Humans have the ability to keep to the beat and dance to the music. Now, new research from the University of Tokyo found that even animals can do that too after observing that rats can nod their heads in time to the music.
Researchers played clips of Lady Gaga, Queen, Michael Jackson, and a Mozart Sonata at four different tempos to see how rodents will react, MailOnline reported. Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi said that the rate displayed innate beat synchronization most distinctly between 120-140 beats per minute.
Rats Can Move Their Heads to Musical Beats Too, Demonstrating It's Not Just a Human Ability
Dancing Is Not Only for Humans
Researchers used a computer model and found that the optimal tempo was defined by the time constant in the brain or the speed at which the brain is able to respond to the stimuli. Dr. Takahashi noted that this demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in explaining the perceptual mechanisms of music.
The ability to move to music was once thought unique to humans, but several studies have shown that it is not the case. The first nonhuman animal that demonstrated this was Snowball the cockatoo who went viral more than a decade ago after its video of him bobbing his head to the Backstreet Boys caught the public's attention.
Researchers from The Neurosciences Institute along with the bird's owner Irina Schulz studied Snowball and they said that Snowball has remarkably diverse movements that show dancing is not limited to humans. Rather, it is a response to music when certain conditions are present.
The new study, titled "Spontaneous beat synchronization in rats: Neural dynamics and motor entrainment" published in Science Advances, aims to see if rats share the same ability. Dr. Takahashi noted that they needed to reveal the neural mechanism underlying how music appeals to the brain and affects emotion as well as cognition.
They fitted tiny, wireless accelerometers into the lab rats' heads to detect even the slightest movements. They played pop songs, such as Lady Gaga's Born This Way, Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, Michael Jackson's Beat It, and Maroon 5's Sugar. They also included 20 human participants to measure their head bopping.
Analysis showed that both rats and humans jerked their heads along to the beat in a similar rhythm. The level of head jerking from both humans and rats decreased as the music sped up, which makes it more difficult to move to the beat. Overall, the study suggests that even more species can link sounds to movements like humans than previously thought.
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First Animal To Prove Innate Beat Synchronization
According to Science Daily, researchers used two hypotheses to guide them in their study, The first hypothesis was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would depend on the time constant of the body, which is different between species. The second one was that the optimal tempo would instead depend on the time constant of the brain, which is similar across species.
Based on the experiment, they found that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain, showing that the animal brain can help explain how animals perceive music.
Dr. Takahashi said that their study could be the first report on innate beat synchronization in animals, which was not achieved before via training or musical exposure. They also believe that short-term adaptation in the brain was involved in beat tuning in the auditory cortex.
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