Giant Study Showing How Dancing Affects Our Brains
Dancers and audience members have been fitted with caps containing electrodes as part of a massive neuroscience study into how we respond to live performances – and the findings go far beyond what could be imagined.
The gel was cool on my scalp and I had to forget how stupid I looked because we were in the middle of serious scientific research. This was in 2021, still in the world of antibacterial products and face masks – I had long come to terms with the fact that in the name of science you can look stupid in public. The Siobhan Davies Studios dance center in south London was transformed into a science laboratory and I was fitted with what looked like an elaborate swimming cap. There were electrodes scattered throughout the cap to measure my brain activity, and gel squeezed into the holes helped connect the electrode to my scalp.
I played a small role in the pioneering five-year research project Neurolive. Led by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling, he combines neuroscience and dance to explore what happens in our brains when we watch live performances.
Spectators/guinea pigs, including myself, entered the studio, hooked up to backpacks full of technology, and watched a duet called Detective Work, where two performers, dressed in elegant green suits, danced an abstract mystery. I was very aware that I was being watched. I'm a dance critic and I felt like I was being tested. Will my brain get it right?
Dance neuroscience is a young field of study, partly due to the sheer difficulty of placing a dancer (or spectator) in a brain scanner – although some have tried: in one study, a dancer was forced to move their legs in tango positions while lying down in a 3D body scanner. Most studies have had subjects watch videos, but the advent of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) has opened up the ability to record electrical activity in the brain on site, and Neurolive is the first study of this scale to study the brains of up to 23 people simultaneously.
When we met in October this year to discuss the project, Orgs told me that the idea came about when the first affordable virtual reality systems became available, with technology that claimed to be “as good as reality, if not better.”
“Scientifically, we don’t even know how good reality is—we can’t measure it,” Orgs thought. So he and Sperling tried to understand “reality” using dance as a subject of study.
In Detective Work, Orx looked for brain-to-brain synchrony, where people's brain activity coincides, signaling that they are focused on the same thing. The production's choreographer, Soke Chimutengwende, was asked to predict when these moments of intense focus would occur, and the data showed that he guessed them almost exactly in all three shows (one conclusion: the choreographers know what they're doing). What was unexpected was that they expected to see activity in the alpha range, a relatively fast frequency of brain waves associated with attention (for example, in a lecture), but saw much slower delta waves. “Activity in the delta band is associated with internal focus, meditation, and being in tune with each other during social interactions,” says Orgs, suggesting that the experience is similar to “collective daydreaming.”
In addition to measuring their brain waves, participants filled out a questionnaire about what they saw. The general response was “confusion”, as contemporary dance is an art form that some consider to be non-obvious. But here's the interesting thing: no matter whether people liked the show or didn't like it, whether they understood what was going on or not, or whether the show was watched by a dance critic who found too many meanings in it, their brains followed a general pattern. The study also found greater synchrony between people who attended the same show, and less synchrony between people who attended the show on different days but sat in the same seats. Any performer will tell you that the energy in the audience can change every night, even if the show is the same, and research confirms this. “In other words, it may not be that important to occupy the most expensive seats,” Orgs says. “The main thing is to attend a dance performance live and with others.”
I only attended the first performance, but since then Neurolive has collaborated with the dance company Dog Kennel Hill Project and choreographer Jia-Yu Corti, and – which I unfortunately missed – put on a 16-hour performance led by choreographer Joe Fong featuring 50 dancers over two days, where spectators wore eye movement sensors as well as EEG caps. The data collected from these stages is not yet fully processed, but feedback from Fong's show suggests that the connection between people is much more important, whether the artist is technically a “good” dancer or not. “Literally, the more I look at a person, the more connected I feel,” Orgs says.
The delta waves Orgs talked about come back to mind when I video chat with New York butoh dancer Vangelin to discuss another performance piece created in collaboration with neuroscience, “The Slowest Wave.” Butoh originated in Japan in the 1960s, and this dance form is most often associated with white painted faces and bodies and almost painfully slow movements. Vangelina will tell you that there is much more to it than just dancing. It is a dance created from within the body (rather than imposed from without) in which performers address emotional and transformational states. “It became clear to me that butoh is a different state of consciousness,” she says. She initiated the project wanting to find out if science backed it up. What's really going on in her brain?
Instead of watching the audience, this time it was the dancers; for the first time, measurements were carried out on five people at once (Vangelina will bring a solo version, without EEG, to the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle on November 23). The practical side of things was semi-complicated: sweat could damage connections, as well as how to carry the equipment safely. “Each item on our head cost $150,000,” says Vangelina. “There was only one thought: don’t break it!” The data is still being cleaned (it's a lot of work to remove eye blinks and head movements), but in the process they were able to show the dancers' synchronicity in real time. “You may have the feeling that you are connected to someone,” says scientist Sadi Paez, who collaborated with the researchers, “but we can show that this magic actually happens.”
Once the results are ready—a frustratingly slow process—Vangelin will want to expand the research. She would like to work with the aging butoh masters in Japan. “It would be great to have an archive of our teachers’ brains for future generations,” she says. But in addition to her artistic curiosity, she is also interested in the medical applications of this research, the possibility of using butoh to “calm the nervous system of a society that is overexcited and experiencing excessive stress.” Having taught for 22 years and worked with people with PTSD, she says, “It is clear to me that butoh has enormous therapeutic benefits.”
When Orgs says, “I really want to demonstrate the power of dance,” he means not only the aesthetic component, but also the healing one. For example, one area where there is promising progress is dance interventions for people with Parkinson's disease. “There are a number of studies showing that dance is more effective than exercise and medication in relieving symptoms of depression,” says Orgs. In science, he adds, there is a tendency to study simpler things, such as walking or running, because they are easy to control. “But these are not the most powerful interventions, so the complexity of such projects needs to be better understood.”
We still have a lot to learn. “Even though the technology is so advanced, it can still only provide access to a fraction of what we actually experience,” says Sperling. Paes notes: “If we can't describe dance using science, then, in my opinion, this suggests that the problem is in science. There are different ways of knowing, and if we cannot describe a dance using the scientific method, it does not mean that it is not true. We just haven't developed the technology or methods to do it.”
Neurolive's latest show, coming this month, is Sperling's work called Readings of What Was Never Written. It is based on the idea of ”reading”, both in the scientific and in a more magical sense, such as reading palms or tarot cards. Sperling isn't saying Tarot is better than science, but he does see how certain kinds of knowledge—rationality, logic, language—are highly valued, and hopes this project will show that dancers have different kinds of embodied intelligence and intuition that can be just as accurate.
As a person who writes about dance, I know the feeling of revelation when you watch a performance and suddenly everything falls into place, its secrets materialize. And I also know how difficult it is to put it into words after a performance. “Knowledge” can come very quickly; it is something you feel without language. I'd like to see how this process happens in my brain. Fortunately, neuroscience is addressing just this question.
