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Miles Davis or Mariah Carey? Your choice of music genre might be influenced by the amount of testosterone coursing through your body. Levels of this sex hormone have been linked to music taste, providing the first evidence that musical preference has a biological basis.
Most research into music tastes has focussed on the role of an individual’s personality, says Hirokazu Doi, of Nagasaki University, Japan. “Extroverted people tend to like pop music, for example,” he says.
But could there be a biological explanation for such preferences? A range of hormones and brain chemicals could conceivably play a role, but Doi and his team decided to put testosterone to the test first, because this hormone has already been linked to personality traits and is known to affect brain regions involved in processing rewarding experiences.
Working with colleagues in Japan and