Why did the drummer cross the road? To bone up on how to use magnetism to compress aluminium or lithium metal bands around a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet to initiate fusion in an effort to replace existing rocket fuels, dummy.
That’s right, it turns out drummers may be more than the thick-headed beat keepers they’ve long been portrayed as. As reported by The Telegraph, a scientific study suggests that drummers might be ‘natural intellectuals’, born with an aptitude for problem-solving.
Research that involved volunteers using a drumstick to keep time before being subjected to intelligence assessments found that those who scored well in the mental tests also have the best sense of rhythm.
For the study Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet professor Frederic Ullen and Guy Madison, of Sweden’s Umea University, had 34 men between the ages 19 and 49, all right-handed, to tap a drumstick at various intervals. Following this the subjects then tackled a psychometric test comprised of 60 questions and problems.
Professor Ullen explained that the study shows a link between good timing and problem solving:
“The rhythmic accuracy in brain activity that is observed when a person maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacities measured with the intelligence tests.
“We found that people with high general intelligence were also more stable on a very simple timing task. We also found that these participants had larger volumes of the white matter in the brain, which contains connections between brain regions.”
So Dave Lombardo is more than likely smarter than Kerry King, huh? Well, I guess it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out…
