Excerpt:

>While animals also react to hearing noise, or 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 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,” explained Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology.

>“The auditory cortex, the region of our brain that processes sound, was also tuned to 120-140 bpm, which we were able to explain using our mathematical model of brain adaptation.”

>Although the main study focused on responses to K. 448 by Mozart, four other musical pieces were also played to the human and animal participants: Born This Way by Lady Gaga, Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, Beat It by Michael Jackson and Sugar by Maroon 5.

Science Advances, DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abo7019