‘You Think, So You Can Dance?’ science is on it.

By Margaret Fuhrer

NEW YORK: How does an art of the body affect the mind? “Epiphany Machine,” a performance that’s also a scientific study, paints a picture of the brain on dance — onstage and in data. Two dancers move through a simple sequence of steps while wearing electroencephalography caps, which track their brains’ electrical activity.

Lab technicians monitor the caps’ data on laptops. And on a large screen, kaleidoscopic projections illustrate the performers’ brain activity for the audience, in real time. Feathery fractal trees grow, branch and recede. Chains of numbers snake around in circles, turning blue, then black. It is beautiful and eerie: a pas de quatre for two dancers and their busy minds. “Epiphany Machine,” performed last month at Virginia Tech, is a product of the young field of dance neuroscience, which explores dance’s unusual brain-body connection. Sophisticated imaging technology has helped reveal that dance’s multifaceted demands engage the mind as intensively as the body; that dance can root our minds more firmly in our physical selves; and that dancing together can help us relate to each other.

These are ideas that dancers grasp intuitively. Unsurprisingly, many scientists in the field are also dance artists, like Elinor Harrison, whose course on the neuroscience of movement at Washington University in St. Louis is subtitled “You Think, So You Can Dance?” “The way dance integrates the mind and the body, that’s something I’ve felt myself,” Harrison said. “So when we see evidence of these things on a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan” — which measures blood flow in the brain — “it’s the science justifying this embodied knowledge dancers have.” Over the past few decades, dance has been used as a rehabilitation tool for people with neurological disorders, tying into a long history of dance as a healing practice. (“Dance as therapy has probably existed for as long as dance has existed,” Harrison said.)

Participants in programs like Mark Morris Dance Center’s Dance for PD — which for more than 20 years has offered specialized classes for people with Parkinson’s disease — found them to be effective before science could fully explain why they worked. But dance neuroscience studies are beginning to reveal the  neural mechanisms behind dance’s positive impact on motor function, cognition and mental well-being in people with a variety of neurological conditions.

“Dance is joyful and mindful for everyone,” said Julia C. Basso, one of the creators of and performers in “Epiphany Machine” and the director of Virginia Tech’s Embodied Brain Laboratory. But for those whose brains are having difficulty communicating with their bodies, “it’s especially powerful.” Despite anecdotal evidence of dance’s special brain-body connection, it has taken a while for dance neuroscience to gain momentum. Dance involves an unusually large number of brain regions — sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, creative. That makes it difficult to study, said Constantina Theofanopoulou, a dancer and neuroscientist who is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University: “It is a super complex behavior to decompose.” Technology has also been a limiting factor. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, requires that the head remain motionless, a hard thing to do while dancing. “To study the human brain in motion has been almost impossible for a long time,” Basso said.

Today it’s more possible, thanks to improvements in what’s called mobile brain body imaging. Electroencephalography caps, like those used in “Epiphany Machine,” can now monitor brain activity with impressive accuracy. And as interdisciplinary study has become more common and accepted in academia, more dancer-neuroscientists have begun to explore brain imaging in dance contexts. Theofanopoulou is part of a team of researchers who partnered with the Butoh choreographer Vangeline on “The Slowest Wave,” in which electroencephalography caps captured the brain activity of five dancers — the largest number tracked simultaneously using the caps — during a 60-minute performance. (Butoh, a form of Japanese dance theater, features extremely slow movements, streamlining the recording process somewhat.)

The brain in motion, scientists are now able to see, does its own kind of intricate dance. One of the hypotheses to emerge from this kind of research is what Basso calls “intra-brain synchrony.” Dance doesn’t just activate several different areas of the brain — sensory, cognitive, emotional — it helps them talk to one another. Dance enhances the flow of neural communication,” Basso said. That increased connectivity might explain the flow state dancers know well. Sadye Paez, a dancer and neuroscientist who is part of the research team for “The Slowest Wave,” calls it the “magic moment” — when the body and brain are so in tune that there is “a seamless connection between the thinking part and the feeling part and the moving and sensing part.”

The brain is a natural problem solver; dance, by strengthening its internal networks, can help it find better solutions. Neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, for example, break down existing neural pathways. When that happens, said Sofia Martins, a neuroscientist and psychotherapist, the brain will try to create new pathways and neurons, so it can do the same tasks using alternate resources. “Because dance is so neurologically demanding,” she said, “it’s really giving the brain more options” — helping it locate or create new neural pathways to replace the broken ones. Partner dance can be particularly good for some neurological disorders. Madeleine Hackney, an associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine who was a professional contemporary and ballroom dancer, said that external movement cues — like the touch of a dance partner’s hand — can prompt the brain to sidestep its damaged regions.