You may be sitting at your desk, waiting for a song to finish, when you suddenly notice that one foot has been moving to the beat for several minutes. You were not deliberately dancing. You may not even have realized you were moving. Yet your foot has been bouncing almost perfectly with the rhythm. Psychology and music science suggest that this can be understood through rhythmic entrainment and sensorimotor synchronization, processes through which perception and movement become coordinated with an external rhythm. Researchers have found that humans have a strong capacity to synchronize movement with auditory rhythms, particularly musical beats. This helps explain why a song can seem to “pull” a foot, hand, head or even an entire body into motion. It is not simply that people consciously decide to tap along. The auditory system detects temporal patterns, the brain forms predictions about upcoming beats and the motor system can become coupled to those predictions.
So when your foot starts bouncing before you have consciously decided to move, your body may be responding to the rhythm in a remarkably automatic way.
