic influence on how well people perform on these types of tests and evaluations. And even on the self-report.

Kat: It's interesting that you talk about all the different elements because music, isn't just one thing, you know, it is the pitch, it's the rhythm. And I was wondering as well, if there's anything that's been done about trying to look at people's aptitude and things like singing versus playing an instrument versus just dancing, moving to music, can we dissect these sides of it as well? The sort of how we appreciate and interact with music?

Reyna: Yes, absolutely. So there are many ways that we can do this, and ideally, we're going to do this in large sample sizes, for example, a recent study that I collaborated on looked at various different aspects in which young people, so teenagers, were engaging with music and found that there is a heritable influence on, genetic influence on young people's engagement with singing and with dance as well as with playing an instrument. So we know that these can be influenced also by environmental factors and there is a portion of the variability that's explained by that, but there's also a portion that's explained by genes.

Kat: I would love to know if there's a gene for annoying teenagers, listening to music on the bus, without headphones, you write that grant, we'll get it funded. It's a piece of research that needs to happen. I also wanted to know a bit about the psychological traits as well. This is probably getting more into actually being a musician because I play a lot of instruments. I have spent many, many hours of my life with a metronome just practicing. And it does take a certain amount of grit. I'm going to do this rather than go out, and have fun or watch TV or all the other things that I could be doing with my life, other than doing my scales. So is there anything there about the sort of traits that are associated maybe with like being a performing musician or actually taking up a musical instrument

Reyna: I think a very basic thing that's been demonstrated by researchers who are working with the Swedish twin registry data, and that's been a great resource because they have assayed musicality, so to speak within a large, large sample. So those researchers have demonstrated that not only do the aptitude and the amount of musical expertise that vary in the population have a genetic influence, but also how much people practice. So we tend to think of practice as being an environmental thing, right? Like you can choose to practice more and that may have an impact on the end result, but it turns out that the degree of musical practice also has a strong genetic influence. So I think it's important to question some of the assumptions we have about environmental influences on something like musicality and step back and say, there may also be genetic factors there.

Reyna: There's an active whole field of research in terms of the other cognitive traits that are associated with musical engagement. And for a long time, it was thought that particular aspects of musical expertise in music training were then having a direct impact on cognitive skills. And I think that that research is very interesting and valid, but I would say that those are associations and they may be along the line of correlations. They're not always causal relationships. So we don't always know whether music engagement is causing a change in cognition. It may be associated with a change in cognition, or it may be just associated with particular cognitive traits, particularly because of shared underlying genetics. So that's something that the field is looking at now.

Kat: So let's unpack that a little. So this is the idea that if children do music, it's going to be better for their cognitive development, but it might just be that the kids that are better at music are gonna have better cognitive development anyway, because it's all the same genes and it's all the same brain pathways that enable you to understand stuff better.

Reyna: Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say that there's partial overlap. That makes it difficult for us to know sometimes whether it's the training that's causing the cognitive benefits or whether the cognitive benefits were there first. And so I don't think there's complete genetic overlap, but I think that there's probably some genetic overlap. Again, we know this from some of the twin studies that have been done with the Swedish twin registry.

Reyna: So that's something we should be really attentive to. And I want to really think about, or I want the audience to think about the fact that individuals are all different and that what works for one person may not work for another person. So a child that's very motivated and interested in music should have, you know, the opportunity to access those music training experiences and other children may be less interested. And Perhaps it's a question of just introducing it to them, but perhaps it's not really where their interests lie. And so I don't think we should have a one size fits all prescription. I think we want to really take things at an individual level. In fact, sometimes just by getting feedback from families,

Kat: So not necessarily recorder lessons for all.

Reyna: Right, but I think school music training is really valuable because it provides an introduction and then an appreciation for music and then gives children the opportunity to specialise.

Kat: For sure. I want to dig into another sort of aspect of music and the brain. And that is where we talked originally about the connection between music and language. And so what's going on there? What is the connection that's going on in the brain? Is it the same bits of the brain? Is it just because it's all just going through our ears? What do we know about what's going on there?

