My first blog Kaan’s Dervish Lodge is on brain research, and this blog you are at is on dancing. So it is fusion time!
I will do “Journal Club” in my blogs once in a while. It is something done at research programs/labs/ (Departments).
One presents a recent and relavant article. This post is about the article you see below. It was published at the prestigious journal (23rd out of 219 journals according to the data of 2008) Cerebral Cortex.
Cereb Cortex. 2006 Aug;16(8):1157-67. Epublication: 2005 Oct 12.
The neural basis of human dance.
Steven Brown1,2, Michael J. Martinez1 and Lawrence M. Parsons1,3
1 Research Imaging Center, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA, 2 Present address: Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, 3 Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Address correspondence to Lawrence Parsons, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TP, UK. Email: L.parsons@sheffield.ac.uk
Human dance was investigated with positron emission tomography to identify its systems-level organization. Three core aspects of dance were examined: entrainment, meter and patterned movement. Amateur dancers performed small-scale, cyclically repeated tango steps on an inclined surface to the beat of tango music, without visual guidance. Entrainment of dance steps to music, compared to self-pacing of movement, was supported by anterior cerebellar vermis. Movement to a regular, metric rhythm, compared to movement to an irregular rhythm, implicated the right putamen in the voluntary control of metric motion. Spatial navigation of leg movement during dance, when controlling for muscle contraction, activated the medial superior parietal lobule, reflecting proprioceptive and somatosensory contributions to spatial cognition in dance. Finally, additional cortical, subcortical and cerebellar regions were active at the systems level. Consistent with recent work on simpler, rhythmic, motor-sensory behaviors, these data reveal the interacting network of brain areas active during spatially patterned, bipedal, rhythmic movements that are integrated in dance.
Key Words: complex sensorimotor coordination • dance • entrainment • music • neuroimaging
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