Photo: Wenn
While listening to the latest album by your favourite artist, you may expect your foot to start tapping or your head to nod along to the beat. But what you might not realise is that the rhythms of you brain follow along too, according to Scientific American.
Studies have shown that when listening to people talk, patterns of firing neurons produce what are called rhythms of the brain – when large numbers of neurons fire simultaneously. And now research has revealed that brain rhythms also sync with musical sequences.
What's more, training yourself in musical theory or generally listening to lots of new music every day also enhances this ability. It may even help you in other areas of your life too, such as linguistics, because speech and music share the same networks in the brain.
Here comes the science bit: Researchers used a technique called Magnetoencelphalography (or MEG for short) to compare the brains of musicians and non-musicians while the subjects were tasked with detecting small changes in pitch during clips of classical piano music by composers like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. The trained musicians, not surprisingly, tracked the pitch changes better.
Regarding the tempo of a tune, the brains of musicians and non-musicians both synced when listening to music that featured more than one note per second. But when it came to much slower tempos, only the brains of musicians synced to the rhythm of the music.
Watch the video below for a fuller understanding of how these processes work:
