Special thanks go to Steven for finding this really compelling article from a blog called Music Matters: A Blog on Music Cognition, written by a man named Henjan Honing, a Professor in Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam (originally posted on May 30, 2009):
week a paper was published in PLoS-ONE suggesting a relation between
AVPR1A-Haplotypes and musical creativity. A group of Finish researchers
analyzed 19 families with a total of 343 family members on their
musical aptitude —using the Seashore test and a test developed by one
of the authors— and their DNA profiles. They were able to show an
association between these and related genes and levels of musical
creativity. The research contrasts earlier research with twins that
propose the interesting hypothesis that music perception and creativity
in music are linked to the same phenotypic spectrum of human cognitive
social skills, like human bonding and altruism, both associated with
AVPR1A. Music as a form of ‘extreme’ bonding behavior…
It was just a matter of time for such a study to emerge. Still, the results of
this study are merely correlational. I like to think of the capacity
for music as shared instead of being special, and a result of complex
nature and nurture interactions.
Suzy S.