Ideas - Why rhythm is essential to how we walk, talk and love

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Rhythm is more than a fundamental feature of music. It's what makes us human. Rhythm begins in the womb and the heartbeat. And neuroscience research reveals that for the rest of our lives, rhythm will continue to have a core impact on our innermost selves: how we learn to walk, read and even bond with others. Rhythm — as one researcher puts it — is life. *This episode originally aired on April 30, 2020.

Why do bad mothers make for such compelling stories? According to the writer Emma Knight, the messiness of motherhood is exactly what makes it interesting. And we talked all about that on my podcast bookends. Every week on the show, I sit down for honest conversations with today's literary stars. We cover a lot of different ground about their lives, their inspirations, their writing, and of course, also we talk about their mothers. If you have a mom good or bad, you should check out bookends with their writing. Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. I'm Nala Ayyed, welcome to ideas and to a documentary called The Rhythm Section. We are surrounded by rhythms. They're inside of us. We have circadian rhythms, which are the daily rhythms. So our processes in our body actually get synced up to the sunrise and sunset, the cycle of the sun. Rhythm is a fundamental part of music, maybe the fundamental part.

I think when I was young, I thought pitch was the most important thing in music, and now I'm convinced its rhythm. Everything is in the timing. Rhythm is really the essence of music. And it goes even deeper. You don't necessarily think that rhythm is also a huge part of language. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. The way we speak, the way we move, even the way we think. Rhythm is what makes us want to stay engaged with a conversation. A book, a movie, a play.

It's so we won't think. We have that excuse. It's so we won't hear. We have our reasons. All the dead voices. They make a noise like wing. Lightly. Like sand.

Like leaves. Rhythm is life. Because that's how we start. I mean, fetal heartbeat begins so early. We breathe in a rhythm. So, yeah, rhythm is the basic of life. But why is rhythm so fundamental to the way our brains work and the way we live our lives?

And why did we evolve to be so rhythmic? Today's episode attempts to answer all of these questions. Just two weeks ago, I was over at Stuart Copeland's house. And we were playing together. Stuart Copeland, of course, for anybody under the age of 40, being the drummer for the police. And the police were Sting's old band. And the police, a lot of the mission was, and a lot of the arguing was about, look, why can't you just play a backbeat?

And because I was a spoiled brat. I don't want to play a backbeat. I want to find some other way of doing it. So ways to avoid a backbeat are... My name is Dr. Daniel J. Levitton. I'm a neuroscientist, and I specialize in the study of music and the brain. But Dr. Levitton isn't your typical neuroscientist. I toured with the police for their reunion tour as a guest

and was privy to a lot of the rehearsals and after concert deconstructions. And he has terrible time by any measure. He doesn't keep a solid beat. But he's such an inventive drummer, and he plays so imaginatively and sensitively to what's going on in the music. That's plenty of rhythm. That it doesn't matter.

You don't actually need that backbeat at all. Rhythm is a pattern of durations that give rise to a kind of a, I guess I'd call it a package or a chunk. So this is a rhythm. You could say that this is a rhythm, just not a very interesting one, or a samba or a rumba or a bossa nova.

Those are rhythms. There's a disco rhythm. You know, rhythm is the collection of note duration that we perceive as having some musical quality. Before becoming a world-renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Levitton was an accomplished record producer in California. There was one day when I was in the studio and Carlos Santana was on the other side of the triple glass,

and he was playing a solo and I got goosebumps. That in itself wasn't unusual. That was always happening to me. But that day in particular, I thought, why is this happening? What is it that's going on in his brain and my brain that's causing this very physical, visceral, and pleasurable reaction? And eventually that sent me back to school to find some answers. That quest to start finding some answers

began when he went back to college in his 30s to study cognitive psychology at Stanford. before going on to get his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. So going back to your experience of listening and getting goosebumps, I'm curious if you could tell me what is happening in our brains when we hear a rhythm that we like? Well, a lot of things. We have different circuits in the brain that process pitch, duration, and timbre, the sound of the instruments. and from that, from the duration information,

we get things like tempo and rhythm and groove. All of that, the pitch and the durations and the timbers, come together later in the brain, say about 40 milliseconds later, so fast that you don't notice they were ever separated. So are there actually rhythms happening inside our brain? There are. In two ways. One is that your neurons tend to fire,

some of your neurons, groups of neurons, tend to fire in synchrony with the music, with the beat. The neurons will fire at this rate. Some of them will fire half as fast. Some of them will fire twice as fast, but they're synchronized in a hierarchical fashion. Isn't that amazing? I'm curious whether you think athletes can use this dynamic to their advantage.

