Movin' Easy Dancewear

Brain maps are ways that we connect with our bodies.  They differ for each person and affect their awareness and involvement in the healing process.  Dancers have unique access to brain maps by connecting physical, emotional, spacial, and intentional parts of the brain.  For this reason, I suggest practitioners who have an experience with dance or experience with working with dancers.

Here is a rough list of brain maps for identifying healing:

POINTS OF PAIN.  This is the easiest to identify.  This map can be accessed by deep pressure therapy and by the opposite principle of light touch used in accupressure and Craniosacral Therapy.

MERIDIANS or connecting lines between pain points.  The awareness of these maps can be developed by work with accupuncturists, chiropractors, and Craniosacral therapists.  Often a pain in one part of the body is related to or caused by a dysfunction in another part of the body.

ANATOMY MAPS.  An awareness of how muscles, bones, and tendons connect is developed in Pilates which concentrates on stretch and strength and  Zhealth which activates the nerves deep within the joints.  Massage and Craniosacral Therapy adds more information and sensation.

MOVEMENT MAPS.  For healing, crossing the mid line of the body activates more healing energy.  I use a healing movement from Tai Chi Chuan to encourage free movement of brain signals throughout my body.  Palms facing each other, I move them in figure eight patterns crossing my body from side to side.  My arms criss cross my body traveling up above my head and down to my knees.  To double the crossing of the mid-line, I turn my  head and hips towards the opposite direction my hands are moving.  Dance is a way to access and develop these maps as they connect to emotional areas of the brain.

LEFT BRAIN/RIGHT BRAIN MAPS.  Healing can be transfered from one side of the body to the other by moving the parallel healthy area on one side of the body to train a dysfunctional or injured part on the other side.

TOUCH MAPS.  Touching oneself and being touched activates an added attention to areas that need healing.  Touch maps can be activiated by the memory of the places that were touched during significant sessions of massage, Craniosacral therapy, chiropractic, osteopathic adjustments, and even use of electrical and magnetic devices.

HEAT MAPS.  An awareness of parts of the body that hold more or less heat is subtle but can be seen in imaging devices and discovered in accupuncture and through Craniosacral Therapy as well as other hands on healing arts.  Training can give access to these maps.

LIGHT MAPS are a result of meditation that allows a person at rest to mentally explore their body in detail and bring bright light to an area that needs healing.  Some training in prayer and meditation is suggested in order to deal with unexpected intensities within us.

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My wish-A Dance Brain Gym for everyone.   24 hours a day.  Drop in or set an appointment with a professional.  Exercises, equipment,  experimentation and exploration opportunities.  All ages, all sizes, all physical abilities including handicapped.

Here are some of the needs that would be met:

Newborns need a variety of stimulus to build their brains.   Dance and music provide the variety of movements,  rhythms, and emotions that they need.

Children and Teens need the challenged to connect emotions with learning and with physical exertion.

Adults need the release and fun of dance and music to reduce stress and open their minds beyond themselves.

Seniors need to renew and build their brains.  Dance and music are obvious ways to do this safely while encouraging exuberance and delight.

Dance training builds specific brain connections using sequences and movements that are unique from other activities.

At the core of dance is the exploration of a wider variety of movements than other goal oriented sports.  Dance uses the complete range of motion in every joint and every body part.  This is especially important for the child whose brain is able to build maps of infinite variety and also for the aging who benefit from more variety of brain connections.

Besides the sheer variety of movement, dance is detailed training for the coordination of hips and shoulders and also for  crossing the mid-line of the body, both known to build superior connections in the brain.

Crossing the mid-line of the body is a key element of dance using circular motion and training each body section-head, shoulders, rib cage, hips, legs, arms, feet, and even eyes- to move together or in opposite directions.

Coordination of shoulders and hips is the essential learning of a growing child who learns to roll over and to crawl.  Dance uses detailed exercises to build on that learning and to increase effecient body awareness and coordination.

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

Unlike music, however, dance has a strong capacity for representation and imitation, which suggests that dance may have further served as an early form of language. Indeed, dance is the quintessential gesture language. It is interesting to note that during all the movement tasks in our study, we saw activation in a region of the right hemisphere corresponding to what is known as Broca’s area in the left hemisphere. Broca’s area is a part of the frontal lobe classically associated with speech production. In the past decade research has revealed that Broca’s area also contains a representation of the hands.

This finding bolsters the so-called gestural theory of language evolution, whose proponents argue that language evolved initially as a gesture system before becoming vocal. Our study is among the first to show that leg movement activates the right-hemisphere homologue to Broca’s area, which offers more support for the idea that dance began as a form of representational communication.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance&page=3

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

Perhaps the most fascinating question for neuroscientists to explore is why people dance in the first place. Certainly music and dance are closely related; in many instances, dance generates sound. Aztec danzantes in Mexico City wear leggings containing seeds from the ayoyotl tree, called chachayotes, which make a sound with every step. In many other cultures, people put noise-making objects—from taps to castanets to beads—on their bodies or clothes while they dance. In addition, dancers frequently clap, snap and stomp. As a result, we have postulated a “body percussion” hypothesis that dance evolved initially as a sounding phenomenon and that dance and music, especially percussion, evolved together as complementary ways of generating rhythm. The first percussion instruments may well have been components of dancing regalia, not unlike Aztec chachayotes.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance&page=3

Dance builds a connection between imagination and the use of the body.  The studies noted in Scientific American, combined with the passion and emotion of dance make dancing unique.

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M Parsons have to say:

Both investigations highlight the fact that learning a complex motor sequence activates, in addition to a direct motor system for the control of muscle contractions, a motor-planning system that contains information about the body’s ability to accomplish a specific movement. The more expert people become at some motor pattern, the better they can imagine how that pattern feels and the more effortless it probably becomes to carry out.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance&page=3

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

Watching dance fires the brain and even more so when the viewer has learned the style of dance they are watching.  Here is what Scientific American has to say:

Investigators have found that when people watch simple actions, areas in the premotor cortex involved in performing those actions switch on, suggesting that we mentally rehearse what we see—a practice that might help us learn and understand new movements. Researchers are examining how widely humans rely on such imitation circuits.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance&page=2

Dance and music combined fires the brain more than either movement alone or music alone. 

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

Next we compared our dance scans to those taken while our subjects performed tango steps in the absence of music. By eliminating brain regions that the two tasks activated in common, we hoped to reveal areas critical for the synchronization of movement to music. Again this subtraction removed virtually all the brain’s motor areas. The principal difference occurred in a part of the cerebellum that receives input from the spinal cord. Although both conditions engaged this area—the anterior vermis—dance steps synchronized to music generated significantly more blood flow there than self-paced dancing did.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance&page=2

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

We believe that the precuneus contains a kinesthetic map that permits an awareness of body positioning in space while people navigate through their surroundings. Whether you are waltzing or simply walking a straight line, the precuneus helps to plot your path and does so from a body-centered or “egocentric” perspective.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance

Here is what Steven Brown and Lawrence M. Parsons say in Scientific American:

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  Our talent for unconscious entrainment lies at the core of dance, a confluence of movement, rhythm and gestural representation. By far the most synchronized group practice, dance demands a type of interpersonal coordination in space and time that is almost nonexistent in other social contexts.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-dance