Arousal Decrease inSleeping Beauty: Audiences' Neurophysiological Correlates to Watching a Narrative Dance Performance of two-and-a-half hours

Abstract

Watching dance is a multisensory experience. In dance, movements are intertwined with music and/or sound, costumes, the narrative, light and stage design. Recent studies have found neuroscientific evidence that a dance audience processes visual and auditory information, while mentally simulating and/or mirroring the movements. In other words, when spectators passively observe movements, their brain shows enhanced activity in areas that are also activated if they were executing the movements themselves. This paper presents an unusual exemplar of a scientific study in which motor simulation was measured in an emotionally and kinaesthetically loaded real life setting. The study illustrates two main points: 1) real-life conditions matter because they change the results and call into question the validity of laboratory based experimental conditions for research which is making claims about lived experience outside the laboratory and 2) new hypotheses emerged about the effects that the length of time spent watching dance can have on cortical excitability and action observation responses. The prevalent theory is that this mirroring process in action observation is automatic; however, it has been shown to increase with experience. It has been suggested that this mapping of observed movements onto one's own motor system helps in understanding the intention of the actions. A lot of effort is being put into gaining further insight into the role the mirror neuron system and motor simulation play in emotion regulation. One way of measuring motor simulation is by externally stimulating the motor cortex, which leads to small muscular responses that can be recorded in the form of motor evoked potentials (MEPs). Changes in the size of MEPs are an indirect measure for the level of motor corticospinal excitability and are thus used to indicate the level of subjects motor mapping simulation's in action observation. Even though the equipment to measure cortical excitability is mobile, most neuroscientific studies have been conducted in a laboratory setting that has little in common with real life – in particular a dance audience's experience in the theatre. Here, we challenged this approach by measuring spectators' brain responses in the theatre while they were watching a dress rehearsal of a commercial production of Sleeping Beauty, lasting 2.5 hours, performed by the Scottish Ballet. However high the ecological validity of this study, it is a small-scale exploratory and rather playful approach producing data that is not eligible for statistical hypothesis testing. Nevertheless, we provide a specific example of how the factors ‘time’ and ‘individuality’ can affect scientific results in artistic settings. We observed that the brain responses of our spectators in terms of cortical excitability decreased with time, were strongly individual, and did not conform to prevalent movement simulation hypotheses. The finding that motor simulation is not automatic during movement observation has important implications for the current understanding and research of mirror neuron activity. A contextual narrative may change the fronto-parietal mirror mechanism, which implies that previous findings based on controlled laboratory experiments could not automatically be transferred to real life. Interestingly though, the retrospectively reported emotional responses of one spectator partly matched his objective measures of cortical excitability attained during the dance performance. Hence, qualitative responses may be linked to quantitative responses more than one would expect, while laboratory findings may not be considered as substitutes for real life situations as previously assumed. However, this study simply highlights these points for future investigations. The observation of a decrease of cortical excitability over time could either indicate subjects' adaptation to the procedure and the consequent effects of muscle relaxation; or changes in their emotional and cognitive engagement when watching dance. In either case, in line with research in dance studies that highlights the importance of time as a relevant factor in dance performance, this study shows that time is a relevant factor in measuring spectators' responses to watching dance. This will require future attention.

Spectators’ aesthetic experience of sound and movement in dance performance: A transdisciplinary investigation.

“…While some work has explored brain activity while watching dance solos of several minutes (Grosbras, Tan, & Pollick, 2012;Jola, Abedian-Amiri, Kuppuswamy, Pollick, & Grosbras, 2012;Noble et al, 2014) or even an entire two hour ballet (Jola, Pollick & Grosbras, 2011), the current study is unique in studying the same dance coupled with different soundscapes. Related work of using ISC indicates that combining music with dance will enhance the correlation of brain activity across observers in primary visual and auditory regions compared with just watching the dance without music.…”

Neurocognitive control in dance perception and performance

“…This type of subjective approach can be communicated to the dance community and, where there is interest, such information could be used to create a dance phrase aesthetically pleasant for the The intersection of dance and brain-based models of aesthetic appreciation is one that is ripe for further inquiry. As discussed and debated elsewhere (Calvo-Merino, 2010;Jola, Pollick & Grosbras, 2011), the nascent field of neuroaesthetics offers opportunities for dancers and scientists to collaborate in order to gain a better understanding of how dance creation and expression is perceived and evaluated by audiences, and how this 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Neurocognitive control in dance 25 relationship might be modulated on both sides of the stage. As neuroimaging technologies continue to advance, we anticipate that research using scientific methods to better understand our relationship to dance will continue to attract interest from domains ranging from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cross-cultural psychology, to dance and choreography.…”

“…Another approach is to study actual dance performance from the spectators' point of view. These studies investigate how the brains of spectators who are not dancers themselves respond to watching live dance performances (Jola, Ehrenberg, & Reynolds 2011;Jola, Pollick, & Grosbras, 2011). This is indeed one of the most exciting new directions being pursued within this field, only just beginning to yield the first results.…”

A review and critical analysis of how cognitive neuroscientific investigations using dance can contribute to sport psychology

“…While some evidence suggests that visual experience alone is not enough to meaningfully impact the AON (Calvo-Merino et al, 2006), other research suggests that even when an individual observes movements that he or she could not possibly physically perform, extensive visual experience of these actions is associated with the emergence of neural representations within sensorimotor regions Jola, Pollick, & Grosbras, 2011). Jola and colleagues have recently performed a number of innovative studies that have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to further explore the impact of visual experience on dance perception (Jola et al, 2011), as well as how the context in which one observes an action impacts how sensorimotor brain regions respond when watching a complex action .…”

“…Jola and colleagues have recently performed a number of innovative studies that have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to further explore the impact of visual experience on dance perception (Jola et al, 2011), as well as how the context in which one observes an action impacts how sensorimotor brain regions respond when watching a complex action . In this work, Jola and colleagues measure motor evoked potentials (MEPs) within arm, hand or finger muscles when participants watch different kinds of dance, such as classical ballet or Bharatanatyam (a type of classical Indian dance).…”