Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

Abstract

Throughout history, dance has maintained a critical presence across all human cultures, defying barriers of class, race, and status. How dance has synergistically co-evolved with humans has fueled a rich debate on the function of art and the essence of aesthetic experience, engaging numerous artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists. While dance shares many features with other art forms, one attribute unique to dance is that it is most commonly expressed with the human body. Because of this, social scientists and neuroscientists are turning to dance and dancers to help answer questions of how the brain coordinates the body to perform complex, precise, and beautiful movements. In the present paper, we discuss how recent advances in neuroscientific methods provide the tools to advance our understanding of not only the cerebral phenomena associated with dance learning and observation but also the neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation associated with watching dance. We suggest that future work within the fields of dance neuroscience and neuroaesthetics have the potential to provide mutual benefits to both the scientific and artistic communities.

Different contributions of visual and motor brain areas during liking judgments of same- and different-gender bodies

“…Previous studies have shown that watching the moving body of other individuals implies mapping their motor, sensory and emotional states onto the observer's bodily states and that this shared representation is one of the source of body aesthetic appreciation (for review, see Cross & Ticini, 2012;Ticini et al, 2015;Freedberg & Gallese 2007). The extension of this shared representation is dependent upon the commonalities of action (i.e., motor repertoire; Calvo-Merino et al, 2005;Aglioti et al, 2008;Makris & Urgesi, 2015) and form (i.e., ethnicity; Müller et al 2011;Avenanti et al, 2010) parameters between the observed and the observer's body.…”

“…Nevertheless, other dimensions were relevant in specific domains, for example interestingness and suspensefulness in literature (Knoop et al, 2016). While similar semantic analyses are lacking in the domain of body aesthetics, the "liking" dimension has been widely used in neuroscientific study of the appreciation of the human body, for example in dance, (Kirsch et al, 2015;Cross and Ticini, 2012) and it has been associated to the processing of essential kinematics aspects of the movements, such as speed, and movement direction, at both behavioural and brain levels (Calvo-Merino et al, 2008;Cross et al, 2011).…”

“…Based on previous findings (Cazzato et al, 2014), we expected that EBA-rTMS should modulate the aesthetic preference of different-, but not same-gender bodies. No specific hypothesis regarding the direction of the effects of dPMC could be made on the basis of previous studies, although the embodiment perspective on body aesthetic perception (Cross & Ticini, 2012;Ticini et al, 2015) would claim that the involvement of dPMC should be greater for those bodies that are more similar to the observer (i.e., same-gender models).…”

Conceptualising Kinaesthesia – Making Movement Palpable

“…Research on movement qualities has shown that training in perceiving movement is pivotal for how movement is engaged in human-computer interaction (Mentis & Johansson, 2013). Similarly, in neuroscience findings point to that human perception and understanding of movement is conditioned by whether the person themselves have performed the movement (Cross & Ticini, 2012). In our projects, it was thus fundamental not to try and impose meaning upon the movements that were being created.…”

Identidades en movimiento: la danza y la experiencia del sujeto en cinco bailarinas-estudiantes universitarias

“…(Cross 2011;7) Si se entiende de este modo, un paradigma neuro-biológico no es una reducción o una simplificación de ninguna manera sino un añadido desde la evidencia a la compleja reflexión sobre la condición del conocimiento, o si se quiere, sobre las condiciones en las que el conocimiento es posible.…”