The notion that only human beings can detect musical beats and dance to them has now been proven wrong.
New research coming from Japan reveals that rats too can have this skill. With this finding, many insights have lit gained into the animal world. In fact, it can open new discussions about the origins of our own music and dance. According to the paper titled “Spontaneous beat synchronisation in rats: Neural dynamics and motor entrainment” by Yoshiki Ito et al., the optimal tempo for nodding along was found to depend on the time constant in the brain (the speed at which our brains can respond to something), which is similar across all species.
Can you move to the beat, or do you have two left feet? Apparently, how well we can time our movement to music depends somewhat on our innate genetic ability, and this skill was previously thought to be a uniquely human trait. While animals also react to hearing noise, might make rhythmic sounds, or be trained to respond to music, this isn’t the same as the complex neural and motor processes that work together to enable us to naturally recognize the beat in a song, respond to it or even predict it. This is referred to as beat synchronicity.
Only relatively recently, research studies (and home videos) have shown that some animals seem to share our urge to move to the groove.
A new paper by a team at the University of Tokyo provides evidence that rats are one of them. “Rats demonstrated innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronisation most clearly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization,” said Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology.