The Music That Moves Us

00:01:34

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. Well, actually, I’m going to save my favorite. I’m going to tell you one that I really liked that was of a really obvious and lovely choice, which is Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

 

00:01:43

Dr. Martin Austwick: Beautiful song.

 

00:01:44

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, beautiful song.

 

00:01:45

Dr. Martin Austwick: I guess we don’t get to decide these, but I’ve got Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners.

 

00:01:49

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That was pretty good. That was pretty good.

 

00:01:51

Dr. Martin Austwick:What else we got?

 

00:01:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: An album I listened to a lot when it came out. This is a song, Rebellion [Lies], Arcade Fire.

 

00:01:58

Dr. Martin Austwick:Yeah, that’s a banger.

 

00:01:59

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, that was a good album. Good album.

 

00:02:01

Dr. Martin Austwick: Party 4 U you by Charlie XCX.

 

00:02:02

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Modern. I like it.

 

00:02:06

Dr. Martin Austwick:Yeah?

 

00:02:06

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I’ll tell you now my favorite.

 

00:02:08

Dr. Martin Austwick: Yep?

 

00:02:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit.

 

Tonight, we are talking about music and our brains. Music is something that, for many of us, is deeply personal. I was reflecting on this. My family is really musical. We used to play music together when I was growing up, and so I’m really excited tonight for us here at Nice Genes! to be talking about music and our brains. How music meets our brains and how much of our DNA influences music.

 

This is the first time we’re doing a live podcast. Thank you so much for coming, so here we go.

 

You’re listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host and rat detective, Dr. Kaylee Byers, tonight’s podcast maestro, guiding you through this special live show.

 

I would like to introduce you to, first, Dr. Lara Boyd. Dr. Boyd is a professor, a distinguished university scholar at the University of British Columbia, and a neuroscientist leading the Brain Behavior Lab, studying how our brain learns and changes. In this case, we’re going to be talking about that in relation to music. Dr. Boyd’s TED Talk on neuroplasticity has been viewed 44 million times. Please, welcome to the stage, Dr. Lara Boyd. And our second guest tonight is Dr. Alison Castle. Dr. Castle is a geneticist at BC Children’s and a clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Castle is also a former flute player and a singer. Please, a warm round of applause for Dr. Castle. You got a fan club.

 

00:04:04

Dr. Alison Castle: Wow.

 

00:04:07

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. Our very first question tonight to get us started, so everyone in the audience was talking about what music they would pass on to future generations. But music gets in us deep, right? It can mean a lot to our experiences and bring up memories. Is there a song that brings you back to a very particular time and place? Every time you hear it, you think about it? And if so, what is that? And Dr. Boyd, we’ll start with you.

 

00:04:31

Dr. Lara Boyd: All right. Well, first, thank you for letting a humble neuroscientist grace the Genome BC podcast. My song is going to be a different genre than we’ve heard so far. My very favorite song, and I will take this to the grave and the one you should all carry forward, is At Last by Ella Fitzgerald.

 

00:04:48

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh, that’s a nice one.

 

00:04:50

Dr. Lara Boyd: And I can tell you why.

 

00:04:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yes.

 

00:04:52

Dr. Lara Boyd: And now you’ll remember why, because I’ve given you a cue that’s interesting. My daughter’s a jazz and blues singer, and every time she sings it, I have to cry.

 

00:05:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh, that’s really sweet.

 

00:05:02

Dr. Lara Boyd: Yeah. I’m going to make everyone else feel bad for choosing Limp Bizkit.

 

00:05:06

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah. Hey, you don’t know. That person might cry when they hear Limp Bizkit. You don’t know.

 

00:05:11

Dr. Lara Boyd: They might.

 

00:05:12

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Castle?

 

00:05:13

Dr. Alison Castle: Well, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to follow that one up. My song that always evokes an emotional response is The Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Many, many memories, both historical and recent, of dancing to that with my family.

 

00:05:30

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Wait, your whole family would get together and do the Time Warp?

 

00:05:31

Dr. Alison Castle: My entire family. Every family party, Time Warp goes on, and everyone is dancing.

 

00:05:37

Dr. Kaylee Byers: In costume?

 

00:05:38

Dr. Alison Castle: That’s the next step.

 

00:05:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay, great. I love that. These are beautiful memories. I was thinking of what you were saying about crying. Mine was It’s a Wonderful World. Whenever I used to sing that, as a kid, we used to sing it in choir, my mother would sit in the front row sobbing. Now, every once in a while, when I want to get her emotional, I just hit play.

