NDEO鈥檚 Guest Blog Series features posts written by our members about their experiences in the fields of dance and dance education. We continue this series with a post by Judith Lynne Hanna PhD, Affiliate Research Professor, University of Maryland.聽 Guest posts reflect the experiences, opinions, and viewpoints of the author and are printed here with their permission. NDEO does not endorse any business, product, or service mentioned in guest blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about the guest blogger program or submitting an article for consideration, please click here.
At times during their careers, dancers may want to explain what dance is to family, friends, students, schools, spectators, and the media. After all, knowledge about dance is new and limited compared to the other arts.
My journey toward understanding dance began as a child in 1946, and the odyssey hasn鈥檛 stopped. A pediatrician told my parents that ballet would make my feet strong. So I studied ballet. Dancing didn鈥檛 do much for my feet, but dancing has made me stronger physically and mentally. Alicia Markova鈥檚 experience with flat feet was different than mine. Critic Clement Crisp reports, 鈥淭he sublime artist Alicia Markova was taken to ballet as a child because her flat little feet left sad imprints in the sand during a seaside holiday. Ballet, said a doctor, would cure that. And it did. She grew into an astounding artist whose 鈥榠ntelligent鈥� feet and legs were the envy of the ballet world.鈥�
But fascination with dance led me beyond ballet to explore other dance genres (e.g., modern, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, African, flamenco, Middle East, jazz, hip-hop, swing, ballroom, folk, and on TikTok with my grandson Merrick Hanna). Curiosity led me to conduct dance research in villages and cities in Africa and then in theaters, school playgrounds and classrooms, and cabarets in the United States.
After teaching high school, I became an applied anthropologist studying human behavior, including many forms of dance and culture, past and present, and drawing upon the work of different disciplines. I was surprised that at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, more than 6,800 attendees paid rapt attention to renowned choreographer Mark Morris as he answered questions about the relationship between creativity and dance. Neuroscientists interested in dance? I wanted to know why.
The Attraction of Dance
Scientists have been turning to dance because it is a multifaceted activity that can help them demystify how the brain coordinates the body to perform complex, precise movements that express emotion and convey meaning. Dancers possess an extraordinary skill set鈥攃oordination of limbs, posture, balance, gesture, facial expression, perception, and action in sequences that create meaning in time and space and with effort. Dancers deal with the relationship between experience and observation.
The brain hides from our sight the wondrously complex operations that underlie the feat of what makes a dance. Although there are many secrets to unravel about the power of the brain and dance, advances in technology in the 21st century, at least 50, such as brain scanning techniques and experiments using dancers, dance makers, and dance viewers reveal the unexpected.
Misconceptions that dancers shouldn鈥檛 think, just dance, or that dance is merely physical or emotional expression, are challenged by reality. Research shows that dance activity strongly registers in regions of the brain responsible for cognition. Hidden processes reveal that the brain is choreographer, dancer, and spectator. Dance is what the brain does.
The Choreographing Brain
Brain dominance begins early 鈥� 22 days after conception the spinal cord and brain appear. Week 4 the eyes, nose, ear and mouth form. Week 28 thalamic brain connections form to mediate sensory input. The brain is a three pound winked changeable mound influenced by moving experience, bodily feelings, perceptions, culture, society, and the environment. Neural plasticity is the brain鈥檚 remarkable ability to change throughout life.
The brain is comprised of about 100 billion electrically active neurons (cells), each connected to tens of thousands of its neighbors at perhaps 100 trillion synapses (the spaces between neurons where information transfers can occur). These atoms of thought relay information through voltage spikes that convert into chemical signals to bridge the gap to other neurons.
All thought, movement, and sensation emanate from electrical impulses coursing through the brain鈥檚 interconnected neurons. When they fire together they connect and reconnect, and the connections between them grow stronger in impacting our perception, our comprehension, and different kinds of memory.
Many Parts of the Brain Act to Make a Dance
Thinking about dance occurs in the cerebrum, 10 percent of the brain鈥檚 mass but with 50 percent of the brain鈥檚 neurons. When a person chooses a dance move, it originates in the brain鈥檚 motor cortex, which is involved in its planning, control, and execution. Signals from the motor cortex travel down the spinal cord鈥檚 20 million nerve fibers to tell a body part to respond in a certain way. The somatosensory cortex, a mid-region of the brain responsible for motor control, plays a role in eye-hand coordination. The brain鈥檚 basal ganglia cells communicate with other brain regions to smoothly coordinate movement and respond to sensory information. The cerebellum integrates input from the parts of the brain and spinal cord into planning the movement and contributes to manifesting neural messages into the actual dance move.
