"Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity."
"We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes," he says.
They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain's frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.
"All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides," says Fredrik Ullen.
This is very interesting, Debbie. My DH, who is very gifted (EG or PG), has no sense of rhythmic timing or any musical ability. My DS has inherited my DH's tone deafness, but excels in piano. He loves the mathematical aspect of it and learned to sight read quickly. I think he is much better at rhythm than his dear old dad.
He couldn't be worse!!!!
It seems like it is a case of pattern recognition to me? I guess they are saying that not only can people hear the pattern accurately, they can also reproduce it accurately. And that is where there supposition that neural noise in the brain leads to lower IQ comes from? Neural noise would then lead to pattern distortion. Although the brain is such an amazingly complex organ (with different area wired for language, math, music,etc.), I wonder how anyone can correlate this?
As a related note, I wonder if this could tie into the argument that video games make people "smarter". (I'm not a fan of video games personally, so there is a very loud smirk from me as well!) But it might be relevant to the above reference that "intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibers in the prefrontal lobe." It seems like it would have the same criteria... that neural noise would lead to less accurate blasting of Asteroids.
