The finding, originally published in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests being able to rock out is innate.

Since you can’t expect a baby to bust some moves in response to a hip groove, István Winkler and his colleague Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam monitored the brains of 14 infants listening to different rock rhythms from a drumset.

When ‘metrically-unimportant portions’ of the beat were muted, changes in brain activity didn’t occur, Honing said. But when the downbeat was taken away, the infant brain responded with an error signal. In other words, an “expectation for a rhythmic pattern” was not met.

After listening to rock samples for several hours, one baby’s actions, in particular, significantly strengthened Winkler’s hypothesis:

Skeptics point to overwhelming evidence contradicting claims of inherent rhythmic comprehension. Not surprising to drumFunny, a significant amount of this evidence comes directly from Expert Village.  

Here’s the original article (which is actually really interesting): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28862536/

drumFunny random stuff

• Vadrum Meets Macgyver
• Amp Fall
• How (Not) To Improv