This is Your Brain on Dance
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KRISTIN SLOAN |
In an article in the New York Times this morning, Diane Solway takes a look at how dancers manage to remember all of their steps. Particularly in the cases of ABT or NYCB (for this article Diane watched ABT dancers - our own Mr. Hallberg included - learning parts), it really is a major part of the job. In the article she says that ABT will rotate through 21 works this season, by choreographers of varying styles, and I know NYCB usually falls in the 30-50 work range for an eight week season.
This article really interested me, as it touched upon a lot of things I’ve been curious about for a while. Personally, when I read about studies on the brain and then think about how it may apply to how my dancer brain learns, retains, and then spits out choreography, it totally fascinates me. I remember reading an article a few years ago (I think it was in the Times magazine) about mirror neurons, and how when we are watching a movie, or watching anything for that matter, there is a part of our brain that actually mirrors the actions we are seeing and thinks, in some respect, that our body is actually doing them. This is something that sounds so familiar to dancers. You know… You are watching someone else perform a piece of choreography that you know, and sometimes your muscles actually twitch in reaction to recognizing the movement. And the fact that you can be sitting down, watching someone perform a series of steps, while at the same time thinking about how your body would dance those particular steps, and then stand up and repeat them.
Dr. Daniel Glaser talks about dancers basically learning the choreography in chunks (he calls it “chunking” - a term I’m sure ballet dancers will love) and that they form these chunks based on things like rhythm or imagery, spatially, or even from an inner monologue. These chunks or phrases are what then become strung together to make one long movement.
Dance is a language. Once you learn the language, you can begin to predict what steps could come next based on combinations that have become familiar to you. This is obviously very useful when it comes to ballet, where when someone says “tombé pas de bourrée glissade assemblé” you aren’t thinking of each individual step on it’s own, because it’s a recognized sequence in your ballet vocabulary. For the most part, in classical dance, there are only so many steps that can physically link to other steps based on where your body, your weight, and your momentum are at that moment. The fact that you can predict, to some extent, a handful of next possible steps, greatly cuts the amount of time it takes to learn a full sequence of steps.
I started thinking more about the whole predicting thing when I read an article in Wired about Numenta, a new company formed by Jeff Hawkins based on theories from his book On Intelligence. One of the first things Numenta has created is a software that attempts to mimic the process of human thought, based on what they are calling Hierarchical Temporal Memory (or HTM). They describe HTM as “a new computing paradigm that replicates the structure and function of the human neocortex”.. If you feel compelled to read more about it, you can click here, but really, the way the process was described in the Wired article reminded me a lot of why it’s so much easier for a dancer to learn choreography than a non-dancer.
But that’s even with the music element stripped out. The second you add music, that’s’ just another layer that helps us immensely. It’s amazing how your boss can say, “So-and-so is out… I need someone for the first movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet tonight. You did it at some point over the years… Do you remember any of it?” And at first you try to think of the steps, and you think. “No I definitely have no recollection of a single step in the entire piece.” But then you hear the music, and it’s all right there, like magic. In the NY Times article Ms. Solway mentioned Frederic Franklin, who while watching a pas de deux that he had performed at some point during his 93 years, says, “It’s all in here, when I’m watching them, I can feel my muscles doing it.”
Ok, so after all that blabbing on, while I was looking for links to all these things… I found on NOVA’s website, a study by Dr. Glaser (who I mentioned above and who is in the current Times article), where he did MRI’s of ballet dancers and capoeira dancers (as well as non-dancers, or “native subjects” as he calls them) while they watched ballet and capoeira. He basically found that the dancers’ mirror neurons where working most when viewing their known style of dance, but still worked more than a non-dancer while viewing the unfamiliar dance style. Any dancer could have predicted that outcome, but it’s still interesting that they chose to test dancers to explore their theories on mirror neurons. Glaser explains it well in an audio clip on NOVA’s website.
