Two new studies in Neuroscience News suggest our connection to music and art is both learned and inherited. Researchers found that even non-musicians naturally understand complex musical structure simply through everyday exposure, using long stretches of context to predict melodies and experience emotion. Training offered little advantage, indicating the brain intuitively learns music’s “grammar.”
A second study found that up to 30% of the tendency to experience chills from music, poetry, or visual art is linked to family factors, with a significant portion tied to genetics. Together, the findings show that while everyone’s brain is wired to make sense of music, DNA may help determine how deeply we feel it.