Well, we know they do. Whenever we watch the Olympics, certainly in the training, we see people wearing earbuds. The idea is that if your neurons are firing in synchrony with the music and you want to increase your gait or your pace by just a little bit, you would select music that's at a slightly faster rate or tempo than what you would ordinarily be running at or doing whatever activity at, and that can actually push you to the next level.

The idea that we can use rhythm to improve athletic performance like running is easy to comprehend. But what about the role rhythm can play in more complex sports? Ones that involve more than just speed. I was your classic Broadway baby. I mean, tap jazz, ballet. My earliest training I was studying with former Radio City Music called Rockettes. I'm Dr. Lois Butcher Poffley. Most of my students call me Dr. B.

It's just easier. Lois Butcher Poffley is a sports psychologist and a kinesiology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She also happens to have a tale of her own that has all the makings of a Broadway musical. She helped turn around a struggling college football team all because she had a background in dance and its rhythmic patterns. When I was, you know, I guess you could label me a graduate teaching assistant kind of thing. I used to run past the football coach every morning. I had a 7.30 a.m. aerobics class and he would be arriving as I was teaching.

and we always said hi. So one day I asked him, I said, so what do you think? You think I can work with your team? And he said, give me your resume and write me a proposal. I said, sure. What did you propose?

All I said was this is what I can do, which is performance enhancement. You know, I can work with them on concentration and focus. I can work with them on changing how they think about things, what we call cognitive reframing. It took some convincing.

But the coach eventually agreed to bring Professor Butcher on board as a consultant. So the first time I was working with them, I was told they're not consistent. I said, okay. When I went to camp for the first time, I said, okay, they have to be more consistent. Well, let's see what they're doing. So I spent probably three or four days laying on my stomach, watching their feet as closely as I possibly could. And...

What did you see? Well, see, this is where my dancer brain kicked in. I was watching them for a variety of different things. I was watching whether or not they switched the angle of their foot. I was watching whether or not they hesitated. I was watching the location of the knee. I was watching their hips. I was watching the whole body.

So at one point, you know, watching each of them and paying close attention, I started to see that there was a rhythm. And in my brain, everything goes with counts. I watch it and I hear it in my head. After watching and hearing for a while, suddenly everything clicked. I said, you know what? I bet we could put that to music and you'd be able to do it. And they'd say, what?

So the next thing we knew, we were putting it to music. What kind of music? I'm laughing because of our... punter who had no clue what he was doing at one point. He was a soccer player and they used, they brought him in to kick. So he was struggling with punting. And I wound up calling it the Bugs Bunny effect. I pulled him aside because I'd figured out the B.

And I said, did you ever watch Bugs Bunny cartoons? And he said, yeah. And I said, do you remember the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he's got a whole bowl of fruit on his head and he's in a nightclub doing the Conga? And he said, oh, yeah, I remember that. I said, well, how does the Conga go? And he went, da, da, da, da, da, dot, da, da, da.

And I said, yeah, that's right. So let's cut that back a little bit. And we cut it back to Bub. So I sent him around the entire practice field with his hand sticking out, straight out. His right hand was sticking straight out. And he had to walk. He had to walk, walk, hesitate, drop his hand, and then raise his right foot to pretend he was kicking the ball. Wow.

And I said, and I made him do that. all the way around the field, and he had to take his time. After days of practicing, it was time for the punter to put his newfound conga rhythm to the test. After that, I had him in place say, okay, let me see you do it. Give it a one, two, three, kick. And that's exactly what he did, and he did it with, it was perfect. There's a little drag to the foot.

