Mobile brain imaging in butoh dancers: from rehearsals to public performance

Abstract

Dissecting the neurobiology of dance would shed light on a complex, yet ubiquitous, form of human communication. In this experiment, we sought to study, via mobile electroencephalography (EEG), the brain activity of five experienced dancers while dancing butoh, a postmodern dance that originated in Japan. We report the design, methods and practical execution of a highly interdisciplinary project that required the collaboration of dancers, engineers, neuroscientists, musicians, and multimedia artists, among others. We also share the raw EEG data from our live recordings as well as the code we used to generate a live visualization of the dancers' brain activity on a screen, via an artistic brain-computer interface. We describe how we envision that the data could be used to address several hypotheses, such as that of interbrain synchrony or the motor theory of vocal learning. Being, to our knowledge, the first study to report synchronous and simultaneous recording from five dancers, we expect that our findings will inform future art-science collaborations, as well as dance-movement therapies.

An EEG Dataset of Subject Pairs during Collaboration and Competition Tasks in Face-to-Face and Online Modalities

“…Other studies also delve into brain synchronization during creative performances. In [14], inter-brain synchrony is studied between three subjects forming three pairs, while [15] studied the same synchrony with five subjects and three pairs during a musical performance and a dance performance, respectively.…”