Nature or Nurture
 
A fascinating new study on beat perception in sleeping newborns suggests that the ability to perceive meter is innate and requires no voluntary attention, which may indicate that musicality carries an evolutionary advantage for humans right out of the womb. Fourteen sleeping infants between 37 and 40 weeks of age were fitted with scalp electrodes to measure brain activity while a research team led by Dr. Istvan Winkler of the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Science exposed them to R&B music. Occasionally, the researchers broke the rhythm by removing a downbeat. And that break in rhythm, reported Winkler, elicited brain activity associated with a violation of sensory expectations. Rather than hearing "boom chicka boom chicka boom...," it was "boom chicka boom chicka chicka..." which registered in the auditory and frontal cortex areas of the snoozing infants' brains. The study demonstrates that the ability to perceive meter comes naturally to humans from day one, says Winkler, and that babies "are ready to understand the world in a much more complex way than previously thought."