The ability to accurately move to a musical beat was thought to be innate to humans. New research shows that rats can do this. The time constant in the brain, which is the speed at which our brains can respond to things, is the same across all species.
Our ability to move to music may be more widespread than we thought. Further insight into the animal mind and the origin of our own music and dance can be found in this new discovery.
Are you able to move to the beat or not? The ability to time our movement to music depends on our innate genetic ability, and this skill was thought to be a uniquely human trait. This isn't the same as the 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 is. Beat synchronicity is what this is referred to as.
Recent research shows that some animals share our desire to move to the grooves. There is evidence that rats are one of them in a new paper.
According to Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, rats and humans exhibit the clearest beat syncopation.
The mathematical model of brain adaptation we used to explain the tuning of the auditory cortex allowed us to say that it was 120-140 bpm.
Why don't you play music to rats? Music has a strong effect on the brain. The neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact needs to be revealed to use music effectively. I am a specialist in electrophysiology, which is concerned with electrical activity in the brain, and have been studying the auditory cortex of rats for a long time.
The first hypothesis was that the time constant of the body would determine the optimal musictempo. Small animals are much faster than humans, and this is different between species. The time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species, is what determines the optimal tempo.
"After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat sync is dependent on the time constant in the brain." The animal brain can be used in music research.
The rats were fitted with small devices that could measure their movements. The human participants wore headphones that recorded their movements. The excerpts were played at four different speeds: 75%, 100%, and 400% of the original speed.
The rats beat synchronicity was clearest in the 120 to 140 bpm range. The team found that both rats and humans jerked their heads to the beat in the same rhythm, and that the level of head jerking decreased as the music was sped up.
This is the first report on innate beat synchronization in animals that was not achieved through training or musical exposure.
The brain's short-term adaptation was involved in beat tuning. A mathematical model of the adaptation was used to explain this. The highest beat prediction performance occurred when the mean interstimulus interval was less than a thousandth of a second. The adaptation property in the brain is thought to underlie the perception and creation of music.
Researchers see it as an insight into the creation of music itself, as well as being a fascinating insight into the animal mind.
I want to show how melody and harmony relate to the dynamics of the brain. I'm interested in how, why and what mechanisms of the brain create human cultural fields like fine art, music, science, technology and religion.
The key to understanding how the brain works is the question, according to me. I am interested in using music for a happy life as an engineer.
The article is titled "Spontaneous beat synchronization in rats: Neural dynamics and motor entrainment".
Science Advances has more information on Spontaneous Beat Synchronization in Rats. There is a book titled "Sci Adv.abo7019."
Journal information: Science Advances
All Rights Reserved © 2024