Dance is physical exercise that sparks new brain cells (neurogenesis) and their connections. We thought that humans had limited brain cells that decreased with age. But dancing generates new cells and their interconnections. So close to my ninth decade, I鈥檓 still dancing.
A language is a method of conveying complex ideas and emotions. It has representations of information, and rules for how the representations can be combined. As a means of conveying ideas and emotions, with or without recourse to sound, dance language draws upon similar places and thought processes in the brain as verbal language. Dance, like verbal language, has vocabulary (locomotion and gestures in dance), grammar or syntax (rules for putting the vocabulary together and justifying how one movement can follow another), and semantics (meaning). Verbal language strings together sequences of words, and dance strings together sequences of movement to make phrases and sentences. Meaning may be story-telling or abstract, playing with form or chance.
Both verbal and dance languages use the same parts of the brain for conceptualization, creativity, and memory. For example, Broca鈥檚 area is activated in syntax processing, encoding complex human movements involving their execution, imagination, imitation, and observation. Broca鈥檚 area assembles and decodes speech sounds in the same way it interprets body language. The Wernicke area, critical for speech production, is associated with expression and comprehension, understanding meaning, symbolic and analytic functions, sequential information processing, and complex movement patterns.
Dance is enmeshed in verbal language through instructions and directions. But dance feeds the brain in its own kinds of multisensory communications. If a pattern is repeated, the associated group of neurons fire together resulting in a new memory, its consolidation, and ease of retrieving it. Neurons can improve intellect, memory, and certain forms of learning if they join the existing neural networks instead of rattling aimlessly around in the brain for a while before dying
Neurons
Neuroscientists report the phenomena of mirror neurons that appear to facilitate learning to dance by observation without the benefits of physical practice. A neural resonance exists. When we watch an action and simulate the movement, the same brain network that we use to execute it is active. Dancers performing a dance and spectators watching a dance both had similar areas of the brain light up. Experienced dancers had more excitability. Mirror neurons seem related to empathy. The process underpins the understanding in student-teacher, dancer-dancer, dancer-choreographer, and dancer-spectator interactions.
Connection for Education
The brain sustains different kinds of dance knowledge. Declarative (knowing what dance is), procedural (knowing how to dance), and substantive (knowing ideas and feelings in and through dance) have their places in the brain.
Dancers acquire declarative knowledge about facts, concepts, history, movement vocabulary, and rules for building dances. The brain鈥檚 cortex is responsible for thinking and language, perception, nuanced emotions, memory, focus, modulating dance movement, and constructing the maps that become the mind, the core self. Dance makers can express declarative knowledge in their choreography. Recalling information leads to reprocessing and restoring.
Procedural knowledge of how to do something one knows is manifest in motor skills, proprioception felt in the body, and cognitive skills and strategies that enable communicating ideas and feelings. Actually dancing, people gain procedural knowledge (鈥渒nowing-is-in-the-doing,鈥� bodily or embodied knowledge). In learning dance motor/cognitive skills, the brain process shifts from a cognitive stage of reflection in learning a procedure through observation or description. Then the brain shifts to working out a method for performing the skill, and then on to a reflexive autonomous stage in which the skill becomes automatic, a learned habit, an 鈥渦nconscious鈥� memory. Practicing a movement creates long-term motor learning, colloquially 鈥渕uscle memory,鈥� 鈥渟econd nature,鈥� performed without conscious effort, and allows the brain to use its energy on something else.
Research about learning a second or third verbal language seems applicable to learning more than one nonverbal language. Children who grow up multilingual have greater brain plasticity, and they multitask more easily. Learning a second or third language uses parts of the brain that knowing only one鈥檚 mother tongue doesn鈥檛. Students who learn more than one dance language not only are giving their brains and bodies a workout; they are also increasing their resources for creative dance-making.
