If you hate Abba, but you can't help tapping your foot along to Dancing Queen, rest assured, it's a perfectly normal reaction. According to a Canadian study published in the journal PLOS One, the urge to move to the beat is not necessarily linked to the pleasure we feel when listening to music. It is thought to be a physiological reflex independent of our musical tastes.
A team of researchers from Concordia University, led by Isaac Romkey, a doctoral student in psychology, came to this conclusion by looking at the phenomenon of groove. This term refers to the irresistible impulse that drives us to move to certain songs with a particular rhythm. The experiment revealed that this need to move was so ingrained that it manifested itself even in people with musical anhedonia, in other words, those who remain totally insensitive to the emotions usually elicited by music.
