Overview
- Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied over 100 non-musicians listening to steady-tempo Bach chorales and observed blinks aligning with the beat.
- Brain activity recorded during the sessions showed neural rhythms synchronizing with the music’s timing.
- Blink entrainment persisted when songs were played backward and when a single tone mimicked the beat, indicating no need for song familiarity.
- A concurrent red-dot visual detection task disrupted the blink-to-beat alignment, underscoring the role of attention.
- The peer-reviewed findings, published November 18 in PLOS Biology, suggest blinks could provide a simple measure of rhythm processing with only tentative clinical implications at this stage.