Tag: consciousness

For decades, scientists believed that humans and a handful of musical birds held a near-exclusive claim to one of the most culturally defining abilities on Earth: the ability to move in time with a beat.

However,  a surprising new study now suggests that our sense of rhythm may not be as uniquely human as once thought.

In a series of experiments, macaque monkeys were observed spontaneously tapping along to music, locking onto rhythms even when it offered them no reward.

Published in Science, the study reveals that monkeys can not only perceive a steady beat in real music, but can also anticipate future beats and adjust their tapping accordingly—all skills once thought to emerge primarily in vocal-learning species such as humans and songbirds.

This unexpected finding challenges a long-standing hypothesis about the origins of musicality and opens a brand-new window into how the building blocks of rhythm may have evolved.

“Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown,” the researchers write. “Here, we demonstrate that macaques can synchronize to a subjective beat in real music and even spontaneously do so over alternative strategies.”

A new challenge to a long-held theory

For years, the dominant explanation for why humans can keep a beat has been the “vocal-learning hypothesis.” The theory proposes that rhythmic synchronization evolved as a side effect of complex vocal learning. Under this view, species like humans, parrots, and songbirds can lock onto a beat because they possess advanced vocal-mimicry abilities, while most mammals—including our closest primate relatives—cannot.

However, this new study’s findings disrupt that clean evolutionary story.

Two adult macaques, previously trained to tap in time with metronomes, were introduced to something far more complex: real music. Unlike metronomes, songs lack clean, repeating onsets and pose a much greater cognitive challenge. Yet the macaques learned to extract and follow the beat—sometimes even preferring to tap in sync with the music despite easier options.

The findings suggest that rhythm perception and synchronization may exist on a continuum across species—one that doesn’t require advanced vocal mimicry as a prerequisite.

How do you teach a monkey to “feel” the beat?

In the study, researchers placed monkeys in front of a screen equipped with an infrared tap sensor and an audio playback system. Once they initiated a trial by touching a holding bar, a song would start, prompting them to start tapping.

Three musical excerpts with well-established human tapping consensus were used, each presented at a distinct tempo. To earn a reward, the monkeys needed only to maintain consistent intervals between taps—not to tap at any particular phase relative to the music.

This distinction is crucial: the monkeys were never trained to tap on the beat. Yet, that’s exactly what they did.

Even more impressively, when the researchers shifted the onset of the song’s audio—misaligning the cue that normally triggered tapping—the monkeys’ taps shifted accordingly.

In humans, this kind of “phase shift” response indicates genuine beat tracking rather than a rote reaction to visual signals. In the monkeys, the same behavior suggested they were following something in the music itself.

“The monkeys were never trained or rewarded to produce a particular phase,” researchers wrote. “Despite this, both monkeys produced a consistent tapping phase for all three musical exercises.”

To test whether monkeys were really hearing and responding to rhythm—rather than simply learning a behavior—the researchers introduced scrambled music.

They chopped the original songs into tiny 30-millisecond fragments and rearranged them, destroying the temporal structure while preserving the same acoustic frequencies. The result was a burst of noise with no beat.

When listening to scrambled music, the monkeys still tapped consistently to receive rewards—but their taps no longer aligned with the audio, suggesting that synchronization emerged only when the stimulus contained meaningful rhythmic structure.

“With the exception of one scrambled song for each animal, the tapping phase distributions now did not differ between the original 0 and π versions of these scrambled stimuli… indicating that although monkeys were perfectly capable of ignoring the auditory stimulus,” the researchers explained. “They chose to synchronize to some feature in the stimulus when the temporal structure was informative.”

This was one of the clearest signs that macaques weren’t just performing a trained behavior—they were actually listening.

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Dr. Eben Alexander was at the height of his career as a neurosurgeon. With a doctorate in medicine from Duke University and a residency from Harvard, he believed he understood consciousness and the brain. However, on Nov. 10, 2008, a rare and severe bacterial infection attacked his brain, challenging everything he thought he knew.

He fell into a coma and, seven days later, awakened with a complete physical recovery. Yet, while asleep, his mind was not idle. He recalls that his consciousness had gone to another dimension—a place furnished with clouds, shimmering beings, and ethereal sceneries.

“I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent orbs, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them,” Alexander wrote in his book, “A Proof of Heaven.”

“I witnessed all of that realm in all of its majesty,” Alexander recounted during an interview with The Epoch Times. “Though I didn’t know where I was or even what I was, I was absolutely sure of one thing: This place I’d suddenly found myself in was completely real,” he said.

Similarly, Dr. Sam Parnia, a medical doctor and research scientist, observed that seven percent of resuscitated patients recounted visits to an unearthly dimension during their near-death experience (NDE)—an experience people sometimes have on the precipice of death and may remember after recovery. Further, Dr. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist from the Netherlands, reported that 29 percent of people with NDEs describe entering a vast, beautiful realm beyond our physical reality.

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“As a neurosurgeon, I was taught that the brain creates consciousness,” said Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote in detail about his experiences with consciousness while in a deep coma.

Many doctors and biomedical students may have been taught the same about consciousness. However, scientists are still debating whether that theory holds true.

Imagine a child observing an elephant for the first time. Light reflects off the animal and enters the child’s eyes. Retinal photoreceptors in the back of the eyes convert this light into electrical signals, which travel through the optic nerve to the brain’s cortex. This forms vision or visual consciousness.

How do these electrical signals miraculously transform into a vivid mental image? How do they turn into the child’s thoughts, followed by an emotional reaction—“Wow, the elephant is so big!”

The question of how the brain generates subjective perceptions, including images, feelings, and experiences, was coined by Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers in 1995 as the “hard problem.”

As it turns out, having a brain may not be a prerequisite for consciousness.

‘Brainless’ but Not Mindless

The Lancet recorded a case of a French man diagnosed with postnatal hydrocephalus—excess cerebrospinal fluid on or around the brain—at the age of 6 months.

Despite his condition, he grew up healthy, became a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant.

When he was 44 years old, he went to the doctor due to a mild weakness in his left leg. The doctors scanned his head thoroughly and discovered that his brain tissue was almost entirely gone. Most of the space in his skull was filled with fluid, with only a thin sheet of brain tissue.

“The brain was virtually absent,” wrote the lead author of the case study, Dr. Lionel Feuillet, of the Department of Neurology, Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille, France.

The man had been living a normal life and had no problem seeing, feeling, or perceiving things.

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Scientists have suggested that dreams sometimes act as portals to alternate realities, connecting a person to another version of themselves in a parallel world. 

“Dreams have been historically perceived as mirrors reflecting our conscious waking life, laden with symbolic representations of our desires, fears, and experiences,” they claimed in their research article. 

“Conversely, a riveting conjecture exists that dreams might also function as conduits to alternative dimensions or elevated states of consciousness, suggesting a more profound and expansive role than traditionally conceived,” they added.

This hypothesis takes inspiration from the “many worlds interpretation of quantum theory,” which is sometimes also referred to as the multiverse theory. 

It suggests that for a quantum event, there are multiple possibilities or outcomes. Each of these outcomes plays out in separate universes. So, for example, if you played a football match, your team may have won in this universe, but in some other universe, your team may have lost the game. 

The authors suggest that in dreams, one can travel to these other universes. However, this isn’t the the primary scientific basis they used to support their hypothesis.

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