Rats Bop Their Heads To Music Just Like Humans Do, Study Finds

Who doesn't love a little Lady Gaga? While the superstar's fans naturally bop their heads to her anthemic songs, it turns out rats like her music too.

A fascinating study done by the University of Tokyo, published in the journal Science Advances, found that humans are not the only ones with the innate skill to move to a musical beat.

Scientists found that rats also have this ability to find the "optimal tempo for nodding along" - a factor dependent on the speed at which our brains respond to something (or time constant).

Ito et al.

This study suggests that the ability of humans' auditory and motor systems to move to music may be prevalent in other species too. How we move to music is based on our innate genetic ability, and previously thought to be a uniquely human trait.

Bopping - Not just for humans

With this new experiment, scientists have found that animals like rats also posses the ability to "naturally recognise the beat in a song, respond to it, or even predict it." This ability is called beat synchronicity.

"Rats displayed innate ¡ª that is, without any training or prior exposure to music ¡ª beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization," explained Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. "The auditory cortex, the region of our brain that processes sound, was also tuned to 120-140 bpm, which we were able to explain using our mathematical model of brain adaptation," Takahashi added.

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To study rats' reaction, they were fitted with small wireless accelerometers that can measure even the slightest head movements. Scientists then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart's Sonata at four different tempos. The song's original tempo is 132 bpm and scientists found that the rats' could best understand the music within the 120-140 bpm range.

Ito et al.

They also found that both eats and humans jerked their heads to music's beat in a similar rhythm - decreasing as the music was sped up.

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While the study's focus remained Mozart, it also assessed the rats' response to various musical pieces - Born This Way by Lady Gaga, Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, Beat It by Michael Jackson, and Sugar by Maroon 5.

Ito et al.

What do you think about rats enjoying the same music as human beings? Let us know in the comments below. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.

References

Rats bop to the beat. (n.d.). The University of Tokyo. https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00262.html