Q: Scientifically or just with any kind of explanation, why do we not our head to music? What is the reason behind that?

A: I’m not sure, but here’s my take:

Music is an immersive experience for us, because we love it, or we love it because it’s immersive, and that compels us to make it even more immersive, or to balance the mental immersion with physical immersion, by moving our bodies in sync with it. That’s the fundamental reason for dancing, or at least one of the fundamental reasons. But sometimes we may not want to move our full bodies and full-on dance, so we just move our heads. This may be the first choice of body part because it contains our sense organs for sight and balance, and also we largely experience ourselves as existing inside our heads, so moving it has the largest effect of all the body parts on our experience. And also we nod to others as a basic form of communication, the most open and agreeable gesture of all—affirmation, so by nodding to the music we express our enjoyment of it outward just like we express it by dancing, and we positively affirm it in somewhat the same way a girl positively affirms sex by yelling out, “yes!”.

The rhythm and beat of a piece of music seems to be a major part of what makes it penetrating and enjoyable, perhaps because it allows us to get in sync with it through predictable regular timing, so as long as we’re nodding, it makes sense that we’d time our nods in sync with the beat.

Sometimes when we only want to move slightly to music we move other body parts than our head, particularly our fingers or feet, so the head isn’t necessarily the first or only choice of body part, but it’s still a prominent one. And note that when we move our fingers or feet when listening to music, we do that to the beat, too.

I am a genius.