 

00:05:55

Dr. Lara Boyd: There you go.

 

00:05:56

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, thank you so much. I think what we’ll do is we’re going to start with a few questions for you, Dr. Boyd. What brought you to studying the brain, and particularly this aspect of learning and music?

 

00:06:07

Dr. Lara Boyd: Yeah. I’m fascinated by just how the brain changes when we change, we learn, and that’s really the crux of my research. I come to the study of music in two ways. One, I’m what we call affectionately in neuroscience an MRI jockey. I was actually recruited into this project to study how the brain changes as students at UBC become experts in opera. I was recruited into that by Nancy Hermiston, who’s the head of voice at UBC, and also the director of the UBC opera program.

 

00:06:38

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And why opera?

 

00:06:39

Dr. Lara Boyd: I know, why opera? Opera is, as Nancy would describe it, as kind of the Olympics of dramatic arts. If you think about opera, if you’ve been to an opera, people are singing, they’re acting, it’s very physical. They’re paying attention to the people on the stage, they’re watching a director, and they’re all doing this in this incredibly timed, dramatic, emotional fashion. And the kicker, most often they’re doing it in a language they don’t necessarily speak. There are very few operas in English, for example, so you are invoking so many neurosystems at the same time that it’s actually an incredibly difficult study to control for. What exactly are they learning? Something we struggled with quite a bit to figure out.

 

00:07:23

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, with all of that going on, how does training for the opera, intensive opera training, how does that influence our brain?

 

00:07:30

Dr. Lara Boyd: Yeah, it influences it incredibly positively. Our findings across the board were both behavioral, so these students, and this is over a year, we saw significant increases in their ability to pay attention, their memory capability, and in their educational achievement. We were able to follow that up by looking at which brain regions were actually changing. We actually were able to show changes in the structure of the brain. Now as an adult, it’s kind of hard to change your brain structure. We’re pretty fixed. But we were able to show that the areas that support movement, those change. It’s not a surprise. You move a lot in opera. But we also showed brain regions that are important for learning and memory became more elaborated, thicker, if you will, and we showed that areas that are important for language processing also became quite a bit thicker and enlarged. There’s a pretty remarkable amount of change over just a one- year intervention of this kind of intensive training in these students.

 

00:08:26

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That’s pretty incredible. You mentioned that opera is sort of unique. You’re learning a new language, you’re all over the place, you’re moving on the stage. How might your brain change in this respect versus, say, learning a new sport or an instrument?

 

00:08:41

Dr. Lara Boyd: Those are great questions and those were our control groups. We had a control group of athletes, so thank you, UBC track team, we had instrumentalists, so people who were learning a musical instrument, we had language- intensive learners, and we had just plain old UBC students. Those were all of the things we controlled for, and so it was a massive undertaking.

 

00:09:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You essentially took all these things that opera students are doing and looked at them independently in relation to opera.

 

00:09:07

Dr. Lara Boyd: Exactly. Then we looked at the combination when you put them all together and what you get from putting it into one big package.

 

00:09:12

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What surprised you most? Because you talked us through some of these changes in the brain, but as a neuroscientist, what surprised you?

 

00:09:18

Dr. Lara Boyd: Probably there was a few UBC alums in the room, and people come to us with really good brains, right? These are smart kids and they’re very capable. And so to take a good brain and actually see it elaborate, become better, is unusual and exciting to see that we could promote change on top of what’s already a highly functioning system. That was a really big surprise. It was also curious to me, and very positive, that we were able to show that these effects transferred into education. These kids were doing better in their courses than other kids who were maybe just doing one of these different things. We saw a bigger magnitude of change.

 

00:09:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Should we put putting all of our undergraduates through opera training in their first year? Should everyone have to take an opera training course their first year?

 

00:10:02

Dr. Lara Boyd: I think that might be a small revolt across the board. Maybe not opera training, but I will tell you that I think that every individual should undergo some musical training. I think probably we don’t need to wait till university. I would really like to see that be embedded into our school system so that kids can take advantage of this throughout their development.

 

00:10:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, that’s really exciting. We’re also thinking about, you mentioned or there’s been work that shows, that learning music, learning a new language can protect our brain. What could this kind of training do for our brain’s resilience?

