The Neuroscience of Gesturing: Applications to Dance

 The Neuroscience of Gesturing: 

Applications to Dance

In Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021), the importance of gesture was emphasized when looking at the understanding of language in children who spoke different languages. In the paper, gesture was defined as any kind of hand movement that helped the listener understand the context or contents of a saying/sentence. What was interesting was that although the act of gesturing is widely used across almost all languages, the way someone gestures varied greatly depending on the grammatical structure of the language they spoke first. With in class demonstrations, it was very clear to see just how much additional context we can get from gesture.Through watching videos of ambiguous texts being spoken, while watching the gesture many people in the class were able to piece together additional information that was not explicitly stated. Thinking about just how much gesture plays a role in how we understand language got me thinking about how much gesture may help when understanding other things. For example, I begin to think of athletes and how many athletes will “mark” a move action when learning or planning.With a background in volleyball, I naturally began to think about how I would almost gesture out different sequences of footsteps for different spikes, sets, and digs. I believe, though, that the most common place where this is seen is within the sport of dance. 

Recently I took a drop in dance class with a friend and I saw this level of gesture everywhere. For example, after the teacher had just shown us a series of steps, many dancers in the room would half mock out the actions as if to commit them to short-term memory. And later in the class, when other groups of dancers would be performing, dancers on the side would be gesturing, with just their hands, the moves that the groups were performing. Again it seems like the gestures were helping them to remember and understand what move came next. In Foster Vander Elst et al. (2023) this gesture is studied in greater detail. The paper concludes that there is a sort of cyclic system when it comes to understanding gesture and rhythm. Rhythm or beat and gesture seem to be very closely related. “Under certain conditions, auditory processing and beat perception can elicit a compelling and pleasurable desire to move, known as groove, … [and] can have close links to music performance. For example, in dance styles such as Tap, Flamenco, or any in which body percussion plays a prominent role, the production of sound is an integral component of the dance which adds to, and becomes part of, the music.” (Foster Vander Elst et al.). It's really interesting to see how gestures can take on different forms in our lives. Gestures do not always have to be related to hands. In this case, gesture could be referring to the whole body and the movement to music. Additionally, the viewer is very important when it comes to dance. “Dance is, to a significant extent, a spectator sport. Dance observation has important functions in non-verbal communication, expressing emotions, and story-telling (Cohen and Tarr, 2015). A significant amount of communication between dancers is visual, but also occurs via coupled movement dynamics, supporting evolutionary theories of dance as a means to enable communication between and within large groups of people (Vicary et al., 2017).” (Foster Vander Elst et al.). The paper continues on to explain how view dance activates the human mirror system and can be used as a way to study the neural activity associated with dance. When a viewer watches a dance, similar neurons fire in their brain that would fire in the dancer. This opens up a small opportunity to explore how far and how accurate the human mirror system goes. The question I leave this blog with is could we possibly explore how our brains fire in situations that may be unethical or just impossible to recreate?

Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. 2101-2107. Paper presented at 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021, Virtual, Online, Austria.

Foster Vander Elst, Olivia, et al. “The Neuroscience of Dance: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 150, July 2023, p. 105197. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105197.