A glass of wine in hand, you lean over to try to catch what your colleagues are saying at a social gathering as music thumps in the background. Too embarrassed to ask them to repeat? Still struggling to understand even when they do?
There’s a trick that might help, and it’s a non-verbal one.
In a noisy environment, you can simply tap your finger before someone speaks to hear better, according to a group of French scientists who used controlled experiments to show how physical movement can improve speech comprehension.
In the study, French-speaking participants were asked to listen to long recorded French sentences. In controlled groups, they were asked to tap their fingers rhythmically or stay still before hearing the recoding. The scientists found that participants who tapped their fingers were able to identify key words and sentences better despite the background noise.
The optimal movement rate is what the researchers in the paper call “the lexical rate (1.8 Hz).” Daniel Riskin, a Canadian biologist who’s not involved in the study, said that rate approximates the regular pace of spoken words.
“The results are somewhat counterintuitive,” Riskin said. “Why would tapping your finger on the table help you hear better? This tells you something about how our brains work that we wouldn’t have intuitively known otherwise.”
“Our brain is full of surprises,” Riskin said, pointing to the French research as a string of studies that reveal how our mind can behave in unexpected ways — like how we tend to associate music with certain life milestones.
“Collectively, these experiments underscore the interwoven relationship between action and perception, expanding our understanding of the motor system’s involvement in language comprehension,” the researchers wrote in the paper, published earlier this month.
“These studies provide evidence that the motor cortex administrates auditory temporal predictions and emphasize the fundamental role of motor brain areas and motor behaviour in providing contextual temporal information to sensory regions,” they said.
While certain links are established, the study is not without caveats, the authors warned.
For one, they weren’t sure if improved hearing stemmed directly from better comprehension per se or enhanced attention to block out the noise. Another? The researchers had no knowledge of the participants’ music or dance training background.
“As such, it remains unclear whether our results are more pronounced in musicians or individuals with strong rhythmic skills,” the authors cautioned.
Would it work in English?
“Presumably yes. But that’s an unanswered question,” Riskin said. “Maybe you’ll end with different results for people who speak different languages.”