 

00:10:34

Dr. Lara Boyd: Well, this is what I’m really, really interested in. We have really good evidence, for example, that people with very profound dementia still remember music that was meaningful to them earlier in their life. We know that musicians have better auditory memory well into old age, and even into neuropathology. Patients who can’t move because they have Parkinson’s disease can move to music, can dance. They may not be able to move voluntarily. They can actually dance when music is meaningful. You see that there are these therapeutic effects of music that I think we don’t fully understand and are very underexplored. We also see that musical training enhances this capacity for learning later in life. My most favorite study, because a good chunk of my lab is devoted to studying stroke recovery, is that if you simply listen to music for an hour a day in addition to your normal therapy after you’ve had a stroke, you have a significantly better outcome from that rehabilitation.

 

00:11:29

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Really? And does it have to be an hour of just sitting listening to music, or could you be doing other things?

 

00:11:33

Dr. Lara Boyd: I don’t actually know. I don’t know why you couldn’t be doing other things, but certainly, the music seems to be enhancing the brain’s plasticity.

 

00:11:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Amazing. I’m just wondering if I should play music in the background while I spend five hours answering emails every day.

 

00:11:44

Dr. Lara Boyd:  I’m sure. It’ll just make you happier.

 

00:11:46

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, yes. I mean, we are setting a low bar to start with, but yes, I think it would improve things. We talked about this backstage a little bit about this ability to remember lyrics and maybe not something that happened yesterday. I can remember all the lyrics from a Chantal Kreviazuk song from the early 90s, and I can’t remember what I did last week. Why is that?

 

00:12:08

Dr. Lara Boyd:  It’s really an interesting phenomenon. There seems to be something highly emotional about music, and so it’s being stored in a different brain region. We have this older brain region. It involves an area called the amygdala. When we encode memories into this amygdala memory system, they seem to be really permanent, and that could be a great thing. You can remember these musical lyrics, you can remember very positive things, but this amygdala system is also hard if we want to unlearn something. It’s also where we’re going to store traumatic types of memories. But it just seemed that when we’re encoding something with this emotional overlay, that they seem to be really, really well stored. That’s how you can remember these very useful lyrics, I’m sure in your daily lives.

 

00:12:50

Dr. Kaylee Byers: It’s very useful, yes. When I’m trying to recall some of the science I do and can’t, but I can remember Chantal Kreviazuk, it’s great for my day. Okay. One final question is we’re thinking about music and our brains, and I have a bit of a chicken-and egg question for you. Does music shape our brains? Do our brains shape music?

 

00:13:13

Dr. Lara Boyd: Certainly, some of us have an innate musical ability, which is a really fascinating, fascinating thing. Some of us are born with capacity. Then we also know that you may come with that capacity, but that music very much shapes the brain. When we talk about neuroplasticity, most of the classic examples we use are from music. If you play the violin, the finger you use for fingering, it has a huge representation in the brain that’s very different than, for example, your bowing hand or people like me who don’t. Actually, musicians are nightmares in research studies because they can do this thing where they can do two different things with their hands at once. This is another beautiful example of how music is changing the brain, and intensive practice associated with music changes the brain. Then we know we see these long-term resiliency effects well into old age that it seems to help us facilitate learning, seems to help us recover when the brain is hurt or damaged, and also when the brain is diseased. There’s definitely a two-way street there. I guess the takeaway I would give there is that the effects of music are overwhelmingly positive on your brain health.

 

00:14:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, everyone, take that as a prescription. You should be going out and listening to lots of Limp Bizkit.. Thank you so much, Dr. Boyd.

 

00:14:30

Dr. Lara Boyd:  Thank you. Thank you.

 

00:14:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We’ve been thinking about, okay, our brains in relation to music, but what about the genetics of it all? Because here on Nice Genes!, we like to talk about genetics. And to talk about that in relation to our DNA and the environment, we are going to talk to Dr. Castle. Dr. Castle, welcome to the stage from your hidden shadowed corner.

 

00:14:50

Dr. Alison Castle: Now I’m in the light.

 

00:14:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Welcome to the light. It’s glorious up here. You can’t see a thing. You are a clinical geneticist.

 

00:14:58

Dr. Alison Castle: Yes.

 

00:14:58

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What is that?

 

00:14:59

Dr. Alison Castle: Yeah, excellent question. I get that a lot. That means that I am a physician who specializes in assessing, diagnosing, and helping manage patients with either known or suspected genetic disorders. It’s entirely patient-facing, so I get to see patients, interact with them, do counseling, organize testing. I don’t sit in a lab. I get to see patients across the lifespan, so that includes seeing prenatal cases to people well into their adult life.

 

00:15:27

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And what do you enjoy about this line of work?

