There’s a rat in my kitchen ... and it’s got great rhythm
Rodents can move their head to Mozart and keep time to Queen, Tokyo University study shows
RATS have rhythm, and will bop to Queen, Lady Gaga and even Mozart, scientists have discovered.
Accurately moving to a musical beat was thought to be a skill that was largely unique to humans, with only a handful of animals, such as cockatoos, demonstrating synchronisation to music with training.
To find out if rodents had an innate ability to sync to a beat, scientists at the University of Tokyo fitted rats with wireless, miniature accelerometers, which could measure the slightest head movements.
They were then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, at four different speeds.
The original tempo is 132 beats per minute (bpm) and results showed that the rats beat their heads most in time when the music was played in the 120140 bpm range.
The rats also managed to keep time with Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, and Born This Way by Lady Gaga.
Originally, scientists thought the preferred rhythm might be linked to heart rate – which varies significantly across species, and would suggest rats would prefer a beat at around 300 bmp.
But researchers discovered that the rats were able to sync most successfully around 120 bmp, which is likely to be linked to innate tempo in the brain, and is similar across species.
Hirokazu Takahashi, associate professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at Tokyo University, said: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on innate beat synchronisation in animals that was not achieved through training or musical exposure.
“Some of us believe that music is special to human culture, but its origin is somehow inherited from our progenitors. We found it in terms of dynamics of the brain.
“Music exerts a strong appeal to the brain and has profound effects on emotion and cognition.
“To utilise music effectively, we need to reveal the neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact.”
The study of animal musicality dates as far back as Charles Darwin, who noted that rhythm was widespread in nature and biology.
The brains of all creatures are highly rhythmical with individual neurons and groups of brain cells operating in an ordered symphony of electrical and chemical activity.
Some animals have been shown to have a basic grasp of rhythm, such as bonobos, who can pick up a beat after much encouragement, and Snowball the dancing cockatoo even appeared on The David Letterman Show.
But most animals are thought not to have any brain synchronicity with rhythm, and experiments with monkeys have shown that they cannot learn rhythmic tapping tasks.
“Next, I would like to reveal how other musical properties such as melody and harmony relate to the dynamics of the brain,” added Dr Takahashi.
“I am also interested in how, why and what mechanisms of the brain create human cultural fields such as fine art, music, science, technology and religion. I believe that this question is the key to understanding how the brain works and develop the next-generation AI [artificial intelligence].”
The team also found that rats jerked their heads to the beat in a similar way as humans, with the nodding decreasing the more the music speeded up, as if they were struggling to keep time.
Understanding how music stimulates the brain may help scientists uncover how it can be used to trigger an emotional or therapeutic response.
The team are now hoping to move on to study melody and harmony and believe their results could eventually lead to the creation of AI music that can sync more easily with the brain.
Prof Takahashi added: “As an engineer, I am interested in the use of music for a happy life.
“After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronisation depends on the time constant in the brain.
“This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”
The research was published in the journal