They take off on one foot. There's a little drag, and then they step down on the next foot, and then they slide the other foot through to kick the ball, and it was perfect. Amazing. And it changed his, it changed his punting. Do you remember the look on his face? Yeah, I do. It's hard to describe it, but it just, it was this transformation like, wow, it worked, you know?

Professor Butcher spent the rest of the season helping the other players find their rhythms. And before long, every punt, every field goal, and every place kick was performed to music. We used Bruce Springsteen's born in the USA And all I have to do is think of the chorus of that Born in the USA I was born in the What do you think happened on the word born? I'm guessing it's the kick

And just as in any good sports movie Dr. B's story ends in triumph. I was with them for three years. So by the time I was done, they had won more games than they had in the past in that one season, which was remarkable. I mean, it wasn't a great percentage, but it was a lot more than they had done. They were wonderful. I wouldn't have traded them for anything.

I never learned so much in my life as I did those three years. Since her success with the football team, Dr. B has also been sought out for work in track and field, basketball, even bowling. It's all a testament to the deep connection between rhythm and our bodies. But rhythm is more than a tool for improving athletic performance. It may well be fundamental to our ability, to move at all. I kind of post a video, letting everybody know about this cool little study I came across.

It's actually been out for quite a while, but I didn't know about it, so I wanted to let other therapists know. I've had great results with this guy. This YouTube video features a caregiver using music therapy to treat a man with Parkinson's. You can find a link to it on our website, CBC.ca slash ideas. The man is probably in his 90s. He's wearing a fleece jacket and

pajama pants and leads against a walker while the nurse describes the exercise to the camera. We're going to demonstrate walking with no music first just to kind of show the gate pattern. He's Scott Parkinson's and so usually, you know, he's got the typical kind of shuffling gate pattern and difficulty with smooth gate cadence. She begins by demonstrating how the man usually walks. Like many people with Parkinson's, he has great difficulty moving. He shuffles forward, maybe six inches at a time. His walker scrapes along the floor as he moves from the living room to the kitchen. As the man painstakingly makes his way to the kitchen, the caregiver pulls out her phone.

Okay, so now we're going to do gay training with. music. Everybody's got cell fans. Everybody nowadays has music on their fans. So this is kind of a real easy way to do it. Let's stand here for a minute. We'll get the rhythm. Once we fill it, then we'll take off. And we hear the first few notes of an old school country song. Good old boys like me by Don Williams. The effect is immediate. The man begins walking again. This time, though, there's no trace of his shuffling gate. He strides forward with relative ease. Step, step, step. A few seconds later, he's ditched his walker. Step, step, step.

You can hear him singing along to the music. Without the music, the man's movement was slow and labored. By the end of the video, he's slow dancing with his nurse smiling. And that, that's all thanks to rhythm. Yeah, what do you do with good old boys like me? given rhythm. It gets inside us, right inside our brains. I think the study of the brain is essentially the study of ourselves. And I think this is why humans in general tend to find studies in psychology and neuroscience very interesting, because they're telling us something about

why we are the way we are. My name is Jessica Gron. I'm an associate professor at Western University. I'm part of the psychology department there and the Brain and Mind Institute. And my main area of research is the neuroscience of music. I wanted to ask Dr. Grahn about music and rhythm therapy. How is it possible that someone with Parkinson's disease can move so much more easily when they hear a beat? When a healthy person hears a regular rhythm, they have activity in their auditory systems and in their movement-related systems. In Parkinson's disease, we see the same sorts of responses. But what's interesting is that these responses might actually be useful for helping restoring function in a way that for a person with an intact brain, it might just induce us

to move. We might want to dance or get up or exercise a little harder or walk a little faster. But for some patients with Parkinson's, that same stimulus, a nice, steady, clear beat, can actually help them initiate movements more quickly. It can help them walk faster. It can help them increase the length of their steps. So is it as simple as them actually hearing rhythms differently? Yes, this is an excellent question as well. So we have done some testing of Parkinson's patient's rhythm perception. And it does seem that they have a somewhat harder time perceiving rhythms that have a steady beat compared to people with an intact brain. But even with this slight decrease in their ability to really perceive the rhythm, many patients still show a change in their movement