 

00:15:30

Dr. Alison Castle:  I like the diversity of it. They always say in medicine, when you choose a specialty, you have to like the bread and butter. If you go into respirology, you can be excited about the rare cases, but you have to love treating asthma. Genetics is the world of rare disorders, so there is no bread and butter. I get to see one in a million cases. I get to see patients that are as of yet undiagnosed, and help them through that diagnostic odyssey. We really get to be at the forefront of medicine.

 

00:15:56

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  That sounds really rewarding, really exciting.

 

00:15:58

Dr. Alison Castle:  It is, yeah.

 

00:15:58

Dr. Kaylee Byers: As you are listening to us talk about music and shaping our brains, what does that bring to mind to you as a geneticist?

 

00:16:06

Dr. Alison Castle: Well, it just goes to show how complex everything is. I think I often think in a very narrow genetics lens of we, the complexity that is humanity, are built from four simple letters, our nucleotides, and those are very stagnant. They, with a rare exception, don’t change through our life, and so how those four stagnant letters can lead to these incredible dynamic beings with plasticity in their brains is just mind-blowing.

 

00:16:32

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  It is pretty amazing when you think of it that way, which is these four little letters. I wonder, you grew up in a very musical household: singing, flute, piano also. What did music mean for you growing up?

 

00:16:45

Dr. Alison Castle: It was good and bad. There was lots of fights. My sister and I ganging up against our parents not wanting to do our piano practice when they argued how much they were spending on lessons, but then a lot of really good stuff. I mentioned dancing with my family. Whenever we would drive with my father, we’d be listening to classic rock. There’s a lot of community building that comes from being a part of musical endeavors, whether that’s building relationships with music teachers or your bandmates in concert band or the cast that you perform within musical theater, lots of relationship building.

 

00:17:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Good to know that forcing your children to actually practice their instruments is a universal experience. Do you think, thinking about your own musical ability and musical experience, that there’s a root into the DNA that determines some of that?

 

00:17:35

Dr. Alison Castle: I think there has to be not just about how we can see musicality run in families or certain people are naturally talented, but I think also just how persistent music has been through the evolution of humanity. We know that even, again, thinking from a medical perspective, music has been a part of medicine for hundreds and hundreds of years. The ancient Greeks used to use music as medicine. I learned this the other day. The Chinese symbol for medicine is actually a superposition of the symbol for plant and for music. There has to be something intrinsic about music for it to have persisted for this long, and for it to be so ingrained with so many cultures.

 

00:18:15

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That’s really interesting, like the connection between music and health, and then also then that connection to who we are in our DNA. Well, thank you both so much for those incredible responses. And to all of you, we have talked about our brain, learning, and music, we’ve started to talk a little bit about genetics, but we’re going to take a quick musical break here with Martin who’s going to serenade us. When we come back, we’re going to be talking about, are we wired for music? How much does the environment matter? I guess we’ll ramp that all together after we hear a couple little songs.

You’re listening to Nice Genes!, the podcast that turns up the volume on the genomics boomboxing into everyday life, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers. And if you like Nice Genes!, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows, and leave us a review. And hey, if this episode hits the right notes, share it with your favorite bandmates so they can jam along too.

I’m guessing, at this point, you’ve either picked the song you want future generations to know. And if it isn’t Limp Bizkit, I mean, I guess we can still be friends, but I have a few recommendations. Or you’ve started side-eying that guitar in the corner like, “Hey, maybe today’s the day.” We’ve been talking about how music boosts our brains and mental health. But because we’re a genomics podcast, we’re about to crank the science knob a little higher. In this next part, we bring in an expert who digs into how much of our musical behavior is written in our DNA, and how much is just life being life. And because experts who study that exact thing are not exactly a dime a dozen, we’re pulling in clips from a previous conversation we had with behavioral genetic researcher, Dr. Miriam Mosing. But first, back to the stage with our musician in resident, Martin Austwick.

 

00:20:06

Dr. Martin Austwick: Yes, you are the reason that I lost my way. But that’s not the biggest thing I’ve lost, no, not even today. And I’m not in it to win it so losing things is okay.

 

Thank you. Would you please welcome back to the stage your host, Kaylee Byers.

 

00:20:40

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Wow.

 

00:20:40

Dr. Martin Austwick: Back to the stage, across the stage.

 

00:20:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: From the dark corners of the stage, I emerge. How long have you been playing music?

 

00:20:47

Dr. Martin Austwick: Since I was about 15, I guess, so quite late, I think.

 

00:20:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Do you feel like music comes to you naturally?

 

00:20:52

Dr. Martin Austwick: No. It’s really hard. I had to practice a lot.

 

00:20:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Really?