Stress, the Brain, and Dance
Positive stress (eustress 鈥� including a dance career and stage fright) is motivating. But chronic stress can harm the brain, changing the physical structure and function of the brain, affecting wiring and thus performance of one鈥檚 dance activities. Formation of new neural connections in the hippocampus, responsible for encoding new memories, becomes blocked in chronic stress. This blockage hinders the mental flexibility needed to find alternative solutions and negatively affects attention, memory, and other cognitive functions, motivation, and energy. Long-term and also short-term stress, even a mere few hours, can reduce cellular connections in the hippocampus, shrinking it.
Dance has been a medium to cope with stress through history and across geographical space. Humans have long held dance in their toolkit to resist, reduce, or temporarily escape stress. Dance exercise may lead to increased levels of brain 鈥漟eel good鈥� chemicals norepinephrine and endorphins, and dissipate the harmful biochemical elements of energy that can remain in the body when you neither fight nor flee from stress because physical action is impossible. Movements increase blood and oxygen flow to the brain, contributing to alertness, and trigger the chemical brain-derived neurotropic factor that supports the health of young neurons, encourages the growth of new ones, and fortifies connections among neurons.
As exercise plus communication, dance conveys ideas, feelings, and stories. Use of the story telling capability of dance is one method to release a person from bad thoughts and behavior. In dance people can recount stressful situations, holding them up for reevaluation and creating versions of the stories in pleasurable ways. Taboo themes can be held up for scrutiny and confronted safely. After all, dance is only pretend, a venue in which to dream oneself anew, even with abstract dances into which meaning can be read by dancer and spectator.
Dance may be a kind of stress inoculation. With its need for strength, flexibility, and endurance, dance also promotes fitness. An individual adapts to the increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones experienced during dancing, and consequently can better resist stress. So dance to resist, reduce, or escape negative stress and maintain your brain health!
More than 400 studies related to interdisciplinary neuroscience reveal the value of dance. For instance, we acquire knowledge and develop cognitively because dance bulks up the brain. Dance contributes to health and healing. Dancers and viewers can learn about themselves鈥搃ncluding sexual, gender, ethnic, regional, national, and career identities. Moreover, dance is a means to help us improve mood as it activates dopamine. This chemical operates along neural circuits known as the pleasure pathways, a euphoric rush that engages a learner/ creator/spectator.
Final Thoughts
Society values mental capacity over physical and emotional expression. Talking, writing, and numbers are the media of value. However, we now know that dance is a multisensory language, brain-driven art, and also, a fuel for learning subjects other than dance. In short, dance is an avenue for thinking, translating, interpreting, and creating. As a multimedia communication that generates new brain cells and their connections, dance at any age enriches one鈥檚 cognitive, emotional, and physical development beyond the exercise itself and extends to most facets of life. Influenced by the body senses, environment, culture, and society, the brain 鈥渃horeographs鈥� dance鈥揳nd more. Consequently, the brain that 鈥渄ances鈥� is changed by dancing.
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+New discoveries about the brain, and especially dancers鈥� brains, gave impetus to Dancing to Learn: The Brain鈥檚 Cognition, Emotion, and Movement (2015). It presents a new understanding of dance that is grounded in the recent brain sciences and integrated with knowledge in dance, the arts, humanities, social sciences and education.
Judith Lynne Hanna is Affiliate Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, and a dance scholar/critic. See www.judithhanna.com. A Ph.D. in anthropology (Columbia University), Hanna (a former high school teacher) has conducted research on education; urban areas; and the meaning of dance in villages and cities in Africa, and theaters, school playgrounds, classrooms, adult entertainment clubs, and neo-burlesque venues in the U.S. Her books include To Dance Is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (UChicago Press), Dance, Sex, and Gender (UCP), The Performer-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor 鈥� (U Texas Press), Partnering Dance and Education (Human Kinetics), Dancing for Health: (Altamira), Disruptive School Behavior: Class, Race, and Culture (Holmes & Meier), Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right, (UTP), and Dancing to Learn: The Brain鈥檚 Cognition, Emotion, and Movement (Rowman & Littlefield). Hanna鈥檚 about 300 articles appear in, e.g., Dance Research Journal, Current Anthropology, Gender and Culture, The Drama Review, Educational Researcher, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, New York Times, and Washington Post. Since 1995 she has been an expert court witness on 150 exotic dance (striptease) cases nationwide. Her views have been solicited, e.g., The Colbert Report with S.Colbert and Bloomberg News.
Photo credits (in order from top to bottom):U of MD Q & A of faculty, next three images courtesy of the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, courtesy of Judith Hanna, headshot by Usha Charya