Many bad dancers have nothing but their own self-consciousness and
awkwardness to blame, but for some, a complete lack of rhythm could have
a biological explanation, a
new research published in Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences has suggested.
Huff’Post has more:
It’s called beat-deafness, and it’s a sensory deficit
analogous to being tone-deaf, or color-blind. It’s a pretty new concept,
first identified in a study published just three years ago, and as
such, the researchers could only find two beat-deaf individuals to
participate in their study. They first asked the participants to tap out
a rhythmic beat on their own, and the beat-deaf individuals were just
as capable of doing this as the normal individuals. But when the
researchers asked them to tap in time with a metronome, which sped up
and slowed down intermittently, it all fell apart.
Their mistakes 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,” Caroline Palmer, a McGill University professor and lead author
of the study, said in the study’s press release.
In all likelihood, however, you can’t blame your own bad dancing on
beat-deafness. Palmer told The Australian, “Many people think they have
more severe problems than they do when they come in for testing.” A few
can blame biology. The rest of us are just awkward.
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