Classical Convert

Rhythm and Intelligence Are Correlated

A recent study conducted at Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University has shown a correlation between intelligence and being able to accurately tap out a rhythm. The journal article is published in Neroscience here. Unfortunately, since we live in an era in which most academic journals are not free (which is a damn shame) you probably can’t see it unless you are accessing it from a university.

Handily, I am accessing it from a university, and the gist is as follows:

They got a bunch of local Stockholm males, around 30 of them (yeah, I know it’s weird that it’s around thirty but they excluded a couple from certain analyses because of technical problems) to perform the rather grandiosely described “isochronous interval production (tapping).” Additionally, the volunteers all took an intelligence test in the form of Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which consist of those really annoying identify-the-pattern type problems.

The tapping-testing consisted of each volunteer being played twenty cowbell hits at a certain tempo. The volunteer then tapped out the same rhythm for twenty beats, with a metronome as a guide, and finally tapped forty-five more beats completely on their own. They tried this for seven different tempos, doing each one twice, and took MRI images of the volunteers while this task was being performed. When they compared the amounts by which the taps were off to the score on the intelligence test, they found a correlation of around 0.5 (which means it’s a pretty convincing relationship).

Unfortunately the discussion of the results is jammed way too full of neuroscience jargon to extract much information. It seems like they are hypothesizing that a certain area of the brain (the right prefrontal cortex) is important for both automatic, repetitive timing tasks and working memory. Tantalizingly, they hint that there is a major neurological difference between a repetitive timing task such as this, and ones which require more “explicit” thought, which seems particularly interesting from a musical point of view. I wonder if perhaps after practicing a rhythm it moves from being controlled by the explicit timing processes into the automatic ones.

Time to break out the ol’ MRI machine, I guess.