"Take Five," though, is written and performed in a 5/4 time signature, as my jazz-fan colleague David Graham mentioned yesterday—meaning there are five beats per measure. (Hence the title.) When there are five, seven, eleven, or almost any number of beats in a measure that doesn't divide evenly into twos or threes, the beats can become non-isochronous—meaning the emphasized beats, the ones you would tap your foot along with, aren't evenly spaced. For example: Try clapping along with the original Mission: Impossible theme, which is also in a 5/4 time signature.

Time signatures like these are often known as "irregular," "complex," or "asymmetrical" time signatures.

"Irregular" time signatures are anything but unusual in other parts of the world—some musical cultures from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Balkan Peninsula commonly use metric structures that don't follow the same set of rules as Western music, according to an article called "Synchronization and Continuation Tapping to Complex Meters" for a 2006 edition of Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

But people raised in North America often have a particular trouble with irregular time signatures. The authors of the Music Perception article conducted a study in which participants were asked to tap along with recordings of drum patterns played over Balkan folk melodies in irregular meters, then continue tapping out the rhythm once the drum pattern was turned off, then in the absence of both the drum pattern and the melody. North Americans, they found, had difficulty producing complex metrical patterns—even those with, as the article specifies (kind of amazingly), "high amounts of tapping experience and music training." Their tapping frequently stretched out to resemble something more like an even beat.

Studies have also shown that the Western preference for even, symmetrical rhythms is a learned behavior. The Music Perception article cites an earlier study that found that

young infants have little difficulty perceiving timing disruptions of musical patterns in both simple and complex meters, while North-American 1-year-olds and adults only perform accurately in the context of simple meters (Hannon & Trehub, 2005a, 2005b). These data suggest that North American adults' difficulty with nonisochronous meters arises from learned representations of Western meters and not from the intrinsic difficulty of complex meters.

So perhaps if you listen to enough music by the famously outside-the-box Dave Brubeck Quartet—or other stuff with a funky time signature, like Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" and Pink Floyd's "Money," which both have sections in 7/4—it's still possible to train your brain differently. Better yet, sing it to your baby at bedtime and he or she might grow up to be as musically innovative as Paul Desmond.