Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
I've always felt rhythms in my body; I never had to struggle to keep the beat while playing music. One of my band members nicknamed me "The Metronome," and quipped that if one of us missed a note, it might well be me -- but if someone screwed up the rhythm, it was definitely not me.
I've often wondered about the origin of this. I've listened to music ever since I can remember, but I dropped out of band in sixth grade, was not allowed to take music lessons however much I begged my parents, and didn't participate in anything in the way of formal music training until I was in my mid-twenties. The result is that I'm largely self-taught -- with all of the good and bad that kind of background brings.
I've always loved music with odd rhythms. There's a reason two of my favorite classical composers are Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich. Then, I discovered Balkan music when I was in my teens, and even before I knew cognitively what was going on, was magnetically attracted to the strange, asymmetrical beat patterns.
For example, what do you make of this tune?
If you know any Slavic languages, the name of it will give you a clue -- Dvajspetorka. There are twenty-five beats (!) per measure; the name comes from the Macedonian word for "twenty-five" (dvaeset i pet). But if you're wondering how the hell you count that, you'll no doubt be relieved to find that you don't count up to twenty-five and then start back at one. Most of these Balkan tunes are dances (or derived from them), and they're all broken down into slow steps (that get a count of three beats) and fast steps (that get a count of two beats). This one is slow-fast-fast, slow-fast-fast, fast-fast-slow-fast-fast. When I've taught Balkan music workshops, I've found it helps to speak the rhythm, using the word "apple" for the fast, two-beat steps and "cinnamon" for the slow, three-beat ones.
So the rhythm of Dvajspetorka would be cinnamon-apple-apple, cinnamon-apple-apple, apple-apple-cinnamon-apple-apple.
Which, if you count it up, adds to an entire apple pie with twenty-five beats per measure.
Humans tend not to like perfectly steady rhythms. When musical recordings are made using a computer-synchronized beat, they're judged as "emotionless" and "devoid of depth." So small, deliberate fluctuations in the tempo are part of what give music its poignancy.
Throwing in random fluctuations doesn't work. Test subjects caught on to that immediately, saying the alterations in tempo sounded like mistakes. There's something about the fluid, organic sound of actual human musicians making minor shifts in rhythm that are what create emotional resonance in the listener.
That said, really good musicians have extraordinarily accurate abilities to keep a steady beat when they want to. Told to hold a rhythm as rock-solid as they can, professional percussionists deviated from the pulse of the music by an average of only a few milliseconds per beat.
fMRI studies have shown that there is a specific part of the brain -- the basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuitry in the cerebellum -- that fires like crazy when people try to match a rhythm. So the rhythmic ability in humans is hardwired. In fact, research suggests that are are other animals that have this ability as well -- other primates, rats, and some birds all show various levels of rhythmic awareness.
As far as why this apparently innate ability to keep a musical rhythm exists, evolutionary biologists admit that their current answer is "damned if we know."
It seems like an odd thing to evolve, doesn't it? The obvious guess is that it might have something to do with communication, but there's no human language (or non-human animal communication we know of) that is sensitive to rhythm to an accuracy of a few milliseconds. If I say "I'm leaving for work now" to my wife, and say it with various rhythms and speeds, the meaning doesn't change (although for certain speed and rhythm combinations, she might well give me a perplexed look).
So how such an incredibly precise ability evolved is still a considerable mystery.
Anyhow, that's our curious bit of science for the day. How humans keep the beat. And if you'd like to end with another challenge, what time signature do you think this is in? Have fun!
Everywhere you go, every culture you look at, there is some form of rhythmic movement, usually to music. (Sometimes the dancing creates its own music.) I love to dance; I'm not saying I'm great at it, but starting out the day by putting on some tunes and moving my body just feels good. And it's much more fun to do daily chores like cooking dinner with my music on, rockin' to the beat while I'm chopping the vegetables.
It's an interesting question why this is. A shrewd guess is that a lot of it is about social cohesion. You get a bunch of people together, all moving in the same way to the same rhythm, and it's a strong symbol of unity and common purpose.
There's some biochemical support for this contention. A series of studies a few years ago found that dancing releases four of the most important feel-good and bonding hormones -- dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin.
For me, one of the most wonderful -- and difficult -- things about dancing is that it requires you to forget about yourself. To dance fluidly, you need to be immersed in the music and the movement, and overcome the self-consciousness we all seem to carry around with us, to greater or lesser degrees. I'm plagued with more than my fair share of it, and it's only been fairly recently that I've been willing to dance with other people around. Which, of course, is missing a good part of the fun of it -- sharing the experience of moving your body in synchrony to the music.
What brings all this up is a fascinating study from the University of Tokyo released last week showing that humans aren't the only ones who feel like shakin' their tails when the music comes on.
Rats were fitted out with tiny helmets containing wireless accelerometers, and then exposed to varying types and speeds of music. Sure enough -- they began to move their heads in time to the beat.
