Music makes people move and groove, often in surprisingly involuntary ways. As it turns out, we even blink in time, researchers report PLOS Biology. “Our eyes—which we usually think of as purely visual organs—spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear,” says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Further research showed that certain songs cause a tendency to either “bop” or “sway” movements.
Using a high-speed eye-tracking system, Du and her team were “amazed” to discover non-musicians instinctively blinking in sync with the beat structure of Bach chorales (but not on every beat, she notes, which would be “quite exhausting”). You suspect the effect would persist for any music with a “strong groove”, not just Bach.
Synchronized blinking faded when the researchers increased the Bach chorale to 120 beats per minute. It also disappeared when study participants were asked to spot a red dot on a screen, indicating that active listening is required. “It is not that the music ‘loses its magic’ when we are distracted, but rather that the brain reallocates its rhythmic resources to what we focus on the most,” says Du.
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Blinking to the beat came as no surprise to Elizabeth Margulis, director of Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab and author of a forthcoming book on “musical daydreaming.” After all, she notes, music activates the motor areas of the brain. Even if we’re just sitting still—and not bobbing our heads, tapping our feet, or dancing—”there can often be this sense of movement,” says Margulis. People tend to sync their steps to the beat of the gym and run faster when listening to pulsating, absorbing songs, she notes. Those with Parkinson’s disease, meanwhile, are known to walk more steadily when music is played.
Even voluntary music response appears to have an instinctive aspect. Shimpei Ikegami, a music psychologist at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo, asked four Japanese pop musicians to compose short musical excerpts, some designed to evoke vertical up-and-down bopping movements known as tate-nori and others designed to induce horizontal side-to-side swaying motions called yoko-nori. Sure enough, when non-musicians in elementary education listened to songs with a strong beat and sudden changes in sound, they spontaneously felt the urge to jump. And songs characterized by a steady timbre and gentle sound changes made them want to sway.
For Ikegami, who presented his findings at a recent conference, this suggests that music instructs us on how to move – and that, for example, runners and Parkinson’s patients can get better results with vertical music, while horizontal music is suitable for stretching and yoga. In general, he says, our playlists can be “much more targeted” to take advantage of powerful innate responses to pump up the volume.
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