It involves a holistic planning with motor behavior, emotional, sensory and cognitive.
“The most authentic expression of a people is in their dances and music. Bodies never lie”
Agnes De Mille
Thedance as a cultural process, social and motorit's a much more important activity, complex and instinctive than is commonly thought. In fact, there are specific researchers on dance neuroscience, that pose it as a primitive function that can also be observed in animals such as birds and dolphins. That is to say, it is an instinctive process not exclusive to our species. On the other hand, many researchers describe dancing as a prelinguistic intersubjective communication phenomenon. Fulfilling acommunicational and gregarious function, since the beginning of our species.
Dancing requires, usually, of a basic music that at the same timecontains rhythm and harmony. Initially, Homo sapiens would have used the rhythms as the basis of the dance; especially in tribal contexts. Ritual processes are considered to contain a fixed structure of dancing. Later, through cultural accumulation, the social context generatedmore space for harmonies and metric changes, with greater complexity in creation
Dance has instinctive and other conscious-rational processes. In other words, it requires procedural activities, but also of learning and of a certainimmediate decision making, basis of your creativity.
Within this context, tango is considered one of the most creative dances, declared a World Heritage Site in the year 2008. So many of thecognitive studies of dancing, are made through tango. further, tango is used in instances of neurological and / or motor rehabilitation.
The group led by Steven Brown from McMaster University studied withpositron emission tomography to these dancersand he was able to gather very interesting questions. For example, when you dance, the input of musical information goes directly to the thalamus ( medial geniculate body) and to secondary auditory areas of the temporal cortex; communicating this information to the motor system: vermis of the cerebellum and spinal cord. All this before this information reaches consciousness.
In other words, the motor system learns very quickly and unconsciously of the dance act. The auditory areas recognize the musical and the motor areas of coordination are activated in an interconnected way.. At that time the extrapyramidal coordinating system is also turned on., that regulates the sequence and the metric of the movement. The internal parietal cortex is also activated together (precuneo), that unifies our body sensation with the limbs.
Dance is not just movement with abasic music: is a complex action involving holistic behavior with motor planning, emotional, sensory and cognitive; that's why a multifunctional expression. In it plays a key role intersubjectivity with the partner and with the public in the case of an exhibition.
Dance is special because it generates processes of rhythm changes, of intersubjectivity and anticipation and error processes. When she is joint she uses certain “prediction” to know what is happening to others and to make decisions asthe bodies are moving. At the physiological level, Mirror neurons participate in this activity, which are activated when the other does the activity., even when the person observing is not doing it at that precise moment.
When moving through music we use different functions: themotivation, attention, the motor center for motor planning and execution and sensory perception(in particular the “proprioception”, which is the conscious and unconscious perception of where we are located ourselves in space). Well then, almost all the functions of our brain and cerebellum are active during the performance of the dance. Thanks to this, our body can express itself through music and relate sound to function and the art of movement..
On the other hand, also generates amemory accumulationthat allows us to remember the movement made and thus generate messages both in our consciousness and in the unconscious motor learning memory that, at the same time, enables us to learn a certain complex movement and then perform it. It is so, once learned, It is possible to unleash emotional memory in a creative process and associate it with special music and then realize that we have improved our expression and that we were able to give it an artistic context.
A relevant project called “NeuroTango” was developed bySuzanne Dikkerfrom New York University (NYU) in which he considers tango as a paradigmatic dance to evaluate the functionality of dancing. In this study we observe the subjective integration and complex electroencephalographic synchronization: couples who knew and had experience together worked much more synchronized than couples who danced without prior mutual knowledge, even without music and even when they just made them imagine they were dancing. One of the explanations for this unit is that tango has great emotional and motor connectivity., causing the couple to be conceived as a unit by the nervous system.
Perhaps it is time to follow the precursors of applied dance as a method for the development of healthy people and to help those suffering from problems of different kinds, not just neurological. Given its complexity, tango is one of themost chosen toolsfor these processes. Just as there is university training in music therapy, Dance therapy should be thought of as an important alternative for body and brain work.
Other studies have shown improvement in patients withParkinson's disease with tango. This dance has a very creative premise, in addition to the conventional routine of any dance; further activating the Brain, especially in patients with moderately conserved cognition.
Dance therapy in general is convenient, because in diseases that affect the nervous system, unconsciously triggers cognitive and emotional motor stimulation mechanisms that are still preserved. Dance is then a process that seems innate and culturally prelinguistic in Homo Sapiens, that acquires more specific cognitive edges, through culture and social fact.
Source: Ignacio Brusco * – https://www.baenegocios.com/ – 11 March 2020
*Psychiatrist and Neurologist. Associate Professor. UBA. Humanas Foundation. INEAAR-CONICET
