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New Delhi: Across the animal kingdom, communication signals ranging from light flashes to vocalisations exhibit a consistent rhythmic pattern. A study of diverse species, including fireflies, crickets, frogs, birds, fish and mammals reveals that these signals repeat at a tempo of about two hertz, or approximately two beats per second. This frequency persists regardless of whether the creature communicates through sound, movement or light. Species are physically capable of signaling much faster, with panicked fireflies flickering at high speeds, and it does not seem to be a biomechanical limit. Most species communicate within a narrow band between 0.5 and 4 hertz.

This suggests that there might be a universal biological constraint. The consistency across species indicates that these signals may have evolve to match the rhythms that brains can process most efficiently. The phenomenon can be potentially explained by the biophysics of individual neurons. Because of this internal timing, neural circuits respond most strongly to pulses arriving every few hundred milliseconds. Computer models of simple neural circuits confirm that they are naturally tuned to the resonance of approximately two hertz. This rhythmic ‘sweet spot’ likely functions as a carrier signal or baseline.

The natural neural timing has a cultural influence

The tempo itself may not convey specific information, but serves to capture the attention of the receiver, allowing the actual content of the message to be processed more effectively on top of the established beat. This neural timing principle extends to human behaviour an culture. Popular music frequently clusters around 120 beats per minute, or two hertz, with human walking gaits averaging two steps per second. Nature appears to operate on a shared wavelength, linked to the fundamental architecture of the brain. All brains may be naturally tuned to process signals that arrive at two hertz. A paper describing the research has been published in PLOS Biology.