Show Notes
This release contains only the music track from Base by Base Episode 456.
Song title: Where the Light Is
Original Base by Base episode: 456: Beyond exons: where heritability hides as traits get more polygenic
Article metadata:
Article title: Beyond exons: Linking noncoding heritability and polygenicity across complex human traits and disorders
Journal: The American Journal of Human Genetics
DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2026.08.012
Reference: Fuhrer J, Shadrin AA, Hughes T, Parker N, Hindley G, Frei E, Nguyen D, Smeland OB, Djurovic S, Andreassen OA, Dale AM, Frei O. Beyond exons: Linking noncoding heritability and polygenicity across complex human traits and disorders. The American Journal of Human Genetics. 2026;113(10):1-13. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2026.08.012
Lyrics:
Verse 1
We searched the lit part of the street, the small bright names we knew.
Two in a hundred, read out clean, and still it wouldn't come through.
The rest lay dark and open wide, too far to walk across,
so we filed it all as background and we counted it as loss.
Pre-Chorus
But it wasn't ever missing.
It was thin, and it was wide.
Chorus
It was never where the light is. It was scattered through the dark.
Not a single voice worth naming, just a million, faint and stark.
And the more it takes to make you, the further out it goes,
past the letters that we counted, into everything that flows.
Verse 2
For the body it stays closer: what you weigh and how you grow,
near a fifth still in the letters, in the part we thought we know.
But for the mind it wanders out, for the worry and the word,
down to one in eight, and drifting into all we never heard.
Bridge
And the middle never moved at all. It held its steady share.
Half of everything you are was always waiting there.
Not the bright part, not the far part, just the quiet in between,
the same in all of us, unchanged, the half we've never seen.
Final Chorus
It was never where the light is. It was scattered through the dark.
Not a single voice worth naming, just a million, faint and stark.
So we're learning where to look now. It was never in one place.
It was all of it, together, spread across the empty space.
