On October 10, Staff Writer Lorelei Gorton attended Where Ideas Come From: Thought, Movement, and the Brain, an interdisciplinary conversation that brought together experts in ballet and neuroscience.

As I waited in the lobby of the Lerner Center for the Arts—technological difficulties that would later be laughingly ascribed to a “geomagnetic storm” were preventing the event from starting on time—my eyes wandered over the crowd. I was looking to see if I could spot any other dancers; after all, for a conversation on ballet and neuroscience, I was sure there had to be at least a few. I saw plenty of variety: a group of people speaking French, an old man with a Juilliard sticker, lots of wool coats and checkered pants, but I couldn’t pinpoint any ballet dancers. Although, I started thinking, was it really so visually perceptible? Was it instead, as the event was about to discuss, more of a neurological difference in our brains, from dancer to non-dancer? The question percolated in my mind as we were (after about a thirty-minute wait) ushered into the venue.

Dr. Carol Becker, the Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita at Columbia’s School of the Arts, welcomed us all to the first event in an exciting new lecture series titled “Where Ideas Come From,” a program brainstormed (no pun intended) by Becker and Dr. Daphna Shohamy, a prominent neuroscientist at Columbia (her roles include Professor of Psychology; Kavli Professor of Brain Science; Director and CEO of Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute; and Co-Director of Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science). The series, which Becker called “an experiment across intellectual boundaries,” will hold conversations that aim to unite neuroscientists from the Zuckerman Institute with artists from various disciplines, including film, visual art, and ballet, creating a dialogue between science and art that is altogether too infrequent.

Tonight’s speakers, along with Dr. Becker and Dr. Shohamy, were Dr. Daniel Wolpert, a Professor of Neuroscience at the Zuckerman Institute whose research centers around the neurological aspects of human movement, and Dr. Jennifer Homans, an author and scholar of dance who writes for The New Yorker as a Dance Critic and serves as Director of The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (which she also founded).

The discussion opened with two brief presentations from Wolpert and Homans. The first discussed the ultimate purpose of the brain, which Wolpert argued was the production of adaptable and complex movement, “the only way to affect our survival.” Movement forms the base of all our communication systems–speech, gestures, and writing–and all our sensory, memory, and cognitive functions serve to inform future movement. For Homans’ presentation, we were shown a six-minute clip of Balanchine’s famous abstract ballet (meaning it has no sets, no costumes, and no narrative) Agon, a mesmerizing, out of body experience. Homans’ choice of presentation was motivated not only by her extensive Balanchine research (she recently published a groundbreaking biography of the man, titled Mr.B) but by the specific, very precise quality of the dancing that she said reflected the high degree of physical intelligence required for ballet. 

Homans has always been interested in the medium of dance as it connects to physical knowledge. She started dancing as a child, as an escape from what she called the “word place” of the UChicago campus where she grew up. The gulf between text and movement still fascinates her. Dance, like oral history, is passed down from teacher to student. It has no language, no textual equivalent that can be used to record the complex interplay of movement, blocking, and acting that compose a ballet. “The library of dance is inside the body,” Homans said. 

How, then, are dancers able to ingest and recall all of this physical movement? Balanchine didn’t remember his own choreography—according to an anecdote related by Homans, he relied on his dancers to serve as a memory bank. Wolpert brought up studies on “chunking,” a mode of memory storage that involves three separate regions of the brain: one for memorizing individual steps, one for linking them together in sequences, and one, located in the frontal lobe, center of logic and reasoning, responsible for the “big picture”—bringing everything together. Homans said this method bears similarities to the classical training structure of a technique class, which focuses on repetition and sequential movement. You learn to do fifty tendus at barre before you even think of doing a grande battement in center; and it’s this almost second-nature familiarity with individual steps that enables a dancer to quickly learn and perform more complicated sequences. This has a scientific backing, too; in what Wolpert referred to as “use-dependent learning,” constant repetition of movement can bias a person’s motion (for example, people told to point left fifty times in a row will, when asked to point straight ahead, point diagonally left.)  

This concept of “second-nature” movement is often what’s said to distinguish professional ballet dancers from “normal” people, and what makes their movement so addicting to watch. Wolpert said that while most people only use a small fraction of the body’s possible movements (out of the 200 joints and 600 muscles available), dancers’ statistics are far higher–although he questioned, from an evolutionary perspective, why audiences view this variety of movement as beautiful, and not as odd, or abnormal. Homans attributed it to, “at the heart of it, a perception that the body is beautiful.” Of course, the apparent ease of movement with which dancers perform also plays a role. Scientifically, “beautiful” movement is connected to smoothness and precision, or a low variability, because it minimizes the force required to carry out an action (which, ultimately preserves energy and contributes to survival).

Speaking on the subject of audience reaction, Becker cited a sense of wonder and awe that occurs when she watches ballet; she wondered if it was a recognition of expertise, an innate physical understanding that I couldn’t do that; but someone in the human species can. Shohamy and Wolpert both spoke of “mirror neurons,” cells in the brain specifically made to imitate the movements of others, which have been seen to fire when people watch ballet or other physical performances (although, interestingly enough, less of these neurons are activated when participants are watching a recording). 

The floor opened to a short audience Q&A, which featured a few notable questions about the role of rhythm and the possibility of using sign language as a means of recording dance—which prompted more inspiration for future research than it did any concrete answers. “We use movement as a way to communicate everything,” Wolpert concluded. Whether it’s through gesture, classical ballet, or language, we all rely on the same universal tool—the body—to continue humanity’s long history of storytelling.

Event photos via Lorelei Gorton.