in response to rhythm. So even though they may not be great at perceiving the rhythm, it's still affecting them. Now, what would be really interesting is to know what insights does all this give us into how we might be able to treat Parkinson's? It's a good question. So what music cannot do is reverse the course of Parkinson's. It cannot restore the cells that have died as a result of the Parkinson's disease or make those cells start producing the neurotransmitter dopamine that's low in Parkinson's disease, but what it can do is really help with the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. In terms of treatment, one of the things that's incredibly important to avoid in any older population, really, is falling. It's a high risk of hospitalization, and it's the

number one reason that people go from living independently to having to go to a care facility. So what we really want to do when we're aiming to improve these movement patterns is reduce the risk of falling. But when it comes to what makes it effective, you have to wonder if taste enters the picture. So if you talk to therapists who have decades of experience, they will absolutely tell you that the tailoring of the music to the patient is very important. We have found that groove, and by groove we simply mean, how much does this music make you want to move? How much does it make you want to get up out of your chair and dance?

That strongly predicts the response people will have when they're walking to music. And this is true for healthy people as well as people with Parkinson's. Do people tend to see the same songs as being groovy? Yes, in fact, if you ask people to rate songs on grooviness, it's very common that the same sets of songs appear at the highest ratings over and over again. There was a study done by a colleague of mine named Peter Janata, and I think he found in the selection that he used, superstition by Stevie Wonder was the gruviest of the range of music that he had,

and it was very consistently highly ranked as groovy by his participants. Superstition by Stevie Wonder may be the grueviest song of all time. But why? What is it about that song, that groove, that makes people want to get out. and dance. You know, I had the opportunity to work with Stevie on an album, and we talked a lot about that song. Daniel Levitton is the one and only neuroscientist I know

who hangs out with famous musicians. He's warm. He's a hugger. One of the amazing things about that track, you can hear it at the very beginning before all the instruments come in. Stevie, this is not commonly known, Stevie's playing the drums on this. He's a fabulous drummer. If he did nothing else, he would be one of the best drummers in the world.

And this is not just my opinion. It's widely agreed among drummers and other musicians. So in any other drummer's hand, that beat would be... I'm talking about the hi-hat now. And then there'd be a crack on the snare. So it'd be like, something like that. What Stevie does is he's so musical and there's so much music built up inside of him waiting to get out that when he's playing on the hi-hat, he's constantly varying where he puts the stick on the symbol

and the way he uses the stick, the angle and the positioning and the force that he uses. So he's coaxing hundreds and hundreds of different tones out of what would ordinarily be a very normal vanilla rhythm. and then he's also varying the rhythm. So he goes, something like, you can hear it at the beginning of the song. It's something like, he's playing around with it, and he does that throughout the song,

and he does that on every instrument he plays. I think that what contributes to groove is that sense that there's so much going on within the constraint of a rhythm, and a beat and a tempo. There are all these layers that your brain can engage with it at, even at a subconscious level, and it draws you in.

Why do we like variations or small imperfections like the one Stevie Wonder does in his drumming? I think we like the predictability of a steady rhythm, and it allows our ears to concentrate on other aspects of the music. And we like the variability that Stevie puts in because it's rich and it's challenging and stimulating to the brain. As I say, it's ear, beer candy.

You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia, on RN and around the world at cBC.ca.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayer. I'm Gordon Caddick from Cited Podcast. Cited is about the politics of science and research. Our new season is called Green Dreams. Each episode tells the story of a utopian thinker and their dreams for our green future. You'll learn about prominent environmental thinkers across the ideological spectrum

and about some lesser-known figures that operate in the shadows. Should we make their dreams a reality, or are they actually a nightmare? Catch Green Dreams at sightedpodcast.com. Today's documentary is called The Rhythm Section, produced by Mitch Stewart. This episode explores the role that rhythm plays in our lives, in how we move, what we say, and even how we think. We all love a good beat in our music, but it turns out that all Although they're used interchangeably, the terms rhythm and beat are actually distinct ideas.

