19-05-2025
The music in us: People found to almost 'become' the songs they hear
Got a rock-and-roll feeling in your bones? When Johnny Cash composed "Get Rhythm" back in 1956, the fabled Country singer wasn't asking a question - he was making a part-exhortation, part-statement about human nature.
And going by the findings of a new study published by Nature Reviews Neuroscience, people do indeed have something like a rock-and-roll feeling in their bones.
"Music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies become it," said Caroline Palmer, a psychology professor at McGill University in Canada who, with other researchers, looked at the physical impact of listening to music.
"Groove" - the ineluctable compulsion to move to the beat - is rooted in human brains, argues the team of researchers with colleagues from the University of Groningen, University of Connecticut, Queen Mary University London and the University of Chicago Illinois.
"Our brains and bodies don't just understand music, they physically resonate with it," the team of neuroscientists and psychologists write.
The gamut of elements of music - pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect - these all contribute to people's innate tendency to "anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure," the researchers say in their paper.
The findings appear to support the validity of neural resonance theory (NRT), the view that "rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain's natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony," according to the team's definition.
They said that such "resonance" not only establishes a listener's sense of timing but the experience of "musical pleasure."
The resonance described adds to what the researchers described as the "instinct to move with the beat," which can be sometimes inescapable.
"Structures like pulse and harmony reflect stable resonant patterns in the brain, shared across people independent of their musical background," the researchers explained.
The researchers believe the insights from the study could have an impact beyond music and contribute to the development of "therapeutic tools" for conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's and depression.
