What is the deal with drummers?

Granted, John Bonham is one of the greatest drummers of all time, but watching any drummer really just amazes me.  Even in the first minute of that performance, John Bonham manages to generate different rhythms with each of his limbs- and he's just getting started there!  My question is, how the hell do they do that?  I've always held a theory that maybe drummers are wired differently- that they are somehow able to disconnect the right and left sides of their brains so that the motor signals don't interfere with one another.  But it's more than just that...take a look at this performance, not only does he have to generate different movements with each of his limbs, each movement with it's own timing and coordination pattern, but he's also got to do that while processing the sensory feedback coming from the drum kit (at some level- maybe it's not conscious processing???).  Ok so I found an article this week that MAY help with this question, I'm not saying that it will answer it completely, but maybe I'll have a clue as to why drummers are motor control freaks.

This article was published last year in PLoS One- Excitability of the Motor Cortex Ipsilateral to the Moving Body Side Depends on Spatio-Temporal Task Complexity and Hemispheric Specialization.  Long title, but here's the rundown of what they did.  The subjects in the study were asked to either rest, move their hand (wrist extension/flexion), foot (ankle dorsi/plantar flexion) or both hand and foot at the same time.  When they were asked to move the hand and foot at the same time, they were either required to move in-phase (i.e. wrist flexion and plantar flexion at the same time) or anti-phase (i.e. wrist extension and plantar flexion at the same time).  The researchers measured the activity of the extensors and flexors on both the moving side and the non-moving side- subjects were told to restrict movement to JUST the side that they were asked (i.e. left or right).  So, while the researchers were monitoring the EMG activity of the non-moving side to make sure there wasn't any muscle activation, they were also monitoring the activity on the side of the brain that controls the non-moving side. 

Here's where things get interesting...the results were that there is a significant facilitation effect on the motor cortex for the non-moving side when a complex coordination pattern is used (i.e. hand and foot moving anti-phase). WHAT??? Ok, back it up...basically what they found was that it's harder to keep the non-moving side still when doing a complex movement pattern.  Hmmm, back to the drummer, maybe what's really happening is that they're using this to their advantage and cross patterning movements so that they're getting the maximum subconscious "help" from their brain.  Most people that I've spoken to about this say that as soon as they start thinking about what they're doing on the drum kit, that's when they loose the rhythm.  So conscious processing interferes with the natural facilitation of movement that occurs due to the complexity of the movement pattern.  Rather than disconnection between the two sides of the brain, there's actually a huge amount of cross communication going on and it is exactly that communication that helps them to do what they do!