So rhythm is out there, and beat is something that our minds do when we listen to rhythms. It's our way of finding regularity in time. And so what we actually perceive as a rhythm is a combination of the sounds that come from outside and this pulse or beat that we've actually created in our minds to line up with. the rhythms out there. John Everson is a research scientist at the Institute for Neural Computation at UC San Diego.

Rhythm is out there. It's in the world. It's a physical thing. It's a temporal pattern of sounds that we hear. But the way particularly humans hear rhythms is by imposing pattern on them. Particularly, we're very interested in finding regular patterns,

repeating patterns. There's nothing in the definition of rhythm per se that means it has to be regular or repeating. But when it is, our brain really goes crazy for it. But the way that those beats line up, those internal beats line up, really determines entirely how the rhythm sound to us. If by this point you're confused, good, I was too. So I got Dr. Everson to show me what he means.

So I'll play two sounds. And just as you're listening, think about, well, how understandable is that sound? Could I repeat it? could I dance to it? Here's the first. So that had a, I think, clearly repeating pattern. You could clap along with it, tap your foot. And here's another rhythm.

So those two rhythms actually had the same notes. just in the second one, they were randomly scrambled around. The difference between those two is that the first rhythm induces a strong pulse or a strong sense of beat in our minds. Whereas the second one, our brains are searching, where's that pulse? And actually, it's kind of interesting for that reason. It's not predictable. The contrast between those two is really what I mean

in terms of rhythms with a beat or not a beat. It's like, does that rhythm have the ability to induce or excite a beat within us? It might be easier to grasp with some actual music. Let's bring back a little bit of that Stevie Wonder. The drums are playing a defined rhythm, but the beat is something our brains impose on top of that rhythm. It's a pulse that is felt, not heard, but if it were audible, it would sound like this.

This idea of the beat is crucial to our understanding of rhythm, rhythm and its impact on our bodies. It's the beat that gets us up on the dance floor and it's the beat that makes music therapy so effective for people with Parkinson's. So when the brain hears a rhythm with a strong sense of pulse to it, the motor system lights up. So this is happening even if there's no overt movement if the person's instructed to stay still. But the question about this motor activity is, okay, great, you know, we know we move to the beat. So is it just really just the sign of a frustrated brain that wants to move, but the experimenter told them not to move?

Or is that motor activity actually doing something more important? Is it necessary? Is it actually part of the brain that creates that sense of beat inside us? And so that's the hypothesis that myself and colleagues have put forward, is that that motor activity is actually part of listening. It's part of hearing this beat. and without it, you wouldn't be able to hear music with a beat. What John Everson is talking about here is something called the ASAP hypothesis,

action simulation for auditory prediction. It's a new way of thinking about the relationship between what we hear and how we move. What's interesting, though, is we think that this kind of hearing the music through the lens of beat, or what we call beat-based perception, is actually rather remarkable, as is the ability to listen to music and dance in time with it, or clap your hands or tap your toe. Every animal can move rhythmically, walking or flying or swimming. They're all rhythmic activities, and most animals can hear. So what's the big deal?

Why is it so tricky to put those two things together? But I happen to think that not all brains can put those two things together. So there's something special about these connections between the auditory and motor systems that enable us to do something, which to us seems as simple as clapping along with music, which most animals actually can't do or they don't do it spontaneously, certainly. Notice he said most animals? Clapping along with music requires something called entrainment, meaning that you're actually internalizing the beat

and predicting when the next note will occur. Until recently, scientists thought that this ability was unique to humans. And then in 2007, a YouTube video of a dancing parrot changed all of that. Snowball is a little bit. the sulfur-crested cockatoo with some serious moves. Snowball bobs his head up and down as he two steps enthusiastically

to the music. This video made Snowball a bit of a viral sensation. Now say hello to Irene Schultz and Snowball. Irene, come on out. Say alone. I have met Snowball. Yeah, he's a real character. Hello, Irene. How are you?

Hi. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much for being here. This must be a snowball. What kind of bird is that? This was hugely significant because actually at that point, we thought that only humans could do this.