Reyna: So that's a really big question that I would say probably right now, hundreds of researchers are working on trying to untangle. So like you said, music and language are both auditory traits. They don't only use the auditory system. They really use many, many different parts of the brain. So there's all different areas of the cortex as well as subcortical areas, that are utilised for various aspects of how we process language and how we process music. And it's thought that there's probably some overlap between some brain areas that process language and music.

Reyna: What's interesting, I think, especially from a genetics perspective is that we see so many correlations, so I'll take rhythm and reading for example. So there are now dozens of studies that have tested people's reading skills, whether it's in children or adults this has been demonstrated in various various age groups, and then have also tested their rhythm, whether it's asking them to tap along and synchrony to a beat or to tell whether different rhythmic sequences are the same or different, so there's different various ways that we can quantify that.

Reyna: And in these studies that have looked at rhythm and reading together, they generally find a fairly strong correlation. So even though we know that the brain networks for rhythm and for reading are not really that overlapping, like they may share some nodes, but they're also very distinct. There are still these correlations. So one possible explanation when we see phenotypic correlations is that there are underlying genetic correlations and that there may be subsets of genes that influence rhythm that also influence reading. So those are the types of questions we're starting to ask and ways in which cognitive neuroscience and even experimental psychology are then leading us to ask genetics questions.

Kat: So what can we do with this kind of information? We sometimes, I think as geneticists, fall into the trap of going well, we'll find the genes and then we can make drugs and tests. Or we'll find the genes and you could imagine some kind of utopia where we'll just screen every two year old and go, are you going to be a concert pianist? Have you got the music genes or not? It's about what do we do with this information about the genes and the connection with our brains and musicality and language.

Reyna: That's another great question. So I think it's the perfect time to be thinking about these things and talking about them because as this brand new field of the genetics of musicality emerges, there are all these ethical questions that come to light. So as far as the genetic models right now that are emerging, they're not strong enough to predict with confidence how one individual will turn out.

Reyna: So we could do a better job by asking the person or by maybe looking directly at their music ability rather than using genetic tests and that sort accuracy problem aside, I think ethically also we want to recognise that music is an important cultural experience and sure there's a small percentage of people out there in the world that don't enjoy music and don't want to engage with it and that's completely fine, right? Because we're all different. And I think genetics has helped me really appreciate the individual differences in humans.

Reyna: But generally for most of the population, music is important and engaging and it's an important social experience. And there's also data to suggest pro social benefits of engaging in music, whether it's just through music listening or whether it's through more active types of engagement. So I think we should really be cautious when thinking about the ethical applications.

Reyna: Now I also have an active line of research on the clinical translational aspects. So I am thinking about how can we use the genetics of musicality in particular to help people and to help the field. And one of the ways in which I'm interested in doing that, I mentioned reading already. Reading and speech and language occur on a continuum just like musicality.

Reyna: And we know from looking at already published literature that children with developmental speech and language and reading disorders are more likely to have rhythm impairments. They're more likely to have atypical rhythm abilities. Now this isn't true for everyone. It's not a one-to-one mapping, but that's the case with most of these types of traits that vary widely across the population.

Reyna: And so I'm really interested, and my colleagues and I are very interested, in how we might mobilise information about the genetic and neural architecture of rhythm/rhythm abilities in order to better detect speech and language and reading disorders. So if we develop tools that allow us to better assess risk for some of these speech and language disorders and reading disorders, perhaps by incorporating information specifically about rhythm phenotypes and about rhythm genetics, then could that then allow us to detect more children that might not be getting clinical services yet because they've fallen through the cracks for one reason or another. So even just on the risk detection, it may open the door to increasing access to services. Does that make sense?

Kat: Yeah. And it sort of comes back a bit, I guess, as well to the question that's still open where we don't know whether it's the chicken or the egg. Whether doing music training supports your language skills or vice versa. And if someone is very good at music, does that mean they're gonna find it easier to learn foreign languages or learn language generally and vice versa. If someone's very good at language, does that make them more likely to be good at music? And can you boost one or boost the other.

