The Scientific Reason You Can’t Dance

Some guys say they’re born with two left feet. Some flail like a fish out of water every time they hit the floor. And some men’s moves make Elaine Benes look like the Lord of the Dance.
But if you can still manage to nod your head and tap your toes to a beat, then you’re not as bad as a man named Mathieu, who just might be the worst dancer in the world.
Researchers from the University of Montreal have pegged the 23-year-old Canadian as the first and only documented case of “beat-deafness,” which means he can’t move his body in sync to music or recognize if other people are in sync.
“Perception of a musical beat normally develops in babies, so even from the earliest stage in life, this becomes part of the way we experience music. That should mean everyone is naturally predisposed to have rhythm,” says Jessica Phillips-Silver, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal.
To test this idea, Phillips-Silver and her team of researchers sought out students who claimed they were bad dancers to see if it’s possible for someone to truly lack rhythm. After all, people are born with tone-deafness, a clinical problem that prevents you from perceiving a song’s pitch. The researchers asked 33 participants to simply bounce their knees in time to the beat of a merengue song, all while tracking their body motion via a Nintendo Wii remote. Every dancer nailed the simple test, proving they could synchronize their bodies to a beat—except for Mathieu. If you’re horrified at the thought of this poor guy suffering through high school dances, don’t fear: “Actually, Mathieu goes out dancing all the time and loves it. Plus, he’s not the worst looking person out there on the dance floor. He kind of compensates for his lack of rhythm by being smooth in other ways,” says Phillips-Silver. (Hmm, maybe the dude does a killer worm?)
When Mathieu watched a researcher bounce up and down to the beat in the study, he was able to perfectly mimic the movement. But when left to his own devices, he failed. “He was using the visual cue, and not the music,” Phillips-Silver explains.
After doing various tests looking at Mathieu’s brain, the researchers deemed him a perfectly healthy guy—with exceptionally lousy coordination. So what’s happening that prevents him from missing the beat? “We don’t know, exactly,” Phillips-Silver says. “There’s a particular area in the brain that is responsible for how we perceive rhythm in music, and there could be something going on there. He can follow a metronomic click and bounce up and down in time, which means he doesn’t have a problem producing a regular pulse with his body. But he has a problem with that perception in the context of music.” And don’t worry if you’re a little clumsy—you’re probably not beat-deaf. “In our society, men are really down on themselves about their dancing ability. I don’t want guys seeing Mathieu’s case and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is me!’ Because this is a really rare disorder,” Phillips-Silver says.
Even if you’ll never be able to bust a move with the best of them, there are plenty of other ways you can still impress women at the club. (After all, that’s the reason you’re out dancing, right?) All it takes to hook a woman’s interest from across the room is to send her one confident look, says dancer-turned-actress Briana Evigan says. Then you can follow 4 more of her tips to seal the deal.
—Andrew Daniels

my dad never listened to music, always sports radio. only music i got was in church and that had no discernible beat.

i dance like an epileptic being stung by bees

i usewd to when i was youmger....some of that old school, fresh prince type stuff....cant do it now

Send her a confident look from across the room.

I think soul is directly related to Melanin pigment. This is why gingers have no soul and black people have so much. Lol