Why We Dance

Psychology Today | 17.11.2025 21:47
Congregate a group of humans in a room, turn on some music with a catchy beat, and you can bet that a sizable chunk of them will start to groove in one way or another. We are irresistibly drawn to move in sync when we hear music. Why? It turns out that our ability to dance to music may be intimately connected to something seemingly unrelated: our capacity for complex speech. Interestingly, we are nearly alone among the world’s species in our ability to move to a beat, sharing it with another notable talking critter: parrots.