\n<\/p>\n
Music makes people move and groove, often in surprisingly involuntary ways. As it turns out, we even blink in time to the beat, researchers report in PLOS Biology. \u201cOur eyes\u2014which we usually think of as purely visual organs\u2014spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear,\u201d says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Additional research showed certain songs cause a tendency toward either \u201cbop\u201d or \u201csway\u201d movements.<\/p>\n
Using a high-speed eye-tracking system, Du and her team were \u201cstunned\u201d to discover nonmusicians instinctively blinking in sync with the beat structure of Bach chorales (though not on every single beat, she notes, which would be \u201cquite exhausting\u201d). Du suspects the effect would persist for any music with a \u201cstrong groove,\u201d not just Bach.<\/p>\n
Synchronized blinking faded when the researchers sped up the Bach chorales to 120 beats per minute. It also disappeared when the study\u2019s participants were asked to detect a red dot on a screen, implying that active listening is required. \u201cIt isn\u2019t that the music \u2018loses its magic\u2019 when we\u2019re distracted but rather that the brain reallocates its rhythmic resources to whatever we are focusing on most,\u201d Du says.<\/p>\n
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Blinking to the beat came as no surprise to Elizabeth Margulis, director of Princeton University\u2019s Music Cognition Lab and author of an upcoming book on \u201cmusical daydreams.\u201d After all, she notes, music activates the motor areas of the brain. Even if we\u2019re just sitting still\u2014and not bopping our heads, tapping our feet or dancing\u2014\u201cthere can often be this sense of motion,\u201d Margulis says. People tend to synchronize their steps to the beat at the gym and drive faster when listening to pulsing, absorbing songs, she notes. Those with Parkinson\u2019s disease, meanwhile, are known to walk more steadily when music is playing.<\/p>\n
Even voluntary music response seems to have an instinctual aspect. Shimpei Ikegami, a music psychologist at Showa Women\u2019s University in Tokyo, asked four Japanese pop musicians to compose short musical excerpts, some designed to elicit vertical up-and-down bopping movements known as tate-nori and others designed to elicit horizontal side-to-side swaying movements called yoko-nori. Sure enough, when undergraduate nonmusicians listened to songs with a strong beat and abrupt changes in sound, they spontaneously felt like bopping. And songs characterized by a smooth timbre and mild sound changes made them want to sway.<\/p>\n
To Ikegami, who presented his findings at a recent conference, this suggests that the music instructs us on how to move\u2014and that runners and Parkinson\u2019s patients, for example, might get better results with vertical music, whereas horizontal music lends itself to stretching and yoga. In general, he says, our playlists could be \u201cmuch more targeted\u201d to take advantage of powerful innate reactions to pumping up the volume.<\/p>\n
If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Music makes people move and groove, often in surprisingly involuntary ways. As it turns out, we even blink in time to the beat, researchers report in PLOS Biology. \u201cOur eyes\u2014which we usually think of as purely visual organs\u2014spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear,\u201d says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[103,20372,686],"class_list":{"0":"post-46445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-beat","9":"tag-blink","10":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}