If insulting someone can be all about your middle finger, seducing someone by your musical ability could be all about your ring finger? I am going to explain, and if it sounds like voodoo science (and may be it is), there are some serious studies around the idea. This is an old concept, people have noticed that many musicians have a long ring finger, and hand casts of Anton Rubinstein, Beethoven and Franz Listz have effectively revealed a long ring finger in both hands. This has been studied by professor John Manning of the Liverpool University, who compared the index finger (second one) to the ring finger (fourth one) by calculating the ratio 2D:4D. Females have generally both fingers of about the same length, which gives this ratio a value close to 1 — and without doing any measurement but looking at my fingers I am probably your typical female — but males have typically a longer ring finger and an average digit ratio of 0.96.
According to many studies, this ratio is determined in utero by the concentration of testosterone, the male hormone. Therefore, 2D:4D may be a marker for prenatal testosterone levels, as a low ratio means a long ring finger and would mean a high testosterone level.
In this study done in 1999, researchers ‘tested the association between 2D:4D and musical ability by measuring the ratio in 70 musicians (54 men and 16 women) recruited from a British symphony orchestra’… and the results confirm the trend, the male musicians had significantly lower 2D:4D ratios (indicating high testosterone) than controls. Interestingly, they didn’t find any differences among instrument groups, suggesting that this was not related to mechanical advantages in playing particular instruments. However, the mean for women did not differ significantly from controls…. So it would work for men but not for women?
Of course we have to be very careful with such correlations, but if low digit ratios truly are associated with more testosterone, this has to have a profound impact on the development of the embryo, and some studies (Martin, Manning and Dowrick, 1999) have even found a significant correlations between digit length divided by height and depression! All kinds of studies have been done around this finger ratio, and people have found about any type of correlation, from video game addiction to verbal aggression, to… penis size, although some studies totally contradict themselves!
I would be curious to know the digit ratio of famous musicians. I have found this picture of Thom Yorke (above) on a website discussing his 2D:4D ratio, and yes, of course, Thom has definitively the long ring finger so the low finger ratio! And he is a music genius right? I checked John Lennon’s fingers, Paul McCartney’s fingers, Mick Jagger’s fingers, and yeah, the ring finger is longer each time. But, we have to be careful at drawing such conclusion, if we follow this, Barack Obama should be an excellent musician (he has a super long ring finger, check it out!).
Rather this ratio may reflect a high level of cholesterol, and so a strong will to succeed,… and music would represent a way for all these famous guys to make it, a concretization of male success. Measure your fingers right now, but be reassured if you don’t find what you wish, Chopin had a female-like digit ratio, so go figure…