 

00:20:56

Dr. Martin Austwick: Yeah. I mean, 15 is quite late, right? I felt like everyone I knew had already started playing an instrument because there were those kids who were like 12 and they’re playing like grade 8 violin pieces. But I think when you come to music a little bit older, you have a different appreciation of it. You’re not being forced to do it.

 

00:21:11

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, that’s really interesting. We’re going to dive into this a little bit more in this next segment about how much of our musical ability and engagement with music is actually coded in our DNA versus all that hard practicing. We reached out to a researcher to talk to us about what is in our DNA when it comes to music, and so we would like to introduce Dr. Miriam Mosing to you now.

 

00:21:37

Dr. Miriam Mosing: Hi, I’m Dr. Miriam Mosing, and I’m leading the Behavior Genetics Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany. I also am an associate professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. My research interests are really how our genes and our environments, so what we are born with and what we experience throughout our lives, influence our behavior. Specifically, I’m interested in skill learning as one of my research tracks, and there, I use music as a model behavior.

 

00:22:11

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, we’re looking here at our musical ability in relation to genetics. We’re going to zoom in on that genetic question because Dr. Mosing and colleagues have been looking at that, have been exploring how our genetics, how that blueprint of our DNA shapes our musical ability.

 

00:22:27

Dr. Miriam Mosing:We know by now that we have shown that in other studies that musical behavior is partly genetic. On average, we now know that almost all music-related traits are around 40% heritable, but some more, for example, differences in our rhythm skills, are more around 60% heritable, and some, of course, are a little bit less heritable. But here, we were interested to better understand musical enjoyment and why we differ so much in how much we actually enjoy music. Some people listen to it all the time and some really don’t care at all about music. We first showed that it is as expected also, 54% influenced by genetic differences between us. But I think the more interesting part is that we could show that it was largely independent of our ability to discriminate musical sounds, so musical discrimination ability. And that, to a large part, it also was independent of general reward sensitivity, so the degree to which we actually feel or can enjoy other things than music. Maybe how much we enjoy food or other things. That means that basically, there’s a lot of genetic influences which are really specific to enjoying music or not.

 

00:23:45

Dr. Kaylee Byers: There, we heard a range of numbers, right? 40% to 60% in our DNA, 54% related to that enjoyment piece. What does that mean? Dr. Castle, what does it mean when we’re talking about something like 54% heritability?

 

00:24:00

Dr. Alison Castle: Yeah. When we talk about heritability in genetics, I find it’s a little bit backwards. Heritability actually means how many differences on a population level can be explained by our genetics. For example, if you have a trait that’s 0% heritable, it means that the differences that you see person to person are not related to your genetics at all. An example for that is the languages that we speak, that isn’t dictated by our genetic differences. On the other hand, if you have a trait that is very, very highly heritable, it means that the differences person to person can be explained significantly by genetics. An example of that is blood type. Blood type is nearly exclusively dictated by genetics, and not at all by our environment. When we talk about musical enjoyment being 54% heritable, it means about half of the differences that we see person to person and how they enjoy music is related to genetic differences they have between them, and half is related to environmental factors.

 

00:25:04

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thank you so much for being the geneticist in the room to come break down those stats for us. Something that’s really interesting to me when I think about this kind of work is how do we even do it? How do we get down into what is genetic and which genetic factors are influencing that musical enjoyment or musical ability? Dr. Mosing has done some research there and will tell us how.

 

00:25:27

Dr. Miriam Mosing: We usually use twins for these studies. I think that’s quite a nice setup actually or experiment because if we use identical twins and compare them to non-identical twins, we can actually estimate approximately how genetic, not only a trait itself is, but also the relationship between traits. That we can do because identical twins share on average 100% of their genetic makeup, so they’re exactly born the same genetically. But they also kind of share the same womb, and that also non- identical twins do, and they share the same upbringing so they share their early environmental exposures. In that sense, they are basically perfect controls for each other. Then we can test, for example, if one twin has been exposed to a specific exposure like started, for example, playing a musical instrument earlier than the other twin, we can explore whether that really did affect outcome later on so we can get as close as possible to causally informative design. Another way, of course, to get at what genes play a role is doing a genome-wide association study. In this case, we actually measure the genotypes of individuals, as there are a lot of genetic variants in which we differ in between humans. That means we need to have very large sample sizes to actually identify any genes which may be relevant for a specific trait. Usually, we find that there are many, many genes which have a very small effect.

 

00:27:02

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What we hear there is there’s potentially many genes involved, but also our environment matters. If I can ask our wonderful panel to come up and talk a little bit about what’s exciting about the role of environment when it comes to musicality and genetics. Maybe I’ll start with you, Dr. Boyd.

