Groundbreaking research has uncovered a significant genetic correlation between human language abilities and musical rhythm skills. This discovery, published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal on November 21, sheds new light on the biological roots of these crucial human characteristics.
The research was a collaborative effort of specialists in musicality genetics and language genetics from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, working in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
The study revealed that the genetic components influencing rhythm-related skills and language-related traits, including dyslexia, overlap significantly. This conclusion was drawn from the analysis of multiple datasets from over a million individuals, using advanced statistical methods to identify shared genetic factors and understand their biological and evolutionary significance.
The research showed that the same genetic variants that increase the likelihood of rhythm impairments also elevate the risk of dyslexia. Conversely, genetic variants associated with better musical rhythm skills coincide with genes linked to improved language and reading performance and better educational outcomes in language-related subjects.
By analyzing a large dataset and integrating brain data, the researchers gained a new understanding of how the genes affecting our rhythm and language skills are involved in the neural pathways supporting these traits. They discovered that 16 regions of the genome overlapped between rhythm and language. These regions are likely to contain genetic variants that regulate gene expression in different types of brain cells.
Reyna Gordon, PhD, associate professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at VUMC and the senior author of the study, said the findings suggest a complex genetic and neurobiological structure shared by human musical rhythm and language abilities.
Gordon highlighted the study’s discovery of genetic variants related to rhythm and language that are abundant in oligodendrocytes, a type of brain cell that helps maintain connections between different brain areas.
Co-author Yasmina Mekki, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at VUMC, found a locus on chromosome 20 that was common to neural connectivity in the language network and rhythm. These findings suggest that connectivity is a critical neurobiological factor affected by the polygenic (many-gene) bases of rhythm and language variation.
The human brain is unique in its strong connections between auditory and motor regions, which previous research suggests may underpin the evolution of language and musicality. The study also pointed out potential evolutionary signatures, including a shared variant linked to rhythm impairment and dyslexia in the DLAT gene, previously associated with rare neurodevelopmental disorders.
Overall, the research has unveiled novel shared genomic factors between rhythm and language traits in humans and their role in shaping and functioning the human brain. This knowledge enhances our understanding of human musicality and communication skills’ origins and could have future clinical applications, such as detecting risk and personalizing treatments based on an individual’s genetic predispositions to rhythm impairments and reading/language impairments in childhood.
The research was funded by National Institutes of Health grants and is the result of a collaboration with co-senior author Simon Fisher, DPhil, and first author Gokberk Alagoz, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute. The Vanderbilt Genetics Institute colleagues also contributed, and summary genomic data from 23andMe, Inc. on rhythm and dyslexia were used for analyses.
