Babies are extremely sensitive to rhythm study shows by Zuzana Zelenakova

According to the latest research, little babies love a beat, in other words they are extremely sensitive to the rhythm, not including the speech though. The study examined the sample of about 120 babies aged 5 to 24 months. “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. We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled,” says University of York psychologist and study researcher Marcel Zentner. Infants passed a series of experiments, when researchers played them either classical music, rhythmic one! and adult speech. Researchers even invited ballet professionals to participate in the study. They were supposed to observe how well babies managed to match their movements with the beat. So far, the scientists don´t know what is behind this predisposition for dancing. “It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition. 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,” says Zentner. An interesting detail was also the fact that the better the babies were able to move to the rhythmic music the happier they were smiling broadly. During the experiments, babies were seated in their parents´ laps and moved their hands, legs and torso to the music. It is not clear to what an extent the predisposition for dance is biologically based, but the truth is to dance is human. Through liberating movements of dan! ce we express ourselves and many experts claim it is a kind of! social behavior. It is connected to many aspects of our lives, such as communication, loving, learning, and so on.

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by Zuzana Zelenakova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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