This Is Morgan Freeman on Helium, And These People Are Smarter Than You

It’s Friday afternoon going into a holiday weekend. If you’re sane, you don’t care all that much about politics at the moment. Well, you care. You just care about other things too.

So here’s Morgan Freeman nipping helium and talking astronomy. Because, why not?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCpsusTta4w

As a drummer since the age of around 11 I guess, I’ve put up with a lot of crap from you people. We’re knuckle-draggers. We’re slow. We’re the guys who couldn’t sing and couldn’t play a chord so we picked up two sticks and started hitting stuff.

Well, it turns out, you’ve all been misjudging us. The science is settled: Drummers are smarter than you. You pretty much owe us drummers everything.

The research suggests that drummers have innate problem-solving skills and a positive impact on communities. Researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet found that, after playing a series of beats, drummers who had better rhythm scored better on a 60-question intelligence test. Seems using all the various parts of a drum kit to keep one steady beat is actually an expression of intrinsic problem-solving abilities.

Furthermore, other studies show that rhythmic music can actually make other people smarter. A University of Washington psychology professor found that his students got higher scores after undergoing rhythmic light and sound therapy. A University of Texas Medical Branch researcher using the same method on elementary and middle school boys with ADD noted an effect comparable to Ritalin. In fact, the boys’ IQ scores actually went up and stayed up.

It gets even crazier, and more primordial, with reports suggesting drumming played a role in our own civilization. Researchers at theUniversity of Oxford discovered that drummers produce a natural “high” when playing together, heightening both their happiness and their pain thresholds. The researchers extrapolated that this rhythmic euphoria may have been pivotal in mankind establishing communities and society. Essentially, drum circles were the very foundation that made human society possible.