This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

The best guess that scientists currently have about the role of genes and the environment in complex cognitive behaviors is that each is responsible for about 50 percent of the story. Genes may transmit a propensity to be patient, to have good eye-hand coordination, or to be passionate, but certain life events—life events in the broadest sense, meaning not just your conscious experiences and memories, but the food you ate and the food your mother ate while you were in her womb—can influence whether a genetic propensity will be realized or not. Early life traumas, such as the loss of a parent, or physical or emotional abuse, are only the obvious examples of environmental influences causing a genetic predisposition to become either heightened or suppressed. Because of this interaction, we can only make predictions about human behavior at the level of a population, not an individual. In other words, if you know that someone has a genetic predisposition toward criminal behavior, you can’t make any predictions about whether he will end up in jail in the next five years. On the other hand, knowing that a hundred people have this predisposition, we can predict that some percentage of them will probably wind up in jail; we simply don’t know which ones. And some will never get into any trouble at all. The same applies to musical genes we may find someday. All we can say is that a group of people with those genes is more likely to produce expert musicians, but we cannot know which i...