{"id":181031,"date":"2007-08-07T15:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-07T23:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unz.com\/the-genetics-of-tone-deafness\/"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"the-genetics-of-tone-deafness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/2007\/08\/07\/the-genetics-of-tone-deafness\/","title":{"rendered":"The genetics of tone deafness"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an “old-school”<\/a> article in the most recent American Journal of Human Genetics on familial aggregation in tone deafness:<\/p>\n

Congenital amusia (commonly known as “tone deafness”) is a lifelong impairment of music perception that affects 4% of the population. To estimate whether congenital amusia can be genetically transmitted, its prevalence was quantified by direct auditory testing of 71 members of 9 large families of amusic probands, as well as of 75 members of 10 control families. The results confirm that congenital amusia is expressed by a deficit in processing musical pitch but not musical time and also show that the pitch disorder has a hereditary component. In amusic families, 39% of first-degree relatives have the same cognitive disorder, whereas only 3% have it in the control families<\/b>. The identification of multiplex families with a high relative risk of experiencing a musical pitch deficit (lambda_s = 10.8; 95% confidence interval 8-13.5) enables the mapping of genetic loci for hereditary amusia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I imagine it’s difficult to get money to study this sort of phenotype, but eventually the technology will be cheap enough. I wonder, though, if any sort of “genetic counseling” company (if such a thing exists) would pony up the cash to find genes involved in tone deafness. Offering the ability to test for and select non-tone deaf embryos for IVF could be a lucrative niche market.\t <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an “old-school” article in the most recent American Journal of Human Genetics on familial aggregation in tone deafness: Congenital amusia (commonly known as “tone deafness”) is a lifelong impairment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawqfx-L5R","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}