"Rats displayed innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization," said Hirokazu Takahashi, of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, who co-authored the paper. "The auditory cortex, the region of our brain that processes sound, was also tuned to 120-140 bpm, which we were able to explain using our mathematical model of brain adaptation... Music exerts a strong appeal to the brain and has profound effects on emotion and cognition. To utilize music effectively, we need to reveal the neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact."
I find this absolutely astonishing, given that rats don't have music in their natural environments (well, except for the rats that sometimes end up cohabiting with us). What possible purpose can this serve? It's interesting, but it seems to me to raise as many questions as it answers.
Which, of course, is the hallmark of good science.
Whatever the reason, it's pretty cool that this impulse to move to the music has a long evolutionary history. And there's no doubt that it does a body good. I'll end with a quote from the wonderful writer Dave Barry: "Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Get out there on the floor and dance anyway."
Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that I've been a musician for a very long time. I started on the flute when I was a teenager, more or less self-taught. In my twenties, for several years while I lived in Seattle, I was fortunate enough to study the classical flute repertoire with a brilliant flutist and teacher named Margaret Vitus, who did wonders for my technique. Shortly after that I became fascinated with Celtic music (due in no small measure to the wonderful radio program The Thistle & Shamrock, which thirty-some-odd years later is still going strong), and was for years part of a Celtic music quartet called Taradiddle that performed at the Seattle Folklife Festival four years running.
Along the way, though, I fell in love with Balkan music. I'm not sure why it was such a draw for me -- I don't have a drop of eastern European blood and certainly hadn't heard it growing up. But something about Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian music was absolutely magnetic, and still is.
A lot of it was the asymmetrical rhythms. People who are unfamiliar with this style of music often can't figure out how to count it or tap their feet to it, because it has rhythms you almost never hear in western music. For example, what time signature would you say this tune is in? (Listen to it before reading further, and see if you can figure it out.)
Ready for the answer?
It, like all kopanicas (pronounced ko-pa-neetsa; the kopanica is a Balkan dance, so they all have the same time signature) is in 11/16. But you don't have to count up to 11 and then start over from 1; Balkan music is in combinations of 2s and 3s. The 2s are the short, quick dance steps, and the 3s the longer steps; and a kopanica has the form of quick-quick-slow-quick-quick. An easy way to count it out is to use a two-syllable word (I use apple) and a three-syllable word (I use cinnamon) to represent the 2s and 3s respectively.
So a kopanica is apple-apple-cinnamon-apple-apple. Pretty tasty. You might want to go back and listen again, and see if you can count it out.
11/16 isn't the craziest it gets, though. The Macedonian tune and dance "Dvajspetorka" is in 25/16. (Broken up 3-2-2, 3-2-2, 2-2-3-2-2.)
Okay, it's not as hard as it sounds. Really it isn't.
This weird rhythmic stuff comes up because of a study that came out last week in the journal Neuropsychologia that looked at fMRI studies of three groups of people -- musicians trained in the western European classical tradition, musicians trained in the Japanese classical tradition, and non-musicians. In particular they were looking for responses in a part of the left hemisphere that is associated with processing auditory rhythm.
Unsurprisingly, both groups of trained musicians showed greater responsiveness in that part of the brain than non-musicians. What was more interesting, though, was that the western and Japanese musicians didn't respond the same way, especially to asymmetrical beat patterns. Most western classical music has until recently confined itself to symmetrical 2-, 3-, or 4-beat patterns; this is why the exceptions stand out, like the movement "Mars" from Gustav Holst's The Planets, which is in 5/4; and brilliant lunacy like Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. (The joke amongst musicians is that when Stravinsky was asked what time signature The Rite of Spring was in, he responded, "Yes.")
Classical Japanese music, however, such as the music used in Noh and Kabuki, often use beat-lengthening, called ma (間), which sounds pretty peculiar to a lot of western ears, as if the stretched beats were random. They're not, of course, any more than the 25/16 rhythm of "Dvajspetorka" is; it's just not rhythmically like what most of us are used to. And the musicians trained in classical Japanese music responded to that as a natural, comprehensible rhythm, whereas the musicians trained in western classical music did not.
"We expected that musicians would exhibit strong statistical learning of unfamiliar rhythm sequences compared to non-musicians," said study lead author Tatsuya Daikoku, of the University of Tokyo, in a press release. "This has been observed in previous studies which looked at responses to unfamiliar melodies. So this in itself was not such a surprise. What is really interesting, however, is that we were able to pick out differences in the neural responses between those trained in Japanese or Western classical music."
So our brains really do respond differently to music that we grok. I'd love to see if the same holds true for Balkan musicians as compared to musicians from other cultures; I know that there are talented musician friends of mine who listen to Balkan music with a puzzled frown, and never can quite catch hold of what the rhythm is doing, even once it's explained. But it does show that learning can modulate what's happening all the way down to the neural level.
