Throw out the drummer jokes - rhythm is clever

New research suggests that all those jokes at the expense of drummers may be way off the mark - it turns out that rhythmic accuracy and intelligence go hand in hand.

Drummers – now officially clever. This fellow will no doubt finish his gig with a selection of whimsical poetry and a critique of Kant’s theory of mind.

Swedish researchers have demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.

According to Fredrik Ullén of the Karolinska Institutet, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests. “We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes,” he says.

They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy.
“It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving,” said Ullén, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. “Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity.”

They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain’s frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.

“All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides,” said Ullén.