Can music listening and performance change our genes?
Possibly! This heavy duty article highlights the recent research which has found that music listening and performance has been found to influence how genes behave or regulate themselves. The first few sentences set the scene and we have done a translation for you.
“Musical training and performance require precise integration of multi-sensory and motor centres of the human brain and can be regarded as an epigenetic modifier of brain functions [this means that music training connects two of the largest information gathering senses in our brain and that as an activity it has the ability to change how our brain works that is not related to genes or predispositions].
“Numerous studies have identified structural and functional differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians and superior cognitive functions in musicians” [well the BBB community is pretty much across this idea].
“Recently, music-listening and performance has also been shown to affect the regulation of several genes, many of which were identified in songbird singing [this means how the genes behave, so genes aren’t set in stone, they change how they behave based on experience, the basic nature/nurture idea, and music listening and performance have been found to have impact on the behaviour. This has been found through the study of songbird singing which is the use of comparative research between animals and humans to better understand gene expression]”