All of which wants me to get my flute out and play some wacky Bulgarian tunes. Like a neat one called "Nenadova Igra," which is in 9/8. But it's not three 3s; no, that'd be too simple. It's 2-2-2-3. Apple-apple-apple-cinnamon.
Because of course it is.
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about as cutting-edge as you can get, and is as scary as it is fascinating. A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, is a crash course in the new genetic technology called CRISPR-Cas9 -- the gene-editing protocol that Doudna herself discovered. This technique allows increasingly precise cut-and-paste of DNA, offering promise in not just treating, but curing, deadly genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.
But as with most new discoveries, it is not without its ethical impact. The cautious are already warning us about "playing God," manipulating our genes not to eliminate disease, but to enhance intelligence or strength, to change personal appearance -- or personality.
A Crack in Creation is an unflinching look at the new science of gene editing, and tries to tease out the how much of what we're hearing is unwarranted fear-talk, and how much represents a genuine ethical minefield. Doudna and Sternberg give the reader a clear understanding of what CRISPR-Cas9 is likely to be able to do, and what it won't, and maps out a direction for the discussion to take based on actual science -- neither panic and alarmism, nor a Panglossian optimism that everything will sort itself out. It's a wonderful introduction to a topic that is sure to be much in the news over the next few years.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
It will come as no great surprise to anyone who knows me that I've struggled to overcome my shyness and inhibitions.
One of the ways this manifested was a reluctance to dance. Dancing requires a willingness not only to get yourself out there on the dance floor, but to lose your self-consciousness and move to the music. If you're constantly watching yourself, wondering what others are thinking, you'll never loosen up enough to be able to dance -- and as a result, you will move awkwardly.
Self-fulfilling prophecy, that.
I'd always advocated for throwing caution to the wind and enjoying yourself, simultaneously being unable for some reason to apply that same standard to myself. But something shifted at the retreat I attended a month ago, about which I have written already. The first night of the retreat, the leader said that one of the things we were going to be doing a lot of was dancing. It's a really primal activity, he said, and is amazing for getting you out of your own head.
Well, my first reaction was panic. The voice in my mind said, loud and clear, "YOU CAN'T DO THIS." But as I related in my post, I did, and it was an amazing experience. He was exactly right. Dancing is freeing and exhilarating in a way very little else is.
Being a biologist, this got me to wondering why. It involves moving your body, sure, but so do a lot of other things; and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that weed-whacking along the fence is equally physical, but is the opposite of exhilarating. Music plays into it, of course, but I can also listen to music without that euphoric feeling occurring (although as I've also written about before here at Skeptophilia, I do have a very visceral and emotional reaction to certain music, another phenomenon that seems to have a neurological basis).
But put the two together -- music and movement -- and you have an extremely powerful combination.
Greg Sample and Jennita Russo, of Deyo Dancers [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Barry Goyette from San Luis Obispo, USA, Two dancers, CC BY 2.0]
Why exactly this synergy happens is a matter of conjecture, but what is certain is that it goes back a long way in our evolutionary history. A paper that came out last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Yuko Hattori and Masaki Tomonaga of Kyoto University, shows that when chimpanzees are exposed to music, or even rhythmic sounds, they respond with something that looks very much like rudimentary dance.
"I was shocked," Hattori said to Eve Frederick, writing for Science. "I was not aware that without any training or reward, a chimpanzee would spontaneously engage with the sound."
The authors write:
Music and dance are universal across human culture and have an ancient history. One characteristic of music is its strong influence on movement. For example, an auditory beat induces rhythmic movement with positive emotions in humans from early developmental stages. In this study, we investigated if sound induced spontaneous rhythmic movement in chimpanzees. Three experiments showed that: 1) an auditory beat induced rhythmic swaying and other rhythmic movements, with larger responses from male chimpanzees than female chimpanzees; 2) random beat as well as regular beat induced rhythmic swaying and beat tempo affected movement periodicity in a chimpanzee in a bipedal posture; and 3) a chimpanzee showed close proximity to the sound source while hearing auditory stimuli. The finding that male chimpanzees showed a larger response to sound than female chimpanzees was consistent with previous literature about “rain dances” in the wild, where male chimpanzees engage in rhythmic displays when hearing the sound of rain starting... These results suggest some biological foundation for dancing existed in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees ∼6 million years ago. As such, this study supports the evolutionary origins of musicality.
Of course, this still doesn't answer what its evolutionary significance is; if I had to guess, it probably has to do with social cohesion and pair bonding, much as it does in humans. But it's absolutely fascinating that the roots of dance go back at least to our last common ancestor with chimps, which would be between six and seven million years ago.
All of which makes me a little sad for what I missed in all those years I was too inhibited to dance. I'll end with a quote from writer and humorist Dave Barry, which seems apt: "No one cares if you can't dance well. Get up and dance."
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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.
In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field. Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.
These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail. This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.
[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]
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