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Editor's Blog

Baby's got beat New study indicates we are born with and respond naturally to rhythm. Susan BelknappPublished: March, 2010

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In an aol.com article published March 16, author Lauren Frayer discusses a new study recently published by British and Finnish researchers that says babies 5 months to 2 years are much more physically responsive to music rather than speech and also find it more engaging. I definitely believe that and think the findings are very cool; I believe it is indicative of our primal roots. It also made me think of many videos of babies dancing because really, is there anything better? This one is extremely popular and deservedly so (keep watching, it only gets better). But there are countless baby dancing videos. I also go back to that scene in “The Jerk” where Naven, Steve Martin’s character finally discovers his rhythm (I’ll have to find that one). Hilarious. In academic terms: "Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants," one of the study's authors, psychologist Marcel Zentner of the University of York in England, said in statement. The findings suggest humans may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music. "It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition," Zentner said. "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing." Zentner and Tuomas Eerola of Finland's University of Jyvasklya also found that the more the babies' movements were synchronized to the music, the more they smiled. The study appears in the March 15 issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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