Monkey Drumming and the Human Brain

While simply proposing the topic of monkeys drumming might cause you to conjure up images of that super creepy wind-up toy — you know, the one with the cymbals, often used quite effectively in horror movies — some fresh new brain research rising out of the world of primate percussion is far less disturbing. In fact, it’s pretty darn cool.

Monkeys actually do drum. And while the sounds produced might strike our ears as just so much simian rhythmic diddling, the monkey brain areas that are activated by drumming and by listening to drumming tell us quite a bit about our human brains. Furthermore, we’re presented with an additional piece of information about the evolutionary development of both language and music.

In their natural habitat it may be with stick against log; in captivity, it may be by the rattle of a cage door. Regardless, rhesus monkeys (among other primate species) will manipulate objects to make rhythmic percussive sound. It’s a behavior typically observed to be the exclusive domain of dominant male monkeys, which suggests that the act is one designed to express something to other monkeys about dominance and standing.

Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have found that laboratory rhesus monkeys listen to recordings of monkey drumming, the same regions of the temporal lobe are activated as when they listen to recordings of monkey vocalization.

The finding that the same brain regions are involved in processing vocal and nonvocal communication, and that this phenomenon is evident in monkeys, strongly suggests that these brain processes have not just been around for a long time, but that they perhaps also developed in tandem.

Christoph Kayser, part of the research team whose findings are currently published in the journal PNAS, sheds some light on what all of this has to do with us, as reported by LiveScience:

"Humans convey information not only using speech, but also using other sounds that range in diversity from loud hand-clapping as applause, to the discrete knocking on a door before entering, to drumming that forms an important part of music. What is common between such sounds is that they are produced by repeated movements of the limbs so as to produce a structured sound made up of a series of periodic repeats, or beats. Humans use very complicated beat patterns by drumming, often in conjunction with musical rhythms. It is well known that such percussive beat generation is ubiquitous across human cultures, even used by tribal cultures."

The researchers have not yet, however, uncovered the evolutionary underpinnings of trashing the hotel room while on tour.

Photo courtesy of MrSco, via Flickr