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BLOG: Scientists prove that drummers are not dumb

Apparently drummers are natural intellectuals

The MusicRadar Team, Tue 22 Apr 2008, 11:51 am UTC

BLOG: Scientists prove that drummers are not dumb

Matt Helders: Definitely a clever monkey

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What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. What did the drummer get on his IQ test? Drool. Jokes about drummers aren’t exactly thin on the ground and we’re all guilty of laughing along. Hell, even a drummer would probably smirk because they’re too stupid to realise we’re laughing at them, not with them. Or are they? A scientific report published by The Telegraph thinks not.

An experiment carried out at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm asked 34 right-handed men to keep time with a drumstick before sitting a psychometric test of 60 questions and problems. The results were conclusive: those with the best sense of rhythm also scored highest in the mental tests. So, there you go – drummers are natural intellectuals.

The problem I have with these results is that the participants were not actually drummers – they were average Joes asked to tap a drumstick at “a variety of different intervals”. Now, I’m not saying that drummers are dumb – anyone that can keep rhythm with four different limbs at the same time must be teetering on genius – but surely, all this proves is that good, time-keeping drummers are clever and bad drummers are not so?

Oh, and before we get started with the drummer jokes – how many guitarists does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to change it and four to stand around discussing how they would have changed it better…

By Tom Porter

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User comments (2)

  • musophilr

    Avatar for musophilr

    Wed 7 May 2008, 12:25 pm UTC

    Doesn't the drummers version of the lightbulb joke go something like "... four to discuss how Bill Bruford would have gone about it"?

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  • FatBob

    Avatar for FatBob

    Wed 30 Apr 2008, 1:45 pm UTC

    I knew a bass player who once thought if you tightened up the wheel nuts on a car too much, the wheel wouldn't turn! I'm not making that up, either - he nearly killed himself after changing a flat tyre a few years back.
    I also knew a singer who thought that when Top of the Pops wanted to show a music video, they filmed a TV playing the tape. "How else would they get it on the telly?" he said, as I fell about laughing!

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