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:
Good rhythm is correlated with general intelligence.
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?
14 Comments
Ringo Starr wasn’t the smartest in the band, because as John Lennon once remarked “Ringo isn’t the best drummer in The Beatles”…
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Interesting about “beat” and brain activity.
Before becoming ill with Chronic fatigue syndrome (for want of any diagnosis I call it that), the first symptom I noticed was that I couldn’t clap my hands to a musical beat. I thought maybe I wasn’t getting enough sleep at the time. As it turned out within a few months I had collapsed into CFS. My illness had the awful physical fatigue CFS symptoms, but more importantly my brain didn’t work. I know it sounds crazy but I couldn’t even enter a 7 digit telephone number without checking the number one digit at a time. That’s how bad my memory was. As all medical tests came up negative, my guess is that possibly CFS is some type of brain infection or chemical imbalance. Something that restricts memory badly and interferes with other brain functions so that you FEEL tired when you actually are not.
Anyway, I have recovered, but it took nearly 10 years, so the beat goes on!
I find this finding very interesting. The reason is that despite the fact that I have been training dance the most of my life (15 years) my beat sense is awfull. But my iq is over 140. So I started to think how it could be explained if the findings where correct. And I realised that on Lumosity.com my weekpoint is my processing speed, bellow avarage. So the theory that the sense of beat is depending on the timing in the neuronal activities could explain that. Raising the quistions will processing speed have a better correlation with sense of beat than general intelligence and will training my processing speed improve my sense of beat?
(My IQ is also 140+)
I took up tap dancing as an adult; I had always wanted to learn as a child but never signed up for lessons. It took a while for my brain and body to sync up and get rhythmically aligned. It is great training for the brain and body. My teacher is 85 years old and has been tap dancing since she was 5…she is mentally sharp and very fit. I love tap; it is also a great mood enhancer.
My exams are held on 14may,2008.I am very anxious to my exams please give me suggestions to learn paper.
this study is completely amazing to me. part of an emerging movement on temporal acuity I think. cool stuff.
If the author were really smart, they’d know that good rhthymic timing is a necessity regardless of instrument, particularly the strumming or plucking hand on stringed instruments. Sorry Ringo.
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So in other words, musicians, and other modern musicians such as producers etc. are actually smart people? Because its not like everybody can make a beat, and have that sence of rhytm that the job requires.
I’ve been a drummer for over 30 yrs. I suppose I could be called “intelligent,” though I don’t know how much correlation there is. But there is more to life than being smart. It’s no fun when you process thoughts faster than anyone in the room. It’s no fun when no one gets your jokes because they aren’t able to understand them. I’d give up a little bit of being “smart” for being more fun and/or interesting. A lot of people give GW Bush a hard time for not being extremely intelligent. He’s not president because he’s smart, but because he’s a good leader. The two qualities are not the same.
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