When it comes to music, rats and humans share similar traits.
This is according to a new study that established rodents are able to perceive the beat of music, and even bop their heads along to the rhythm of songs from top pop and rock artists including Lady Gaga and Queen, much like humans do.
To arrive at these findings, researchers at the University of Tokyo fitted 10 rats with wireless accelerometers to measure their head movements and then played music for them as well as 20 human participants. The aim was to determine whether rats and other small animals preferred faster beats to humans. Their thinking was that this would correlate with physical factors like heartbeat and body size.
Sections of songs including Lady Gaga's Born This Way, Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, and Beat It by Michael Jackson, were played to the rats and human participants at four different speeds. What the study revealed was that both rats' and humans had the best beat synchronization in the range of 120 to 140 beats per minute.
"Rats displayed innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization," Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi of the University of Tokyo said in a press release Friday.
The team also found that both rats and humans moved their heads to the beat in a similar rhythm.
"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," Takahashi said.
The discovery could very well be an insight into the creation of music itself.
"Next, I would like to reveal how other musical properties such as melody and harmony relate to the dynamics of the brain. 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," said Takahashi.
"I believe that this question is the key to understand how the brain works and develop the next-generation AI (artificial intelligence)," Takahashi added. "Also, as an engineer, I am interested in the use of music for a happy life."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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