Dancing is supposed to be a joyous activity where you can show off your skills, burn some calories and have a lot of fun. But for many of us, the thought of busting a move in front of other people is downright terrifying. It's something you only do behind closed doors as you sing some Taylor Swift into your hairbrush microphone. No? Just me?
There may finally be a reason why when you do dance, the music does one thing, and your hips do another. And it might not even be your fault.
Some people are actually born without the ability to keep track and respond to rhythm in a condition deemed "beat-deafness," according to a new study published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. "Beat-deafness" is a sensory deficit that is akin to being tone deaf or color blind.
In the study, researchers from McGill University in Montreal studied two "beat-deaf" individuals who described themselves as having difficulty keeping the beat in music. The participants had to complete a series of tasks by tapping their fingers to the beat, which included tapping at a normal pace on a silent keyboard for 30 seconds, tapping along with a metronome and tapping along with a beat that might change. The researchers compared their results with a control group of 32 adults.
There wasn't a significant difference between the "beat-deaf" people and the control group when they tapped to their own beat. The "beat-deaf" participants did slightly worse when they had to follow a metronome. Though both the "beat-deaf" people and the control group had difficulty keeping rhythm when the beat changed, the "beat-deaf" individuals were at a "broader deficit."
Interestingly, there were differences between the two participants' "beat-deafness" based on how they were able to adapt to changes in the beat. This suggests that "beat deafness is a spectrum of temporal coordination disorder," according to the study.
The study's authors write that further research needs to be conducted to pin down the precise cause of "beat-deafness." However, according to the results of this study, it appears that the problem could lie in missing the beat such that once someone messes up, he or she has a hard time getting back to following the beat.
"The types of mistakes that beat-deaf individuals made 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," said one of the study's authors Caroline Palmer in a statement.
So now that we can maybe blame biology for our lack of rhythm, who wants to do a victory dance to celebrate?
Image: Carsten Koall / Getty Images
