Some of us are born with mental metronomes.
We don’t just have rhythm, we are deeply in tune with time and tempo.
Connor Dodson won a national contest for naming the presidents while playing the drums. He memorized the presidents with the assistance of pictorial memory promos.
We lock into the tick-tock of a grandfather clock or the urgent beat of a car’s turn signal. Sometimes the beat even leaks out of us and into a tapping pencil or drumming fingers.
Connor Dodson, age 10, has been listening to his internal metronome for years.
His dad has a video of Connor drumming on mixing bowls when he was 3 years old. Even then, his rhythm patterns were syncopated. Connor can slice notes into eighths and sixteenths and then shuffle them to create contagious drum patterns.