So, what was wrong? A group of music neuroscientists tracked down Mathieu (using advertisements that said "Do you have no rhythm? Have two left feet? Do you think you can't dance?") and brought him to the laboratory to find out what might be the problem. The task they gave Mathieu – and 33 dancers who reported no rhythm problems – was to listen to a popular Latin dance song, of the merengue style, and to simply bend at the knees and bounce to the beat. In order to measure the timing of Mathieu's bounces, they used a commonly known device for capturing motion data: the remote control of the Nintendo Wii. Why did they use a Nintendo Wii to capture the body movement? Because, with an accelerometer inside the Wii, this instrument recorded the periodicity of Mathieu's bounces, down to the level of 10 ms – information which the researchers stored for analysis. They then compared the periodicity of Mathieu's bounces with the period – also known as tempo – of the Latin music. If Mathieu could feel the rhythm of the merengue, then his body movement would have a periodicity similar to the music's tempo.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2014.00011