So You Think You Can Dance?: PET Scans Reveal Your Brain's Inner Choreography

To explore that question, we conducted the first neuroimaging study of dance movement, in conjunction with our colleague Michael J. Martinez of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, using amateur tango dancers as subjects. We scanned the brains of five men and five women using positron-emission tomography,

clipped from www.sciam.com Recent brain-imaging studies reveal some of the complex neural choreography behind our ability to dance Dance is a fundamental form of human expression that likely evolved together with music as a way of generating rhythm. It requires specialized mental skills. One brain area houses a representation of the body’s orientation, helping to direct our movements through space; another serves as a synchronizer of sorts, enabling us to pace our actions to music. So natural is our capacity for rhythm that most of us take it for granted: when we hear music, we tap our feet to the beat or rock and sway, often unaware that we are even moving. But this instinct is, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary novelty among humans. Nothing comparable occurs in other mammals nor probably elsewhere in the animal kingdom. using amateur tango dancers as subjects. We scanned the brains of five men and five women using positron-emission tomography,