17-05-2025
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
Experts say our brains are in sync with music
Research suggests that brain rhythms sync with sound to create emotion, movement and meaning. (Envato Elements pic)
PARIS : A simple beat, a heady melody, and our body responds instinctively – a foot starts tapping, or we start to sway in time with the beat. So what's going on in our brains?
A North American study published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience offers a surprising explanation for this phenomenon. It claims we don't just hear music – our brains and bodies physically resonate with it.
Led by Edward Large from the University of Connecticut and Caroline Palmer from McGill University, this study presents a bold hypothesis supporting the idea of neural resonance theory (NRT).
Conventional wisdom attributes our taste for music to learned expectations or prediction mechanisms. But NRT suggests that our brain oscillations fall into sync with music.
'This theory suggests that music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies BECOME it,' Palmer explained.
According to the researchers, the human brain has its own natural oscillations, which can spontaneously synchronise with musical beats. This phenomenon is thought to affect our perception of rhythm, our enjoyment of music, and our instinctive tendency to move to the beat.
Remarkably, this neural resonance is not limited to musicians or seasoned music lovers: it is based on universal mechanisms, independent of experience or musical training.
NRT opens up concrete perspectives for potential applications. It could find use in therapeutic tools, for example, particularly for strokes, Parkinson's disease, or depression.
It could also enrich research into artificial intelligence to promote more emotionally sensitive interactions between machines and humans, or renew musical teaching methods with tools better adapted to our cerebral rhythms.
Above all, this theory sheds new light on a universal phenomenon – that of music's ability to transcend cultures and languages. By suggesting that our brains share common resonance patterns, NRT may reveal part of the origin of our intimate and universal connection to music.
These discoveries highlight how music can be more than mere entertainment: it engages our bodies and brains in a much deeper way than we might ever have imagined.