Only humans could synchronize with sound. So this is really the first example that was found of an animal that could really do this. And it lost the whole field of research, really, where people are looking at different animals and trying to see, well, what are the abilities and so forth, which really gets at the core question, which is, well, why are we musical? That's both like why in terms of how does our brain do it,

but it's also a deeper question of why did we evolve to be musical? Did we evolve to be musical? But why do we share this remarkable ability with snowball? One thing that we share is vocal learning, and a particular kind of vocal learning that we can learn to imitate sounds. So that ability to hear something and then create a vocalization,

which is a motor act, to recreate that sound, that requires some pretty close coordination between the auditory and motor systems in the brain. So that's one idea called the vocal learning hypothesis for why humans and cockatoos would be like the main species to do this. And so, given that that circuit is there, well, humans could use it for other purposes, like inventing music.

One popular theory is that our capacity for language, which relies very heavily on integration between the sounds that we hear, the language we hear in our own environment, and being able to produce those sounds accurately in order to communicate effectively. This is Jessica Granigan. That that wiring was what enabled music to evolve, that music sort of piggybacked on those connections, but was then separated off to become more of an emotional expression rather than an informational content expression the way that language is. So, you know, it's obvious that rhythm is a part of music.

Everybody knows that. But you don't necessarily think that rhythm is also a huge part of language. Dr. Nina Krause is a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. You know, as I'm talking to you now, I have a certain cadence in my voice, and there are stresses on certain syllables. It tells you where important information stops and starts. Dr. Krauss studies the relationship between rhythm and language, a relationship human beings have thought about for millennia.

Intuitively, we know that great speeches have an innate sense. of rhythm. They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided,

too disillusioned, to ever come together around a common purpose. What's perhaps less known is that our very ability to understand speech is intrinsically tied to our ability to understand rhythm. You have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.

Let's read this word here. What is that? What does I say? If you ask, say, a child to perform a rhythmic task where, say, they need to tap along with a beat, It's been shown again and again that children who have difficulty with rhythm often have difficulty with language.

And surprisingly, this principle applies not just to the spoken word, but also to written communication. I mean, that's really one of the hallmarks of a good and correspondingly a poor reader is how good they are in their rhythmic abilities. So children who have difficulty you say, tapping along to a beat or tapping a rhythmic pattern,

these are going to be the children who are likely the ones to have difficulty reading. And just as with movement, this relationship between language and rhythm is also a two-way street. Our ability to interpret rhythms affects our linguistic processing, but our language also affects how we hear rhythms. John Everson. When we're babies and learning language, We don't know when words start and words stop. And language is well known for not having, you know, clear, silent breaks between every word.

That sounds very artificial. Exactly. And we don't even talk to babies like that. So babies have to somehow, through the timing and pattern of sounds, learn when words start and words end and when phrases start and phrases end. So we thought that that process might imprint in a way of sort of preference for certain rhythms. So we looked at very simple rhythms that just had an alternating long and short sound. And just ask people to say, well, how do you hear that? Do you hear that grouped as words, kind of in quotes, so to speak, of long short?

Da, da, da, da, ta, da, da. Or do you hear those grouped as short long? Da-da-ta-da-da-ta-da. We just had people listen and then write down their preference. And we found something really interesting. So English speakers uniformly hear that short long. That kind of sounds like English, right? Whereas we tried this as well in Japan,

which has a very different rhythmic format, and we found that a significant number, about half, actually heard that simple short-long alternating rhythm as groups of long and short tones. So da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And it turns out those actually correspond to some very significant rhythmic cues in those two languages. So the idea is that maybe through learning the languages,

those rhythmic preferences were kind of built into the brain. So the languages we speak can actually change the way we interpret rhythms. Nina Krauss takes this idea even further. If you have dyslexia, you are, likely to perceive rhythms differently. And similarly, it's not only the perception of rhythm, but it's the production of rhythm. A child who has difficulty reading is going to have difficulty producing rhythm patterns or tapping along with the pulse, with the beat. When founders of music programs came to me and said, you know, we know that the kids who are playing musical instruments are the better students.

