Can’t beat it: Rats like to move to MJ, Lady Gaga

Blasting Lady Gaga in your house? There’s a chance a nearby rat might be bopping along with you, a new study suggests.

Rats can recognize and move to the rhythm of a beat, according to a University of Tokyo study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances. Only humans had been thought to innately possess the ability, according to the university’s news release.

Researchers played Mozart, Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Sugar” by Maroon 5 for rats and measured their head movements before comparing their results to the humans who participated in the study. They played the music at four tempos and found rats best synchronized their head bops to music in the 120 to 140 beats-per-minute range, much like humans, the study showed.

Animals can be trained to move to a beat, but rats here show an “innate” ability to groove, the release says.

Animals are known to respond to music in reactive fashion, but that is not the same as recognizing a beat, responding to it or predicting it, the university said in its statement. Researchers call the ability to naturally recognize a beat in a song “beat synchronicity.”

The rats in the study did bop their heads in a more reactive manner than their human counterparts, but their movements also showed signs of being predictive at some points.

The researchers concluded that the rats’ beat synchronization “could neither be characterized as being purely reactive nor be explained only by startles.”

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on innate beat synchronization in animals that was not achieved through training or musical exposure,” Hirokazu Takahashi, a study co-author and associate professor at the University of Tokyo’s information and science technology graduate school, said in a news release.