As the music’s tempo increased, the level of head jerking dropped, as neither the rats nor humans could keep up with the fast pace.

The rats moved in time with the music most distinctly when the song’s tempo was 120 to 140 beats per minute-the same range as humans. Another speculated that the time constant of the brain, which is similar in rats and humans, would dictate the optimal tempo. One hypothesis supposed that the rats’ physical characteristics, such as their quick heartbeats and breathing rates, would mean their optimal music tempo would be faster than ours. The researchers wanted to find out which tempo the rats would be most synchronized with, and how that compared to the humans. The rats were placed in a dim-lit box and played the music through a speaker. They went into a soundproof room and listened to the music through headphones that had accelerometers attached to them. Twenty human participants also listened to the same songs. The rats also listened to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and Maroon 5’s “Sugar.” They then played the rats one-minute snippets of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major at four different tempos ranging from 75 percent to 400 percent of the song’s original speed. By placing small, wireless accelerometers on their rodent participants, the team recorded motions that were imperceptible to the eye. In the study, researchers measured the head movements of ten rats. “Music exerts a strong appeal to the brain and has profound effects on emotion and cognition.”

“Rats displayed innate-that is, without any training or prior exposure to music-beat synchronization,” says Hirokazu Takahashi, an engineer at the University of Tokyo in Japan and study co-author, in a press release. This paper, however, represents one of the first scientific inquiries on animals’ sense of rhythm, writes the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. Scientists long thought this skill was unique to humans, with only a few animals-notably cockatoos-organically busting a move to a tune. This ability stems from the speed that their brains respond to stimuli, also known as the time constant in the brain. The research, published last week in the journal Science Advances, found that rats have innate beat synchronization. Rats have a human-like sense of rhythm and can bop their heads in time to musical beats, a new study suggests.

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