you hear a song for the first time. You like. Almost without realizing it, you are nodding your head, perhaps even following the rhythm by drumming your fingers on the table. Even if you’ve never heard those chords, you can ‘predict’ them almost effortlessly. because the song causes a complex reaction in our brain that also involves the rest of the body, something that was thought to be an exclusive phenomenon in humans. However, a new study published in the journal Science Advances reveals that other species may enjoy music in the same way we do. Or, at least, the rats.
While animals also react to noise, they may make rhythmic sounds or be trained to respond to music, this is not the same as the intricate neural and motor processes that work together to allow us to naturally recognize the rhythm of a song, respond to him or even predict it. It is a synchronicity
You may remember videos of parrots wagging their necks to the beat of a song or even shows with larger animals, like bears, twirling to the tune of a waltz. In that case it is training, not an innate reaction. The novelty of this experiment is that it was tested with rats that had never been deliberately exposed to music or rewarded for carrying out one or the other movements.
The secret behind Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat it’
Perception of rhythm and timing within tempo 120-140 BPM (beats per minute) is known to be common in humans. That is to say, that the rhythm 120-140 of songs like ‘Beat it‘, of Michael Jacksono ‘Live life‘, of Coldplayunleash all this stimulation in our brain that leads us, often uncontrollably, to move our heads to the beat, which is why many composers take this rhythm into account when creating their compositions.
The Japanese researcher Yoshiki Ito and his team at the University of Tokyo, tried to find out if the ‘taste’ for this rhythm also occurred in other species. Thus, they started from two possible hypotheses: a first theory that postulates that the optimal rhythm of each animal is determined by the body structure and the physical movement of each specimen (that is, that animals of different sizes would have different preferences according to the pulses) . Or that, on the contrary, the key is not in the body, but in the brain, and that the preference for the beat (120 to 140 BPM) would be similar for all species.
Rats listening to sonatas and pop
To verify this, an experiment was carried out in which they put 10 untrained rats to listen to Mozart’s ‘Sonata for two pianos’ at four different tempos: 99 (75%), 132 (100%), 264 (200%) and 528. (400%) BPM. Other songs were also tried’Born This Way‘, of Lady Gaga; ‘Another One Bites the Dust‘, of Queen; ‘Sugar‘, of Maroon 5; and finally precisely ‘Beat it‘, of Michael Jackson. While the test subjects attended this ‘recital’, the researchers observed the acceleration of their movements through sensors and head shakes, in addition to measuring their neural activity. They did the same with 20 human volunteers.
The results concluded that both rats and humans exhibited such a predisposition by 120-140 BPM, which would support pulse perception and timing may be inherent to neural activity in the brain, rather than being influenced by size and time. general body movements of a species, in addition to opening the door to study the rhythm in other animal species beyond humans. In addition, the team also found that both rats and humans shook their heads to the same beat in similar rhythms, and that the level of head shaking decreased the faster the music was sped up.
“The rats showed innate beat synchronization, that is, without any training or prior exposure to music, most clearly within 120-140 bpm, at which humans also show the clearest beat synchronization,” he says. Hirokazu Takahashi, another of the study’s authors. “Music exerts a strong pull on the brain and has profound effects on emotions and cognition. To use music effectively, we must reveal the neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact.”
This study will make it possible to study the relationship between music and the animal brain from a different perspective, as well as future applications in artificial intelligence that are more suited to the way we ‘feel’ music.