You're probably doing this without even realizing it. Scientists say the "tiny action" could lead to greater discoveries down the road.
If you’ve ever found yourself tapping your foot or swaying to the beat of a good song, you’ve just experienced the power of music firsthand. These particular movements tend to be voluntary (even if you’re barely thinking about it), but new research shows that there are some ways that music affects our bodies in a completely involuntary way.
In a recent study published in the journal PLOS Biology, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered that when music is playing, our bodies will react by syncing our blinks with the music’s tempo—and even aligning our brainwaves with the beat as well.
The phenomenon of coordinating body movements with sound is known as auditory-motor synchronization. These movements are usually “overt actions such as finger tapping, clapping, dancing, or whispering, where body movements align with rhythmic auditory stimuli.” According to the study, those movements are voluntary—we need to start and stop them consciously—but researchers aimed to explore more deeply how “synchronized behaviors may extend beyond overt voluntary movements to include more subtle, involuntary motor actions.”
Researchers played Western classical music with an even tempo for more than 100 participants. From there, they measured the participants’ spontaneous blinks, which are the blinks our eyes do without us noticing. They found that blinks began to sync with the music—and it didn’t matter even when the researchers played the music backwards to see whether participants were merely responding to the familiarity of the music. The only thing that was found to disrupt the synced blinking was when participants were given an unrelated task to complete.
“What surprised us most was how reliably a ‘small-movement’ like blinking locks to the beat—it’s a tiny action that reveals a deep coordination between hearing and action, which we did not expect at all,” says study author Yi Du, PhD, in a news release.
The study participants were not professional musicians, meaning that they had no prior musical training or ability that might influence how their blinks or brainwaves synced with the music.
According to the news release, researching how our bodies react to music can help scientists understand neural pathways—and eventually lead to music therapies that help treat certain neurological conditions. “This project reminded us that small, overlooked behaviors can expose big principles of brain function,” Dr. Du said.
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