The Beat Drop: why is moving to music so powerful?

If you dance in any form, if you come to a vinyasa yoga class where we move and breathe in time to a steady beat, you will have felt the impact moving to music has on your energy, mood, and how lost you get in the moment. But what is happening in your brain and body to have that effect? Any why?

Here’s the interesting thing: for all we know about the neuroscience and the psychology of music - the way it lights up multiple parts of our brains, allows different parts to talk to one another, changes our hormones, and even the way our neurones fire - for a long time, we had no firm idea why. From an evolutionary point of view, what is the point? Why does music have the power to move us? To elicit “every emotion, every mood and every state of mind there is”, as Oliver Sacks put it?

Even the brilliant Oliver Sacks admitted that music itself is a total mystery when it comes to its usefulness. It doesn’t convey external information, it doesn’t warn us or tell us useful things about the outside world, it seems to have no role in our survival.

What it does do however, is move us “to the depths”, as he put it. And when we experience music together, it bonds us in those shared experiences.

Let’s start at the start, though: what is going on in our brain and body when we listen to music?

Remember the last time a tune dropped and you found yourself tapping your foot, nodding your head, making the ‘skank’ face (IYKYK)? The fact we are compelled to move to certain types of music is no coincidence; it's a powerful brain-body phenomenon called entrainment.

The Body Runs on Rhythm

Our brains love predictability and pattern, they thrive on it, in fact, it’s how we function. By creating ‘internal representations’ of what we expect will happen, our bodies can send all the messages and recruit all the muscle fibres we need to perform an action, just as we need them. We notice this more when it goes wrong than when it works out - like when you go to push what you think is a heavy door, and it flies open, announcing your arrival in an unintendedly dramatic fashion. Or when you go to pick up a heavy mug that turns out to be lighter than you thought and drench yourself in tea.

The regular beat of music is something our brains love: it’s predictable. So, when you start moving or dancing to a regular beat, your brain becomes ‘phase locked’ with that beat. This phenomenon - when your neurones actually fire to the beat - is called entrainment. And when it happens, we move more efficiently, because our bodies don’t need to make as many micro-adjustments to coordinate movement.

Even just listening to music, without bopping at all, increases electrical activity in the areas of the brain used for coordinating movement, and increases “cross-talk” in the brain, meaning more parts are communicating with one another.

On top of this, well-chosen music reduces your perception of fatigue and effort, encouraging you to move for longer by interrupting the negative feedback loop between your tired body and mind, and stimulates the brain's reward centres, triggering the release of powerful feel-good chemicals: dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin.

Music is also one of the best tools for accessing the mental flow state, the feeling of being fully engaged, focused, a sense of effortlessness that can seem to "bend time", as it similarly interrupts your mental distractions, forcing your brain to kick up its processing power to stay on task, helping you remain focused for longer (there are some particularly cool studies around helping ADHD emerging in this).

Group Migratory Patterns & Social Bonding

So, what is the point of that? Evolutionarily speaking?

The theory goes that our ability to entrain with music, to sync with it and one another was crucial for group success. Dancing, singing and drumming have been, and still are key elements of tribal culture. They promote social bonding, releasing endorphins for closeness and connection.

Rhythmic synchronisation also allows groups to coordinate complex, effortful actions, like lifting heavy objects, hunting or working together efficiently. Talking of which, it’s been found that (adult) humans have an innate preference to move around 120 bpm. If you ask someone to tap their finger on a desk, it clusters around this speed (which just happens to be the tempo of Disco). This is also believed to be related to the optimal pace for group travel and synchronised running behaviours among early humans. It’s just fast enough to get a move on, but is sustainable over long distances.

Does all music do this?

Not all music, of course, is created equal.

The music that scientifically makes you want to move most (referred to as having high “rhythm-” or “groove response”) has certain key qualities: a strong, regular beat, a robust bass line and a healthy bit of syncopation (think: everything Stevie Wonder ever wrote). That’s what gets your limbs moving.

For mental flow, the best music is typically repetitive, familiar, predictable, and has a clear pulse. Genres like techno, electro, and trance are often – funnily enough - cited as being most conducive to flow, because they provide enough distraction to keep your attention engaged without fully drawing it away from your activity. Early research is also showing a particular helpfulness for those with ADHD, dampening down the internal distractions and helping to stay on task.

For rhythmic practices like vinyasa, tempo (speed) is especially important. Choosing a slow tempo (around 60–70 beats per minute, which happens to be around 120 bpm), if you are breathing in time to the beat as you move, means a slow breathing rate - around 8 breaths per minute. This engages the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s "rest and digest" mode.

In short, when you move to music, you are optimising your mind and body by tapping into ancient rhythmic wiring which some believe to be tied to our migratory patterns, and social bonding. Psychologically, moving to a beat reduces effort, increases concentration, and gives you a rush of natural neurochemicals. What’s not to love?

For me, the last decade getting into the weeds in working out what music works, scientifically (then spending hours in my Ableton production cave making it!), what tempo feels most natural, and how to teach in a way that people feel ‘held’ by the music, taken on a journey by it, has been genuinely game changing. And I’ve seen that in the teachers that come through our 200 hour yoga teacher trainings with Good Life Yoga School too.

It’s also something that can be applied to any vinyasa practice – Ashtanga, Rocket, Dynamic Vinyasa, Slow Flow. Any practice where movement and breath are synched can be synched to music. So, if you’re new to it, give it a go! Music changes your brain, and it can change your life!

Hannah x

PS Want some reading around the topic?

I recommend Daniel Levitin’s Your Brain on Music, and Music as Medicine. Also Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia.

If you want to learn some basic music mixing skills - how to warp (make tracks the tempo you want them), cross-fade and beat-match mix music - so you can make your own soundtracks and mixes for class, we have an online course for that, Making Music Short Course: Basic Mixing with Ableton Live (£49!).

If you want to dive into our full Music x Yoga course, which teaches you more on the psychology and neuroscience of moving to music, gives tips on how to teach to it (often called 4Beat) and gives you basic and more advanced mixing lessons to create your own music, you can take the course on demand for £199.