{"id":67509,"date":"2025-05-02T04:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T04:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/67509\/"},"modified":"2025-05-02T04:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T04:45:13","slug":"ronan-the-sea-lion-can-keep-a-beat-better-than-you-can-and-she-might-just-change-what-we-know-about-music-and-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/67509\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronan the Sea Lion Can Keep a Beat Better Than You Can \u2014 and She Might Just Change What We Know About Music and the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/a>California sea lion Ronan. CRedit: Carrson Hood\/UC Santa Cruz. <\/p>\n

At the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, a 16-year-old sea lion named Ronan loves to put on a show. With her head bobbing in time to a percussive beat, she hits her marks not just with accuracy \u2014 but with flair. Her timing is so precise, researchers say, it outpaces even the best of us.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,\u201d said<\/a> Peter Cook, a cognitive neuroscientist at New College of Florida and lead author of a new study out today in Scientific Reports<\/a>. \u201cSometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she\u2019s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n

And unlike her human competitors \u2014 10 college students from UC Santa Cruz \u2014 Ronan wasn\u2019t just better at her favorite beat. She kept pace at tempos she had never heard before, outperforming the humans at every speed.<\/p>\n

A Sea Lion Star<\/p>\n

\"Ronan<\/a>Ronan can dance perfectly to a beat. <\/p>\n

Ronan\u2019s story began on the shoulder of a California highway. In 2009, after multiple strandings caused by malnutrition, she was found wandering along Highway 1. Deemed unreleasable by wildlife agencies, she was adopted by the Pinniped Lab at UC Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

By 2013, she was already a sensation. That year, researchers showed she could keep time to pop songs like Earth, Wind & Fire\u2019s Boogie Wonderland. At the time, scientists were shocked. Ronan was the first nonhuman mammal to demonstrate \u201crhythmic entrainment\u201d \u2014 the ability to move in sync with a beat. Until then, that honor seemed reserved for humans, parrots, and maybe a few dancing primates.<\/p>\n

But a decade later, questions lingered. Was her earlier performance a fluke? Could she still groove?<\/p>\n

To find out, Cook and his colleagues gave her a more rigorous test. They asked Ronan, now 16 years old, to bob her head in sync with a metronome at three tempos: 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute. Only one was familiar. Meanwhile, the students moved their forearms in time to the same beats \u2014 a fair match, since \u201cthe hand is like the sea lion\u2019s head, and the arm is like the sea lion\u2019s neck,\u201d Cook said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

What Did They Find?<\/p>\n

These sessions were recorded with high-speed video to capture every precise motion. The goal for both sea lion and humans was the same: align the lowest point of their movement with the beat \u2014 and the results surprised even the researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no human that was better than Ronan on every measure of precision and consistency,\u201d Cook told The New York Times<\/a>. \u201cAnd she was better than most humans on all measures, so she really rose to the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

At certain tempos, her timing was more precise than that of 80% of the humans tested. Her movements were also less variable. She also kept pace with new ones \u2014 112 and 128 beats per minute \u2014 that she had never encountered before.<\/p>\n

At every tempo tested, Ronan produced exactly one adorable head bob per beat. No extras. No missed beats.<\/p>\n

Rethinking Rhythm<\/p>\n

Humans are often described as \u201cnatural synchronizers\u201d, able to instinctively move to music. For years, scientists believed that rhythm is a human hallmark \u2014 or at the very least a trait reserved for animals that could mimic sounds. This idea, known as the \u201cvocal learning hypothesis,\u201d held that only species that could imitate vocalizations \u2014 like parrots and humans \u2014 could move to a beat.<\/p>\n

Snowball, a cockatoo known for dancing to the Backstreet Boys<\/a>, is a prime example. But Ronan doesn\u2019t sing. She\u2019s not a vocal mimic. And yet she can definitely feeling the rhythm. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThis study demonstrates conclusively that humans are not the only mammals able to keep a beat,\u201d Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the research, said during in an interview with the NY Times.<\/p>\n

Others remain skeptical. Aniruddh D. Patel, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, points out that Ronan needed training to develop her beat-keeping, unlike humans and parrots, who move to music spontaneously. \u201cA very important difference,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Still, her ability challenges the idea that rhythm must be linked to language.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost like precognition \u2014 knowing what\u2019s going to happen before it does,\u201d Cook explained for The Times<\/a>. \u201cImagine, as a sea lion, swimming through choppy water and the energetic advantage of matching one\u2019s flipper strokes to wave patterns. Or watching the rhythmic swimming motions of a fish as it tries to evade capture.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, rhythm may not be about music at all \u2014 but survival in the harsh wild.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Next for Ronan?<\/p>\n

\"Ronan<\/a>Study co-authors Andrew Rouse, Peter Cook, and Carson Hood with Ronan. Credit: Colleen Reichmuth.<\/p>\n

Ronan\u2019s participation is entirely voluntary. If she\u2019s not in the mood to perform, she slides off her platform into the water. Over the years, she\u2019s participated in fewer than 2,000 rhythm trials \u2014 many just seconds long, some years apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe definitely wasn\u2019t over-trained,\u201d Cook told Newsweek. \u201cIf you added up the amount of rhythmic exposure Ronan has had since she\u2019s been with us, it is probably dwarfed by what a typical 1-year-old kid has heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now in her prime at 170 pounds and 16 years old, Ronan is still learning. And Cook wants to push the boundaries even further.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan she do things that accelerate or decelerate? Can she do patterns that aren\u2019t even steady in time but change?\u201d he asked. \u201cThese are things humans can be quite good at. Can a nonhuman do those?\u201d<\/p>\n

He and his team also plan to train other sea lions \u2014 to see if Ronan is unique, or merely the first to get her big break.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to say dogs can\u2019t dance, you have to empirically assess that,\u201d Cook said. \u201cI would be very surprised if you couldn\u2019t get a border collie to do something like what Ronan does if you spend enough time on it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California sea lion Ronan. CRedit: Carrson Hood\/UC Santa Cruz. At the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[269,15197,70,10629,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-67509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-music","9":"tag-rhythm","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-sea-lion","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114436422136153829","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}