Here's Why Beat Deaf Individuals Don't 'Have Rhythm'

Are you familiar with beat-deafness? Simply put, it happens when certain individuals can't keep a pulse or move their bodies based on synchronized sounds.

Recent findings published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences show that deficits in synchronizing help to uncover fundamental properties of human neural function, including how auditory and motor systems are integrated in neural networks.

"We found that these beat-deaf individuals were able to perceive different rhythms and tap a regular beat in the absence of sound, similarly to control group members," said McGill psychology professor, Carolin Palmer, in a news release. "Only when they had to move with the beat did we see a deficit, compared with the control group."

"Most people had no problem, but the beat-deaf individuals were quite variable in their tapping - sometimes missing the beat by a large amount," added Palmer, who is also Director of the NSERC-CREATE training network in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience. "The most difficult test was to tap along with a metronome that suddenly became faster or slower. The non-beat-deaf were able to adapt to the changes within a few beats, but interestingly, the beat-deaf individuals were not able to synchronize with the new beat. The types of mistakes that beat-deaf individuals made indicated deficits in biological rhythms, including the natural frequencies or rates at which the internal oscillations pulsed, and how long it took them to respond to the new metronome tempo."

Statistics show that about 1 in 5 American have trouble keeping the beat-showing that this form of amusia may be more common than previously thought.