scientificamerican | You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and
feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of
the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate
simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this
possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only
driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental
processes?
The mystery runs deeper than previously thought,
according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today
at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound
“not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also
coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the
group become synchronized.”
This finding extends the well-known
power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and
movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception.
This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why
armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies
are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of
emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.
Schirmer
and her graduate student Nicolas Escoffier from the University of
Singapore first tested subjects by flashing a series of images on a
video monitor and asked them to quickly identify when an image was
flipped upside down. While participants focused on this task, a
synthetic drumbeat gently tapped out a simple four-beat rhythm in the
background, syncopated by skipping the fourth beat of each measure.
