All posts tagged: Rhythm

Live music causes brain waves to synchronize more strongly with rhythm than recorded music

Live music causes brain waves to synchronize more strongly with rhythm than recorded music

Published by José Betancourt

A recent study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience provides evidence that listening to live music causes brain waves to synchronize more strongly with musical rhythms compared to listening to a recording. This enhanced brain-music synchronization tends to predict how much pleasure and engagement a person experiences during a performance. The findings offer a biological explanation for why attending a concert can feel so much more moving than playing a track on a phone or computer. Live music attendance remains widely popular worldwide, even as high-quality audio streaming makes pristine recordings available on demand. This persistence led researchers Arun Asthagiri and Psyche Loui to ask why a live experience feels noticeably different from a recorded one. “If a recording can faithfully reproduce the acoustic signal, why does the live experience feel so different? A growing body of work shows that audiences physiologically synchronize with each other during live concerts, and that rhythmic entrainment — the tendency of neural oscillations to align with external rhythmic stimuli — underlies the pleasurable urge to move …

Bumblebees surprise scientists by showing a sense of rhythm

Bumblebees surprise scientists by showing a sense of rhythm

Published by skeptic

A buff-tailed bumblebee on an artificial flower Bee lab at Southern Medical University Bumblebees have learned to recognise Morse code-like sequences of flashing lights and vibrations, demonstrating a sense of rhythm that has never been seen in such a small-brained animal. The ability to recognise flexible, abstract rhythms – when, for example, the same pattern or melody is played at a different tempo in different ways – has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals, including parrots, songbirds and primates like chimpanzees. Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues ran a series of experiments to try to determine whether buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), which have far less complex brains, could also recognise a range of different rhythms. In the first experiment, bumblebees learned to choose between two artificial flowers consisting of flashing LED lights. One flower produced long flashes and the other short pulses, like dashes and dots in Morse code. One flower contained a reward – sucrose – and the other unpalatable quinine. Once the bees had learned …

A ‘Rhythm 0’ for the TikTok Age

A ‘Rhythm 0’ for the TikTok Age

Published by Jenni Sidey

In 1974, Marina Abramovic placed an assortment of items on a table. A rose, a gun, a knife, a feather, a pot of honey, a whip, and so on. Objects that could bring pleasure or pain. The audience was informed that those props could be used on Abramovic over the course of the next six hours, she would not resist them. It was a famous performance: what began with gentle, playful interaction quickly devolved into an act of violence. When the gallerist announced that the performance was over, the people who had torn her clothing from her body, who had taunted her with knives and bullets, ran to the exits. For many, Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 has become a sort of myth of the human tendency to act in violence when the rules ordering interaction are suspended. The photographs of Abramovic in the aftermath are haunting.  Related Articles While scrolling on Instagram recently I came across a video. In it, the artist Briony Godivala explains that in January 2025, she had a QR code tattooed on …

Smartwatches Help Detect Hidden Dangerous Heart Rhythm Problems, Clinical Trial Finds

Smartwatches Help Detect Hidden Dangerous Heart Rhythm Problems, Clinical Trial Finds

Published by Sam Flores

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, Jan. 23, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Smartwatches can greatly improve doctors’ ability to detect hidden-but-dangerous heart rhythm problems, a new clinical trial has found. More than half the time, these smartwatch wearers with heart rhythm problems hadn’t shown any symptoms prior to diagnosis, researchers found. Later editions of Apple Watches are equipped with two functions that can help monitor heart health — photoplethysmography (PPG), which tracks heart rate, and a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) that monitors heart rhythm. “Using smartwatches with PPG and ECG functions aids doctors in diagnosing individuals unaware of their arrhythmia, thereby expediting the diagnostic process,” said senior researcher Dr. Michiel Winter, a cardiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center in The Netherlands. “Our findings suggest a potential reduction in the risk of stroke, benefiting both patients and the health care system by reducing costs,” Winter said in a news release. The most common heart rhythm problem is atrial fibrillation, which causes an unnatural quivering beat in the upper chambers of the heart, researchers said in background notes. A-Fib …