Think you’ve got rhythm? Well, now there’s a reason beyond musicianship and dance-floor bravado to claim an accurate sense of the beat:
General intelligence is correlated with good rhythm.
Fredrik Ullen and a team of researchers in Sweden found that people who most accurately tap out a beat also do the best on intelligence tests. They suggest that the brain’s sense of timing might underlie higher intellectual functions. The paper was published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.
From the press release on physorg:
“It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving,” says Fredrik Ullén at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. “Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity.”
According to Fredrik Ullén, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests.
“We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes,” he says.
They also found differences in the anatomy of the prefrontal cortex - a part of your brain involved in many complex cognitive tasks. The subjects with good rhythmic accuracy and intelligence had more white matter volume in the prefrontal cortex.
As is common with an interesting result, this study prompts many new questions:
Does this correlation arise out of a difference in noisiness at the neuronal level, as the release suggests? Or do keeping time and intelligence both arise from higher level cognitive processes, like attention and working memory?
Can intelligence be altered by improving rhythm? Is Ringo Starr actually the smartest in the band?
More white matter in the prefrontal cortex implies more myelin, which aids in fast and reliable communication between neurons. Does the additional myelination improve communication between neurons to the point that rhythm and intelligence are both enhanced?