 

00:27:18

Dr. Lara Boyd: Well, so it’s amazing that you would ask that. We actually just published a paper about two weeks ago showing that there was a relationship between musicality in a very specific brain region, an area called the arcuate fasciculus.

 

00:27:30

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Sorry, what was that again?

 

00:27:31

Dr. Lara Boyd: Yes, exactly. An area called the arcuate fasciculus. But we have this region in our brain that, in people who show higher degrees of musicality, it is larger. Now, we did this in adults. It’s, again, one of these studies I’d love to do in kids and see, are you born with this or is it maybe something that develops as you have more and more exposure? I don’t know the answer to that, but we do know there are these strong relationships between the environment and then maybe an innate, at least in this instance, brain structure that come together to enable someone to be a musician.

 

00:28:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Castle, in your role as a clinical geneticist, I mean, are there other outcomes for folks that are related to the environment as well that we think of in this way?

 

00:28:14

Dr. Alison Castle: Yeah. I think so many of our complex traits are complex interaction of our environment and our genetics. I think historically, we used to think in genetics of nature versus nurture. Now, we realize they’re probably not two things that are at odds with each other, but are very intricately entwined. You think about, for example, if somebody is born with a high innate musical ability, that’s because they’ve inherited genetic factors from their parents who probably also have high innate musical abilities, which probably also means their parents are going to raise them in environments that are surrounded by music. And so somebody that might be born with an innate ability might also have that early environmental exposure simply from familial traits happening.

 

00:28:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah. I guess even just in both of your research generally, do you struggle with this? I think it’s so hard to tease these things apart. What do we have to keep in mind when we’re doing this kind of research and trying to attribute things to genetics or what we see in the brain scanner versus what’s going on in our environment?

 

00:29:10

Dr. Alison Castle: With the clinical hat on, I always think about making sure the information we’re sharing with patients is accurate. I think what Dr. Mosing’s research shows is that we can’t necessarily always be 100% definitive when we’re telling patients about X, Y, or Z. Even known genetic disorders always has variation and always has variability, and nobody can predict how particular additional genetic factors or environmental exposures may change outcomes on, for example, known genetic disorders.

 

00:29:44

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, that was a real problem with the 23andMe stuff, right? We would come out and would say, “Oh, you have this marker,” and then people would panic, but didn’t necessarily mean that you were going to have that outcome.

 

00:29:53

Dr. Alison Castle: Exactly. There are some things in genetics that you find a genetic change, you can be pretty darn definitive about outcomes that are going to happen. But the vast majority of things still exist on a spectrum and still have other mitigating or complicating factors that we, as clinicians and geneticists, don’t fully know and can’t fully understand yet.

 

00:30:13

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah. Do you run into these challenges also in your work, Dr. Boyd?

 

00:30:17

Dr. Lara Boyd: Oh, certainly. Of course, I always think about it a little bit like this. The genes set the table, so they’re the place settings. But what you actually serve on the table, how that is consumed, and how it’s processed, that’s such a huge effect of your environment, your exposure, what motivates you, what moves you, what gives you that hit of dopamine that makes it feel good, and those things will scaffold one onto the other. The other thing about the conversation around music I just feel like we haven’t quite touched on is it’s a group event. We can listen to music by ourselves, but so often, we’re in an environment like this and we’re sharing it, and so you also have this very strong social connection. One of the studies that I love the most in this field actually shows as a group of individuals is sitting together and enjoying music, our brains are always oscillating. We have these oscillatory brainwaves happening all the time. As you become engaged in a musical performance, your brainwaves are all syncing up and oscillating together.

 

00:31:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What?

 

00:31:21

Dr. Lara Boyd: And so you’re not only having the shared experience that you can feel kind of emotionally and through our social connection, but you’re also having a neurophysiologic connection through the sharing of that experience.

 

00:31:32

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love that. All our brains are moving similarly right now or they’re getting synced up?

 

00:31:37

Dr. Lara Boyd: They become synced up.

 

00:31:38

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh, wow. I love this so much. We are having a very intimate experience, everyone. Dr. Mosing mentioned, okay, there’s more than just one gene that’s contributing here. This is really complex. In the next clip, Dr. Mosing is going to talk about that complexity bit, how we determine what genes are at play, and something that’s called a polygenic score, something in terms of multiple genes contributing.