They are the better readers. They have better language skills. What is going on in their brains? And so, you know, we embarked on a couple of longitudinal studies, both in Chicago public schools and in the gang reduction zones of Los Angeles, where we followed children longitudinally. And we measured their brain's responses to sound. We measured their reading ability, their IQ, their various other, their academic achievement. For how long? Well, this was over four years. And an important thing that I really want to make sure that you're aware of is that the changes, these fundamental changes in the brain to sound, only happened after two years of music making.

After one year, we saw no change in how they had been a year before. It takes time to fundamentally change the brain and to change the way, you know, I like to call it our default processing, you know, the real you, you know, how you respond to sound, even when you're asleep, your brain has learned over your life to respond to certain sounds and to certain sound and meaning combinations based on the music you make and the languages you speak. And this takes a while. So it takes two years? It takes two years. So what if you stop playing entirely after that? Is the change permanent? It is.

It is. Making music is such a good investment. The question that stems from all of this is this, is if we have all this research, supporting that link between music and language skills. Why isn't it that every kid in school isn't starting their day basically with a drum lesson or a flute lesson or a piano lesson?

I don't know. It really mystifies me. How old are you? Nine. Okay, so come take a seat here. I'm guessing you won't need the cushion under your butt, but we'll see. So I'm going to pull this closer to you.

So did your dad tell you what we're doing at all? He says something like drums or something. Mm-hmm. So this is going to be our favorite. So while it's clear that rhythm has a profound effect on our ability to move and communicate with one another, it's still not clear why that is. There, perfect. How does it feel?

Like a real drum? Yeah. Yeah? So I've come to the Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Okay, so we're going to be playing a few drumming games. There's going to be multiple different tasks that we're doing, and I'll explain each one as we go.

This experiment is part of a larger study on children with developmental coordination disorder, which is basically the scientific term for kids who are clumsy. Amazing. Do you know that song? Yeah, that was like the first one I heard. Yeah, that one's a little bit newer. Development Coordination Disorder has high comorbidity with other developmental disorders like dyslexia, autism, ADHD. And all of these developmental disorders are associated with deficits in time and rhythm processing. So I think that just speaks to the importance of timing and rhythm in perceiving your world and interacting with your world.

And if there's something wrong in that system, it can lead to major problems. My name is Laurel Traynor, and I'm a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and behavior at McMaster University. I direct the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, which houses the live lab. Dr. Traynor has studied the effects of rhythm on thousands of different brains. We test about 800 infants and children a year, and I've been here for more than 25 years, so that adds up to quite a few. In fact, we now have babies coming in whose mothers came in as babies. Are you serious? Yeah.

Oh, my God. Wow. Her research has impressed upon her just how important rhythm is to the way we think. One of the reasons that rhythms are so powerful is because their regularity enables us to predict the future, essentially. So, you know, if I clap my hands, you know exactly when to expect the next beat. And so you're extrapolating from the past that those beats were always separated by the same amount of time,

that that's going to continue into the future. So the brain is continually predicting what's going to happen next. It's an absolutely basic function of the brain. It enables us to test our models of how the world works. So it's a fundamental learning mechanism. She's also found that our ability to focus on something, to give it our attention, is rhythmic. Our attention isn't continuous over time.

We have this feeling that we can attend to something continuously over time, but in fact that's not true. Our attention is constantly going up and down and up and down. And the speed which it does that is approximately, twice a second, which seems like quite incredibly fast. But if you think about a rhythm where you have a beat every half second, when we present information that's at the onset of beats, you process it better than information that's between beats. So if our attention ebbs and flows approximately twice a second, that would be 120 times a minute. And it turns out that

that this tempo is important for another reason as well. When you hear a rhythm that makes you want to move, chances are the basic beat frequency in that rhythm is about 2 hertz, so that means two cycles per second. So that's the range that sort of makes us most want to move. This principle is one musicians have known intuitively for ages. Songs at that temple, 120 beats per minute, just make us want to dance.

