Off the Beat: Neural Oscillation Interference and the Neuroscience of Rhythmic Perception Failure
For most people, synchronizing movement to a musical beat is effortless and automatic—but for a small and poorly understood population, this basic capacity is genuinely absent. Emerging neuroscience suggests the culprit is not a failure of hearing but a failure of oscillatory synchronization: competing neural rhythms that destructively interfere in the auditory and motor cortices, preventing the stable phase-locking that beat perception requires. This investigation maps the interference physics