 

00:32:01

Dr. Miriam Mosing: In terms of genome-wide association studies, so actually finding specific genes for music, there hasn’t been so much done. We have done one study on rhythmic ability in 400, 000 people using the company 23andMe, which now doesn’t exist in its past form anymore. And there, we identified some genes which were related for the ability to clap to a beat. But rather than just looking at those specific genes, what we can do is that then we use that information we get from this study, and basically then calculate in yet another sample which has been genotyped. There, we can use the information from the large scale GWAS and calculate some sort of, it’s called a polygenic risk score. That’s basically an indicator of their rhythmic predisposition basically, based purely on their genetic markers. We can calculate that, but that’s a little bit more inaccurate. It doesn’t work well on a individual level. For example, looked at Beethoven’s genome and showed that this polygenic score was predicting that Beethoven had a very bad rhythm, which obviously is very unlikely to be true. It just shows how inaccurate these types of polygenic scores or genetic scores to date are when we try to use it for individuals. But we can also show that on a group level, it does work much better.

 

00:33:27

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Poor Beethoven. What are the risks, I guess, of doing this kind of research? We’ll start with you, Dr. Castle. What are the risks of doing this kind of work when you’re dealing with, I mean, there’s the power of large datasets, but also recognizing that’s really difficult to tease all of this apart.

 

00:33:41

Dr. Alison Castle: Yeah. You talk about the power of large datasets, and we know that we need massive datasets to be able to do studies like genome-wide association studies. The reason is that there’s not, as Dr. Mosing said, one genetic change or one gene of interest that causes musicality or being particularly rhythmic. You have tons and tons of these tiny genetic variants that, on their own, probably have no influence, but there is a cumulative effect. Now, the challenge is most of these large genome-wide association studies come from very biased populations. For example, they’re not highly representative. At least in medicine, a lot of the polygenic risk scores are derived from genome-wide association studies that over-represent white Europeans, and so it can be challenging to use a dataset that might not represent every single individual to whom you might apply it.

 

00:34:36

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Right. And in the brain world, is it a similar challenge?

 

00:34:40

Dr. Lara Boyd: It’s a huge challenge, but our challenge is having big datasets because the way we get those is by $1, 000 MRI scans. We are working towards that though. We’re getting larger and larger datasets where we can start to interrogate these things, but the brain is so magnificently plastic. Each of your brains looks as different as each of you do. I mean, we have general features, like we all have two arms and two legs, but very varied differences in how those things are expressed, and so these studies become virtually impossible in neuroscience, at least to date.

 

00:35:12

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  Well, having those big datasets are really helpful, but then does it make it challenging on an individual level once you do have that kind of big data?

 

00:35:19

Dr. Alison Castle: I think it comes back to kind of what we were talking about about heritability. We know that that is a concept in genetics that we don’t apply to an individual, we apply to a population. I think you have to think about polygenic risk scores similarly. Really hard to apply it on an individual level, but you can learn a lot from a population level about natural human variation, brain functioning, and learning.

 

00:35:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And you, Dr. Boyd?

 

00:35:43

Dr. Lara Boyd: Well, the challenge for me, at least, is that I think the most interesting part is the variability, and so I’m always reluctant to take a bunch of scans or whatever and crush them into an average. I always feel like now we have something that describes the average, but it doesn’t describe any of the individuals that made up that average. In my research, we’re very interested in the tales of the distribution. What makes us unique and what factors go into that? That helps us understand how we change differently as well to different interventions, so I think that’s actually where the richness and the data lie.

 

00:36:14

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love this. On the one hand, it’s great to be able to draw these big population examples. And then on the other hand, it’s great to be able to look at the non-conforming brains.

 

00:36:23

Dr. Lara Boyd: We need both, yeah.

 

00:36:25

Dr. Kaylee Byers: If we have the power to map all of these things, our genetics, the last question here is, should we? And Dr. Mosing has some thoughts on that.

 

00:36:33

Dr. Miriam Mosing: Even if we could identify the package of traits which are needed to make a person really musical or to succeed, to make a person be Beethoven or a famous musician, then I think that would be incredibly hard. But in the end, we maybe lose a lot of, I don’t know, individuality. I think that’s generally also something to keep in mind when you’re doing this research, that maybe it depends a little bit what we are doing it for. Do we try to obviously understand what is going on in our brains, how do things work, or do we actually want to predict an individual’s musicality? We, personally, do not want that. And in that sense, it’s also great that it is so complicated so we cannot just test the baby at birth and say like, “Oh, this will be the next Beethoven, and you better never even start doing a music lesson or something like that.” We are far from that, and I hope that we also never get there.

