Dance and Neuroscience - "Popping"

Found this at The Frontal Cortex. This kid is amazing. The judges loved him, too.



Here are Jonah Lehrer's comments:

While there have been some interesting studies of dance and the brain, most of this research focuses on the learning of motor movements. (Not surprisingly, expert dancers exhibit increased activity in the cortical "action observation network" when watching dances "in the movement style of which they were expert". In other words, a ballet dancer shows increased activity in the brain when watching ballet, but not when watching cheerleaders, or Merce Cunningham.)

But I couldn't find any research that would explain the bizarre, and seemingly inhuman, youtube performance above. There have been some elegant studies of brain plasticity in London taxi drivers (swollen hippocampuses) and string players (enlarged somatosensory representation for the left hand) but I'd be curious if dancers also exhibit distinct brain structures as a result of their training. I'd certainly hypothesize that increased body control depends on more precise neural maps in the somatosensory cortex.

Tags: Dance, Neuroscience, Popping, art, fitness, flexibility, neural maps, somatosensory cortex, The Frontal Cortex