Does music move you? Here's why our brains love to groove.

“We think that's pretty much universal.” Takahide EtaniHe is a medical intern at Ashikaga Red Cross Hospital and a co-author of the book. 2024 Review Etani, who studies groove in his neuroscience and psychology research, said many other countries have words for similar concepts, including the Japanese “nori,” the Brazilian Portuguese “balanço” and the Swedish “svängig.”

Psychological and neuroscience research suggests that the phenomenon of groove reveals something fundamental about how our brains work: we enjoy predicting how a piece of music will progress, and we move to make those predictions happen.

When the rhythm of the music is completely unpredictable, it encourages us to move around and “fill in the beat.” Said Maria Vitek“In some sense, music demands that we move in order to complete it,” says John McClellan, an associate professor of music who studies music cognition at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The power of groove, she said, is that it “makes music a distributed process in which we actively participate, blurring the boundaries between music, body and mind.”

Groovy music is unpredictable

The word “groove” has historically been associated with African-American and Cuban immigrant music. Thomas MatthewsHe is a clinical postdoctoral researcher at the Brain Music Centre at Aarhus University.Groove-Based Music“Groove” genres include funk, hip hop, jazz and Afro-Cuban music. Musicians use the word groove in a broader context to describe the rhythmic and collective feeling they have while playing, but scientists use the term more narrowly to describe the pleasurable urge to move to the music.

But not all music moves us. One important element of music seems to be rhythmic complexity.

the study An inverted U-shaped relationship has been consistently reported between subjective reports of groove and syncopation. — A break in the normal rhythm of music, There is also an element of rhythmic complexity.

People tend to find music with moderate rhythmic complexity to evoke a sense of groove more than music with lower or higher rhythms.

There seems to be a sweet spot between predictability and complexity in music. Too little complexity and It's boring — There's no need to predict anything. It's too complicated and too difficult to even understand what you're hearing, let alone predict what's coming next.

“You need some regularity to move forward, but if it's too irregular, you can't even predict where the beat is,” Wittek said.

Researchers theorize that one of the brain's primary functions is to predict what the world will bring to us and compare that to what actually happens.

When something doesn't match up with what the brain predicts, like an unexpected syncopation in a song, a prediction error occurs.

“The idea is that humans have a fundamental drive to try to minimize the error in our predictions,” says Matthews. Being able to predict the world accurately would improve our chances of survival, he says.

The reason we tend to dance to music rather than the sounds of a babbling brook or a lecture is because music has more predictable patterns than the sounds of nature or human speech. Music has a predictable rhythm, but the notes within a piece can deviate, making it more complex and unpredictable.

Moving to music (clap, nod, dance) is a way to add new sensory input that can minimize prediction error by reinforcing the underlying musical beat.

But the right amount of complexity makes it fun to think about what will happen next.

“we Like a challenge” says Matthews. Recent Publications The process of minimizing prediction error in music is inherently challenging: “We are attracted to things that are challenging and simply not perfectly regular.”

The Grooving Brain

Groovy sounds trigger different responses in the brain.

in Neuroimaging studies in 2020Matthews, Wittek and their team asked 54 participants to listen to musical sequences of piano chords of moderate or high rhythmic complexity and observed how their brain activity changed in response.

Subjects reported experiencing stronger sensations ranging from groove to moderate complexity. In brain scans, how enjoyable subjects rated the sounds as correlated with activity in the ventral striatum, which receives dopamine and is important for behaviors related to reward and motivation.

The researchers also found increased neural activity in brain regions involved in movement and timing, including the premotor cortex, basal ganglia, and supplementary motor area. Notably, these brain regions lit up in the brain scanner even when the subjects were not moving, and were associated with participants' self-reported urge to move.

Matthews said there is a “special connection” between the brain's auditory system and the motor system that controls timed movements.

in 2018 SurveyEtani and his colleagues report that the optimal tempo for eliciting a sense of groove is between 107 and 126 beats per minute — a tempo that, interestingly, is similar to the tempo preferred by DJs. Tends to play At the music event, Preferred walking speed That's about two steps per second, Etani says.

Interestingly, the vestibular system, which senses balance, may also be crucial to our sense of groove.

One 2022 Survey The researchers monitored people attending an electronic music concert. During the show, they periodically turned on very low-frequency bass sounds that people cannot consciously hear but can process through their vestibular system. They found evidence that the deep bass in dance music may be the key to getting people to dance: On average, participants moved 11.8 percent more when the low-frequency bass was on.

Music builds bonds and blurs boundaries

Music is often a communal experience and brings people together.

Groove may help us not only sync our brains and bodies to music, but to each other as well.

“I think so The social bonding effect of music “It has to do with groove and experience,” Etani says.

People who listen to the same music move together, the study Synchrony between people has been shown to predict how similar they feel and thus prosocial behavior, so music may play an important role. Strengthening social ties.

When we're all moving to the same rhythm, “the boundaries between you, the music and the people around you become blurred,” says Wittek.

Have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email [email protected] Maybe I'll answer that in a future column.