Abstract

There is a rising scientific interest in the neuroscience behind contemplative practices (see e.g., Vago and Silbersweig, 2012 for a review), including movement-based practices such as yoga and tai chi. Given that, it becomes important to ask how such contemplative practices differ from Western movement practices such as dance. In both dance training and contemplative movement, one learns to control the body very precisely, and this requires an assortment of mental skills as well. As a practitioner of both classical ballet and contemplation, and as a neuroscientist who studies contemplation, I will examine how the neural and mental causes and consequences of movement training differ between dance and contemplation. Ballet, rather than modern dance, serves as a good contrast for contemplative practice, because modern dance itself has been influenced substantially by contemplative practice (Hay, 2000). I will compare classical ballet and movement-based contemplative practice on the dimensions of (i) cultivation of attention, (ii) development of interoception, (iii) cultivation of meta-cognition, and (iv) emotion regulation. To date, there are limited studies of movement-based practices, for the obvious reason that movement tends to create artifacts in neuroimaging and EEG measures (e.g., Gwin et al., 2010). I will point out important gaps in our neuroscientific understanding of these phenomena. The results have implications for how we conduct studies of contemplative practitioners and dancers.

Highlights

  • There is a rising scientific interest in the neuroscience behind contemplative practices, including movementbased practices such as yoga and tai chi

  • There is a rich literature on how contemplative practice trains sustained attention (MacLean et al, 2010), attentional stability (e.g., Lutz et al, 2009; van Vugt and Jha, 2011), the ability to deal with conflicting information (Jha et al, 2007), and so on

  • While most of the research on attention has been done on sitting meditation, embodied practices such as tai chi have been shown to affect attention as well (e.g., Kerr et al, 2008)

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Summary

Introduction

There is a rising scientific interest in the neuroscience behind contemplative practices (see e.g., Vago and Silbersweig, 2012 for a review), including movementbased practices such as yoga and tai chi. The training in ballet too requires substantial attentional focus, since it involves sustained attention to the details of muscle tension and location of body parts, situational awareness of where the other dancers are, and memorization of movement sequences.

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