Reyna: Right. So, yeah. So I think on the one hand we're seeing really strong correlational evidence. And on the other hand, we have not seen as much evidence that, to me, at least is convincing in terms of the causal transfer. But even if music training and music interventions don't end up being helpful for a subset of kids that need an extra boost for speech and language and reading, maybe just that risk detection aspect could be helpful because they may be falling through the cracks with the normal methods.

Reyna: So in one study in my lab, that's ongoing, we're actually testing infant's rhythm perception using a method called EEG where we put electrodes on their scalp.

Kat: Aww they're so cute, the little baby hats.

Reyna: Yes. It's super fun. It's completely non-invasive, the babies don't mind and they listen to some musical rhythms, we record their brain data, we analyse it and then we're looking to see whether that's going to predict their risk of having a speech or language disorder when they're a little bit bigger.

Reyna: We're also looking at their parents for the skills. So if rhythm has a genetic influence, then assessing parent's rhythm may give us a window into the child's language development. So that work is ongoing, but I'm excited about it because it allows us to integrate these ideas that are really from very disparate fields. So cognitive neuroscience, communication disorders, human genetics, music cognition, these are all very separate fields and we're trying to knit them together to make headway on an important clinical translational problem.

Kat: So I've got a couple of like curious questions that I've always wondered about. So as someone who's a musician and someone who's a scientist, I've had lots of people say to me, well you must be really good at maths, and I'm like noooo. And there seems to be this connection between maths and music that I don't know quite where it's come from. I probably blame Bach for this one actually. But like, is that a thing? Does that stand up anywhere from what you've seen?

Reyna: Yeah. I'm glad you asked about that because I also get asked this a lot and I'm always like, Ooh, let's talk about music and language because that's where we see the strong correlations. So there are some modest correlations between musicality and specifically music aptitude and general cognitive abilities. So those are well-documented, but the specific relationship either with math ability or with music listening influencing visual spatial tasks, that has not really been replicated well. And so I think it's an idea that's gained a lot of popularity in the public, and certainly there are some individuals for whom this is true, but it says small subset and it's not a really robust correlation.

Reyna: The really robust correlation is between music aptitude and language abilities, and language abilities that range from reading, which I already mentioned, to second language learning, which you asked about, grammar skills, the ability to perceive speech in noisy environments. So that's also something that greatly impacts our communication ability, right? How well can we perceive speech accurately when there's background noise and all of these tend to be correlated with various aspects of music aptitude, including rhythm and tonality related skills.

Kat: And this kind of brings us to the last question that I have, which is really why does music feel good? Cause there's certain types of music that just make you feel good. And for me particularly, I really like jazz and syncopation and when it crosses the beat and you're like, yeah, that feels great. And when you hear a song that you love it's like oh, that feels good. Does science have any insights into why this is?

Reyna: Yeah. So this is a pretty hot question. It's not as much in my area, but I'll try to give you a little bit of insight. So I think one of the reasons that music makes people feel good is that it activates reward circuitry in the brain. And so we know that there are certain brain areas that are very active from a rewarding stimulus and music acts in that way. And in particular, and my research focus is rhythm so I know more about rhythm and I'm partial to rhythm, rhythm and the beat they're activating networks of brain areas, including sub-cortical areas, including the basal ganglia that are very involved in reward processing.

Reyna: So we're seeing a convergence there in the brain. And then it's exciting to me to think about how we're going to be able to ask questions in genetics with the new methods that are available to us, to be able to actually understand this. So what are the genetic influences on music engagement and how do particular genes influence the development of brain circuitry that's then activated by music and how does that intersect with ways in which we can use music to improve mood and to help us focus. Again, probably only for subsets of people, but I think that genetics can help to give us insight on the relationships between genes, brain, and behaviour and how these phenomena unfold. These very complex phenomena unfold. 

Kat: Reyna Gordon from Vanderbilt University, very patiently answering all my question