Lányi Eszter Rozgonyiné / Universidade de Amesterdão
One of the babies who participated in Honing’s experiments
Recent studies reveal that newborns have an innate ability to recognize a rhythm in music, indicating that our capacity for music, or “musicality,” may be biologically programmed.
In 2009, a study published already PNAS showed that newborn babies could anticipate a missing beat in drum rhythms, as evidenced by a distinct spike in brain activity.
The study results suggest that the ability to appreciate musical music is not just cultural, but also has deep biological roots.
However, this discovery has faced skepticism, explains Henkjan Honingresearcher at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of the study, in an article in WITH Press. Critics have proposed alternative explanations, such as statistical learning — the process babies use to understand language.
To analyze this possibility, Honing’s team carried out a new study in 2015, in which they expanded the scope of the research, including adults and monkeys.
The results of studywhich will be published in the February edition of Cognitionreinforced the idea that the perception of rhythm is a distinct mechanismseparate from statistical learning.
Interestingly, explains Honing, when the same study was conducted with monkeys macaques in 2018, primates showed no evidence of rhythm processing, just sensitivity to the regularity of the rhythmwhich suggests that the perception of rhythm evolved specifically in humanssupporting the hypothesis of Gradual Audiomotor Evolution.
This hypothesis, detailed in a book published by Honing in 2019 with the title “The Evolving Animal Orchestra,” suggests a stronger link between motor and auditory brain areas in humans compared to other primates.
The implications of these studies are significant: they suggest that our ability to perceive and interact with rhythm It is not only cultural but also biologicalpotentially offering a evolutionary advantage.
The field of musicality researchonce speculative, is gaining respectability and scientific maturity, integrating areas such as psychology, neuroscience, biology and genetics, explains Honing, who leads the Musical Cognition Group at the Institute for Logic, Language and Programming at the University of Amsterdam.
This interdisciplinary approach, says Honing, thus allows for a more concrete and scientifically rigorous exploration of the origins of music — looking for what makes it humans are musical beings.
2024-01-01 19:15:00
#Babies #born #programmed #dance
