270 HUMAN INTELLIGENCETh is is what Hennig found in each of his volunteer musicians, tapping
out their beats on keyboards. But, aft er a few minutes, he also observed
something else: that their deviations from the metronome, though ini-
tially diff er ent from one another, soon started to correlate with each
other. Th ey not only failed to follow the metronome rhythm, they also
started to follow each other’s deviations from it.
Th ere seems to be only one explanation for such convergence of pat-
terns. All along, each player must be tracking the other’s history of rhyth-
mic deviation and then assimilates it so as to fi nally predict each next
stroke. Even between only two collaborating individuals, the abstracted
structure seems to achieve “an actual binding of ner vous systems,” Hen-
nig suggests.
Remarkably, listeners signifi cantly prefer music exhibiting such struc-
tured deviations over in de pen dent fl uctuations: perhaps because such
music has a richer, deeper, structure. Now we know why: structure pro-
vides predictability and evokes the good feelings just mentioned. Such
structure is, of course, the kind already discovered among components
in cell metabolism, physiology, and brain functions; and among individ-
uals in ant colonies, fi sh schools, and starling fl ocks. Forms of “interper-
sonal brain- to- brain coupling” are also being demonstrated through new
techniques of brain scanning.
Such binding of ner vous systems also suggests that human culture
consists of much more than what the individual can take from social
cooperation as individuals. Th e real ity is of far more complex, epicognitive,
dynamics: something happens that is more than passive social learning.
Whether in, say, cooperative hunting of prey or making music, each mem-
ber of a group is registering, and adapting to, the structure in the be hav ior
of one or more others: each is complementing, augmenting, and com-
pensating for the be hav iors of others. Th ere is a new emergent layer of
regulation.
Th is seems to be the case with humans from a very early age. For ex-
ample, infants between seven months and one year of age acquire turn-
taking be hav ior when vocalizing with others; that is the cognitive bind-
ing that characterizes interactions between them and caregivers at that
stage of life. And to begin to learn language properly, infants need to de-
tect and assimilate the statistical structures that segment words in the
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