We are family. Yeah, hey, sing it to me. I know our sisters and me. I'm singing me. I'm telling you. Oh, I want to die for somebody. But it's not just dancing. Researches in Australia found that our preference for tempos around 120 beats per minute

can be found almost everywhere. Walking, running, cycling. Even when we're sitting at a desk or driving a car, we appear to move our heads ever so slightly at this temple. Scientists aren't entirely sure why this is. But there is one question I'm hoping Professor Traynor does have answers for. Why have humans evolved to be rhythmic at all? A number of studies have shown now in adults that when two people move in synchrony to music,

afterwards they report liking each other more, trusting each other more. And if you actually give them a game in which they have the choice of cooperating or not, They will cooperate more if they moved in sync prior to the game. So this is fascinating, and we decided if this is an important mechanism for social affiliation, it should be present early in development. So we decided to look at young infants. So one person in the experiment bounced the infant in time to music, and the infant faced a second experimenter,

and that experimenter either bounced in synchrony with the infant, or they bounced out of synchrony with the infant. So they experienced that for about three minutes. And then immediately following, we gave the infant opportunities to help the experimenter. So, for example, the experimenter would be trying to put clothes on a closed line with clothes pegs, and she would accidentally drop one of her clothes pegs. And then the infant had 30 seconds to help or not.

And what we found was after just this three minutes, of synchronous bouncing with the experimenter. Infants were about twice as likely to help her with these various tasks compared to infants who bounced out of sync with the experimenter. So I think that shows just how powerful these effects of synchronous movement to music are for social affiliation and social bonding.

It's a phenomenon you've likely experienced too. If you've ever bounced a happy baby on your lap, or dance with a partner, or swayed in time with the crowd at a concert. We will, we will rock your... All right. There's probably no mistake that we have music at virtually every function or event when we want people to come together as a group. So at weddings and parties, obviously we always have music,

but also at funerals when people feel grief together. also in the military when you want people to work together as a team or a group. Music and marching, rhythmic marching, moving together in synchrony with other people. It has been used for centuries, probably longer, millennia, to bring armies together to a common purpose. When you move in synchrony with someone else, you feel this common bond with them. You're working together.

It's as if you're working together, you have a common view of the world. So it may have evolved in humans to facilitate communication, hunting, to be able to move in time to instructions or to music. We don't know. It's all speculative. Military might. Certainly that. And if it didn't evolve for that, it was certainly exploited for that. Daniel Levitton. Plus, you know, cooperative work projects. Thousands of years ago when the pyramids were being built and you had human labor moving these heavy stones

when you're doing the one-two heave hoe, you all want a hoe at the same time or somebody's going to end up putting out their back. So, you know, it's likely that the ancient Egyptians or the Israelites who were doing the labor or whoever it was were at any large-scale building project were doing it to music. Think of the scene in the snow white

where the seven dwarves are with their pickaxes at the train tracks, right? We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig in our mind the whole day's true. To dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig is what we like to do. The Old Testament was set to music for at least a thousand years

before it was ever written down. And so the mutually reinforcing cues of rhythm, metrical structure, tempo, rhyme, syllables, lyrics. All of these things come together to give music a rather privileged position in the brain in that you've probably had this experience. You might have been at a hockey game or a soccer game and people are singing along. And you may not know all the words to the song, but you don't have to.

So while scientists still aren't sure why rhythm has the privileged place in our minds and bodies that it does, they do know that it's absolutely fundamental to several crucial cognitive processes. Whatever future research may reveal, one thing is certain. Rhythm is part of what makes us human. Rhythm is what gives structure to our lives. It's the patterns in which things occur. It's been shown again and again that children who have difficulty with rhythm

often have difficulty with language. For some patients with Parkinson's, it's a nice, steady, clear beat can actually help them initiate movements more quickly. It can help them walk faster. When you move in synchrony with someone else, you feel this common bond with them. It's as if you're working together,

you have a common view of the world. Rhythm is the basic of life. That's how we start. I mean, fetal heartbeat begins so early. Rhythm is life. One, two, three, and... You were listening to The Rhythm Section by contributor Mitch Stewart.

Technical production, Danielle DuVas. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer, the senior producer Nikola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayat. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com slash podcasts.