Music, in one form or another, is universally present across human cultures. A key ingredient of music is its beat: the periodic pacing that serves as the foundation of a song’s rhythm. Our natural tendency to gravitate towards the beat of the song by tapping, or bobbing our head, is one more example that the human brain is a prediction machine. You do not tap your foot in response to each beat—which is often marked by the strike of a drum—rather, your brain is looking a few hundred milliseconds into the future to predict when the next beat will occur, and synchronizes your movements to match
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