Brainpower Boosted by Tapping Out a Specific Rhythm, Study Finds

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/learning-memory/tapping-finger-hearing-comprehension/

French scientists have uncovered an odd superpower triggered by tapping your finger to a rhythm - it can help you hear and understand someone talking to you in a noisy environment, such as a party or a busy cafe. While it may sound a little woo-woo, there is a reason for it.

Aix-Marseille University researchers hypothesized that prepping the natural rhythm of a brain by finger-tapping could help you then better "tune in" to speech. Previous research into the "rhythmic priming effect" has looked into various modes of delivery and its impact on speech - such as music in language comprehension and therapy for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). But its application in broader contexts is largely unknown.

"The motor system is known to process temporal information, and moving rhythmically while listening to a melody can improve auditory processing," the scientists wrote. "In three interrelated behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that this effect translates to speech processing. Motor priming improves the efficiency of subsequent naturalistic speech-in-noise processing under specific conditions."

In the first experiment, 35 participants each tapped a finger to different beats - slow, medium, fast - before having to take in a lengthy spoken sentence buried in intrusive background noise, noting down words they'd identified. The idea is that because speech has different natural rhythms among its syllables and words, priming your brain to tune into this pattern could help your brain process rhythmic language better.

The researchers found that there was much better comprehension of that noisy sentence after tapping along to a medium-paced beat, which equals about two taps a second, compared to the fast, slow or no-tap primer. This was the "lexical" or word rate, similar to speech, or around 1.8 Hz.

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