 

00:37:32

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Mosing talks about why she thinks this work is exciting, but why do you think it’s exciting? Why do you like being in this space? Dr. Boyd, maybe I’ll start with you.

 

00:37:41

Dr. Lara Boyd: Well, it’s a little bit personal. I love music. I’m one of those people who has it on all the time. But no, I think the field is absolutely fascinating in that it speaks to the importance of us, of music to us as humans. I love that we’re not quite sure why. There’s some reason why we do this, right? We find musical instruments from 50, 000 years ago, so we’ve always been doing this. And for me, I would maybe argue that there may be an evolutionary advantage to it. We see that there are direct changes in the brain as a result of music. We see that as we engage with music, we’ll see our stress hormones come down. We know that our stress hormones compete with the hormones that allow and the growth factors that allow our brain to be more neuroplastic, so it may actually be a vehicle that literally is enhancing learning through that kind of neurophysiologic mechanism, and so maybe this is a reason. There’s also social connection we’ve talked about, and that might be really important for a social species like humans. I think maybe we are on the edge of starting to have some interesting theories about why we have this and why it’s so very engaging.

 

00:38:47

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love the evolutionary question. Yeah, why do we do it? You mentioned that social connection. That, to me, is one of the things that I find the most compelling is that way of building connection with others, another form of communication. Then maybe they’re going to help you out and they won’t let you get eaten by a bear. Are there any things about the evolutionary aspect that you are excited about, Dr. Castle?

 

00:39:08

Dr. Alison Castle: Yeah, I think just better understanding of everything is so important. Again, from a very narrow medicine lens, we’ve talked about music therapy as something that is beneficial for stroke victims, is used in patients with dementia, is used across many areas of medicine. And now, in the 21st century, we talk a lot about evidence-based medicine, so making sure we have the evidence to understand how, why, and under what circumstances something is helpful. I think to be able to best characterize that, we have to understand typical before we can understand how pathology might interact with typical. To be able to understand, from a genetics and imaging perspective, what dictates musical ability, what dictates musical enjoyment, what can music do to our brain, that helps us understand how music can be used to treat illness.

 

00:40:05

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  I also feel like it just teaches us a little bit more about who we are, right? All of these questions help us understand our brains, our biology and our past, in this case too, with evolution, which is really exciting. Dr. Boyd, Dr. Castle, thank you so much for taking the time and talking to us about brains, genetics, and music. I learned so much and I’m really grateful to both of you. Please, a big warm round of applause for Dr. Boyd and Dr. Castle, and Dr. Mosing, who’s not here. This has been a real treat. Music is so dear to me. I like to listen to all kinds of music. I’m now going to play it in the background of all of my email writing. I think we have another song here as well, don’t we, Dr. Austwick?

 

00:40:51

Dr. Martin Austwick: Yeah, we do. We do. This is the song you can sing along to.

 

00:40:53

Dr. Kaylee Byers: They can sing along to it.

 

00:40:53

Dr. Martin Austwick: They can sing along to it.

 

00:40:53

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh, well, that’s excellent, and you better.

 

00:40:57

Dr. Martin Austwick: Yeah. The end of the show and we all have to go through the winter wonderland of the Vancouver snow. Okay, look, music should be truthful, right? End of the show, you all have to go through the misty cataracts of the Vancouver drizzle. I get so lonely singing solo forever. Maybe there’s a song that we could sing together.

 

00:41:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You don’t have to ask me twice to volunteer. You’re never more than six feet from a singer, I fear. Let’s move to the music. Let’s move to the music. Let’s move to the music, and let the music move us.

 

00:42:02

Dr. Martin Austwick: Let’s move to the music. Let’s move to the music. Let’s move to the music, and let the music move us. Dr. Kaylee Byers, everyone.

 

00:42:07

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Austwick, doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor.

Two of our guests for today are from the University of British Columbia, including neuroscientist and director of the Brain Behaviour Lab, Dr. Lara Boyd, and clinical geneticist and assistant professor, Dr. Alison Castle. We also spoke with behavioral genetics researcher, Dr. Miriam Mosing. Special thanks to musician, writer, and award-winning podcaster, Dr. Martin Austwick, for the musical performances you heard throughout the show. A big thank you to everyone. We’d also like to thank our live audience who came to attend the very first live Nice Genes! episode, and of course, our wonderful listeners for tuning in. We hope it struck a chord.

You’ve been listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from. Share it with your friends and leave us a review, why don’t you? You can also DM the show on social media by going to @GenomeBC. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers, and in the words of Limp Bizkit, I’m rolling, rolling, rolling out.