Stay Alive With The Bee Gees -by Alyson Camus

Do you know about CPR training? We have a basic training each year at school, and we learn how to push hard and rhythmically on the chest of a dummy in order to learn how to reanimate a person. You have to push hard and fast, but not too fast, the trick is to find the right rhythm, 100 beats per minute… pretty tricky. You push too slow you don’t pump up enough blood, you push too fast, it’s bad too.

So researchers have found a way to make people push the chest at the correct beat per minute: music! Yeah music has a tempo, a rhythm that people follow immediately, but there were two conditions for this idea. First they had to find the right song that beats around 100 beat per minute, as it is not the case for all songs, then they had to find a song that everybody knows and can sing in their head, because you will not necessary carry your iPod with you when you will have to rescue someone.

And, oh, surprise, it is the Bee Gees’ song ‘Stayin’ Alive’, which fits the situation the best… The disco beat of the 1977 hit has exactly 103 beats per minute and seems perfect to the situation.
I heard this on NPR, and as they were talking about the so appropriate title of the song, I thought how life plays these serendipitous jokes all the time.

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