Rhythm Comes Before Words

Newborns, rhythmic prediction, QSH, and the hypothesis of a basal Jiwasa before language

There may be a layer of “we” that we feel before we can even name it. Before explanation, before rules, before explicit agreement, there is rhythm. There is cadence. There is repetition with expectation. There is the body entering into tempo with something that has not yet become a concept, but has already begun to become a bond. That is where this blog wants to begin: with the hypothesis that an important part of shared agency is born before language, as embodied temporal coordination. (PLOS)

Bianco and colleagues help open that door in a very concrete way. In their study, they recorded EEG from 49 sleeping newborns while the infants heard real melodies and shuffled versions. The core result was clear: there was evidence of probabilistic rhythmic expectation encoding for real music, but not for shuffled music, and no comparable evidence for melodic structure. Put simply, the human brain seems to be especially sensitive to temporal regularity in music from the very beginning of life. (PLOS)

That finding is too beautiful to read narrowly. The paper does not speak about Jiwasa, QSH, or a decolonial neuroscience of collectives. But it gives us a strong foundation for a hypothesis that matters directly to this series: perhaps rhythm is a kind of pre-discursive ground of being-together. Not yet a fully assumed “we,” not yet We-mode in the strong philosophical sense, but a basal condition from which bonding can later take form. That is our editorial reading of the article, not the authors’ literal conclusion. (PLOS)

When we read this through the BrainLatam2026 lens, the question shifts. It is no longer only, “Does the newborn perceive music?” It becomes: what kind of temporality can the body already inhabit before any shared language exists? Rhythm is not just auditory content. Rhythm is anticipation. Rhythm is bodily preparation. Rhythm is expectation modulated across time. Rhythm is one way the organism learns that the world does not arrive only as chaos, but also as pattern that can be felt, predicted, and accompanied. (PLOS)

This is exactly where QSH becomes highly relevant. In our lens, a common stimulus reaching many bodies at the same time can generate a sense of collectivity, a shared direction of attention, and a shared horizon of expectation. The literature on shared attention supports this strongly: when attention is experienced as shared, information receives deeper cognitive processing, and shared attention helps give rise to shared reality. Related work on collective learning argues that collective attention can function as a marker of common knowledge, helping groups build mutually known representations, emotions, evaluations, and beliefs. In BrainLatam language, this fits very well with QSH as a field of human coupling and belonging organized around common signals. (PubMed)

But here we need an important caution. The same basal mechanism that can support belonging can also be captured. A common stimulus does not necessarily create a true “we”; it can also manufacture a quasi-collective. On social media, false rumors, viral countdowns, and repeated expectations that “something will happen in 72 hours” can synchronize attention and anticipation without generating real mutual commitment. Research on rumor diffusion online points in exactly this direction: false-rumor sharing shows stronger herding tendencies rather than collective intelligence, and false rumors can proliferate at greater cascade depth. (ACM Digital Library)

So QSH enters this blog with two faces. On one side, it helps us understand why rhythm, repetition, and common stimulus are so powerful in the formation of bond: they can create shared attention, common knowledge, and a basal sense of being-together. On the other side, it helps us understand a contemporary risk: not every attentional synchrony becomes We-mode. Sometimes it becomes only alignment of expectation without genuine shared agency. The same common stimulus that can open a path toward belonging can also fabricate a false collective. (PubMed)

That is why the hypothesis of a basal Jiwasa before language becomes both stronger and more critical at the same time. We are not saying that a newborn already enters We-mode as if assuming explicit group commitment. That would be too much. What we are proposing is something more subtle: before declared shared agency exists, there may already be a shareable temporal predisposition, an openness of the body to regularities that can later support synchrony, coordination, teaching, singing, ritual, and belonging. But that same openness can also be captured by artificial architectures of attention when the common is induced without being lived as mutual commitment. (PLOS)

This speaks deeply to the Damasian Mind. If consciousness is a living body in situation, then our relation to time cannot be reduced to a late cognitive operation. The body already learns the world through pulse, repetition, expectation, surprise, and adjustment. Before semantic language, there is an embodied temporal grammar. And perhaps it is there that we find one of the deepest roots of collective life: not first in abstract ideas of cooperation, but in the capacity to enter into tempo with something that repeats and varies. The newborn-rhythm paper does not make this theoretical move itself; this is our synthesis from its findings. (PLOS)

In terms of I-mode and We-mode, this opens an important intuition for the experiments we are building. Very often, the difference between instrumental coordination and shared agency is sought in instructions, rewards, and conscious reports. All of that matters. But this work suggests there is an earlier, deeper, more embodied layer: the layer of temporal prediction. Some contexts may favor I-mode because they fragment time and isolate the body into punctual responses. Others may favor We-mode because they offer a rhythmic field that can be inhabited in common more easily. And perhaps QSH is one of the names we can give to that field when common stimulus truly convokes a “we,” rather than merely a herd of aligned attention. (PLOS)

That is also why this blog touches APUS so directly. There is no “we” without body-territory, but perhaps there is also no fully lived body-territory without some minimal temporal organization. Space is not inhabited only by geometry. It is inhabited by rhythm, cycles, approaches, repetitions, pauses, and returns. We do not enter a shared field simply by being close. We enter it by being able to sustain some degree of common temporality. That applies to holding, speech, music, ritual, learning, and later to the very design of coordination experiments. This is our theoretical extension from the newborn-rhythm findings. (PLOS)

At bottom, this blog wants us to feel something simple: perhaps rhythm comes before the isolated “I,” and long before the explained “we.” Before saying “we,” the body may already know something about entering time together. And perhaps that is exactly why music, chant, rocking, marching, dance, and rhythmic speech are so powerful in human life. Not because they replace thought, but because they offer an embodied base from which shared thought can one day emerge. And in our time, this comes with a warning: the same rhythmic ground that can sustain real belonging can also be exploited by false signals that manufacture collective expectation without common commitment. (PLOS)

Maybe that is precisely where a decolonial neuroscience of collectives gains a precious clue: a “we” does not begin only when two minds decide to cooperate. It may begin much earlier, when life learns to predict the unfolding of time together. But it truly matures only when common attention stops being capture and becomes critical belonging. (PLOS)

References

Bianco, R., Tóth, B., Bigand, F., Nguyen, T., Sziller, I., Háden, G. P., Winkler, I., & Novembre, G. (2026). Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure. PLOS Biology, 24(2), e3003600. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3003600. (PLOS)

Shteynberg, G. (2018). A collective perspective: shared attention and the mind. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23, 93–97. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.12.007. (PubMed)

Shteynberg, G., Hirsh, J. B., Bentley, R. A., & Garthoff, J. (2020). Shared worlds and shared minds: A theory of collective learning and a psychology of common knowledge. Psychological Review, 127(5), 918–931. doi:10.1037/rev0000200. (PubMed)

Pröllochs, N., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Mechanisms of True and False Rumor Sharing in Social Media: Collective Intelligence or Herd Behavior?. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW2. doi:10.1145/3610078. (ACM Digital Library)