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Rock and Roll From the Cradle to the Grave!!!

Started by AFK, January 27, 2009, 07:16:29 PM

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AFK

Scientists have discovered that newborns have rhythm.  Or, at least, they have an innate, seemingly instinctual sense of rhythm. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28862536/

QuoteNewborns can't exactly swing their hips to prove they can jive, so Winkler and his colleague Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam monitored the brains of 14 infants listening to variations of a rock rhythm — complete with drum, snare and high hat cymbal.

When "metrically-unimportant portions" of the beat were silenced, nothing much changed among the auditory-related activity in the brain, Honing said. But when the rhythm was disturbed, particularly by omitting the downbeat, the infant brain responded with an error signal: An expectation for a rhythmic pattern was not met.

"A baby's auditory system is working the same way as an adult's, in that it is always making predictions," Winkler said. If the prediction is incorrect, an error signal helps gauge "how much you are off the actual target," he said.

Cynicism is a blank check for failure.