According to a Canadian study published in the journal PLOS One, the urge to move to the beat is not necessarily linked to the pleasure a person feels when listening to music. It is thought to be a physiological reflex independent of their musical tastes.
A team of researchers from Concordia University, led by Isaac Romkey, a doctoral student in psychology, came to this conclusion by looking at the phenomenon of groove.
This term refers to the irresistible impulse that drives people to move to certain songs with a particular rhythm.
The experiment revealed that this need to move was so ingrained that it manifested itself even in people with musical anhedonia, in other words, those who remain totally insensitive to the emotions usually elicited by music.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers subjected a group of participants to a series of experiments. Some felt pleasure when listening to music, while others suffered from musical anhedonia.
Each volunteer listened to around 50 pieces of music with varying rhythms before evaluating the extent to which they felt pleasure and the extent to which they wanted to move.
In general, musical pleasure and the desire to get up and dance go hand in hand. But the scientists sought to determine whether these reactions are really inseparable.
It has been established that rhythms that are neither too simple nor too complex are the ones that most inspire the desire to move, following an inverted U-shaped curve.
Logically, the researchers expected the anhedonic participants to experience little pleasure, but still maintain this motor impulse.
However, the results revealed a surprise: for these individuals, the movement became a source of pleasure in itself.
In other words, even without feeling any particular musical emotion, the simple fact of moving to the rhythm was enough to give them a form of satisfaction.
“That implies that for those with musical anhedonia, they derive pleasure from the urge to move. More generally, it suggests that the urge to move may itself generate pleasure,” explains Isaac Romkey in a news release.
While the origins of musical anhedonia remain unclear, this study highlights the key role of certain brain areas.
The irresistible urge to move to the rhythm of the music is mainly associated with the dorsal striatum, a region involved in movement control.
Conversely, musical pleasure is more dependent on the ventral striatum, the nerve centre of reward and motivation mechanisms.
To go further, the researchers plan to analyse these distinctions by studying the brain activity of the participants using advanced imaging tools, such as MRI and magnetoencephalography.
This should reveal interesting characteristics of the brain’s reward system and could help improve the treatment of certain pathologies, such as addictions or affective disorders.
Until researchers know more, there’s no need to feel outraged if your feet start to tap along to the rhythm of a song you can’t stand. It’s not a betrayal of your musical tastes, just your brain trying to do you good, in spite of yourself.