People who have trouble moving to the beat may have their GENES to blame, study finds

Are your two left feet embarrassing you? It’s the fault of your ancestors with difficult rhythms!

According to a study, having a good rhythm and being able to move to the rhythm is at least partly explained by our genes.

Researchers from the University of melbourne identified 69 different genetic variants linked to the ability to keep up with a beat.

Many of these genes were expressed in the brain, some of which were also linked to the Depressionschizophrenia and developmental delay.

The research, published today in Nature Human behaviorstates that these links suggest that rhythm has a biological link to brain development.

The musicians involved in the study tended to have more of these genetic variants, suggesting that they are important for broader musicality.

To get their results, the researchers first asked participants to complete a ‘self-report’ in which they said whether they thought they could keep up with a beat, before measuring their perception of the beat through a task. .

They then studied the genomes of 606,825 individuals using data from 23andMe to find common genes associated with beat timing.

The results were then validated by seeing whether the beat synchronization markers found in the study would differentiate self-identified musicians from non-musicians.

Finally, the team looked for any genetic correlation between beat timing and other traits.

They found that the “heritability” of pace-determining genes was between 13% and 16%, which is similar to estimates for other complex traits.

Heritability is a measure of the extent to which differences in people’s genes explain differences in their traits, which are not explained by environment or chance.

This was enriched for genes expressed in brain tissue, further suggesting that genes expressed in the central nervous system are rhythm-related.

Genetic correlations have been found with respiratory function, motor function, processing speed and chronotype – the natural inclination towards a particular sleep-wake cycle.

This suggests that these share a genetic architecture with beat synchronization.

Scientists have already discovered that the “perfect ear” may also be in the genes, rather than something you can learn.

Perfect pitch is the ability to recognize the pitch of a note played or to produce a given note while singing or on an instrument.

It’s so rare that 1 in 10,000 people have it, but since they’re almost always musicians, it’s easier to find among bands and singers.

Researchers at the University of Delaware found that musicians with the musical gift shared by Mozart, Beethoven and Bach had about 50% larger auditory cortex than those without.

But it’s probably not that music training enlarges the part of the brain that processes sound.

When the researchers scanned the brains of similar musicians who had been training for more than a decade, they had the same size of auditory cortex as someone who had never picked up a musical instrument.

This suggests that musical entrainment does not influence the size of the auditory cortex, and that an enlargement, and the resulting perfect pitch, could be the result of genetics.