Thinking with the Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience[1]

A New Book by Sandra Minton and Rima Faber

Blog post by Rima Faber

When Sandra Minton and I first discussed co-authoring a book on research about dance and the brain, I thought, “What research? There isn’t enough research to fill a book!” Notwithstanding Anne Green Gilbert’s Brain Dance and Glenna Batson’s expert knowledge in her book, Body and Mind in Motion, I thought collecting enough additional good neuroscience about dance to fill the pages of a book would be a fruitless struggle.

But, we as dance educators know the many deep and complex critical thought processes involved in embodying dance: observation, attention, imaging and imagination, memory, abstraction, executive thinking, critical thought, attention, emotion, problem solving, and all of the 21^st Century Skills.[2]  Since the turn of the Millennium there has been an explosion of neurological research focused on understanding cognitive activities, so we decided to concentrate our book on the neurology of thinking and learning inherent in creating, performing, analyzing, and connecting dance to meaning!

Sandra and I became interested in brain function back in the 1970s. In my case, my sister suffered a Broca’s area stroke in 1976, and I asked the doctors so many questions that two residents lent me their textbooks. I have since followed a great amount of the popular-style research about the brain. I knew Sandra as a highly respected dance educator who has written four books. She proved to be a beaver of a researcher.

The structure of the book became clear as we worked. Each chapter focuses on a major thought process, and is subdivided into more specific sections. For instance, the chapter for memory includes sections on short term memory, long term memory, spatial memory, emotional memory, recalling, and cuing. Each section throughout the book includes an introduction to the process, the brain networks involved, application to educational classroom pedagogy, embodiment in movement and dance, and concludes with movement explorations and experiences to internalize the information.

Sandra and I are both experienced performers, choreographers, and dance educators. We experience movement as an artistic communicative language that expresses our thoughts, and so the book became focused on how the brain transmits thought into action through the body. As seasoned teachers, we also are aware how this transfers to best practices for teaching methods in the classroom. The book contains a great amount of practical research for transmitting understanding through bodily movement. The improvisational movement explorations at the end of each section embody the information. For the most part they are entry level movement experiences for readers new to dance, but can be easily embellished for experienced dancers.

The book is directed mainly toward dance educators who wish to understand how students learn, how to develop the brain through dance experiences, and educators who wish to use movement as a teaching tool in their classrooms with an understanding of its benefits to intelligence and learning. We hope neurologists will be inspired to explore cognition in dance, currently an undervalued and under-researched topic.  

Indeed, the Dana Foundation for brain research dismissed the study of dance in relation to intelligence in their four million dollar 2004-2008 initiative on the arts because they considered dance an art form “embedded” in life.[3] Their research focused, instead, on how music and visual arts increased intelligence and enhanced learning. The research for dance, by Emily Cross and Scott Grafton, focused on observation. To summarize their findings: people who watch dance can learn a dance sequence, and people who physically perform the movements can learn dance better. However, their subjects observed a dance musical video. This means the observations were accompanied by the variables of music with words, which were not factored in the study. I am not sure why the Dana Institute didn’t immediately realize the addition of music and words greatly compromised the outcomes of the observation studies. Perhaps subjects remembered the movements from cuing the words or music, not from visual sight. I don’t know of anyone, to date, who has questioned this.[4]

Stephen Brown executed another well-publicized study touted by Scientific American as research on the tango.[5] He presented his work at the Learning and the Brain organization conference on “The Creative Brain” (2009). Brown’s study focused on the neurological entrainment necessary to repeat a simple basic box step (neither a tango step nor creativity). He used a static brain imaging methodology of subjects lying horizontally on a bed following a box step pattern painted on a board placed vertically at their feet. The research methodology was well-executed as a good beginning exploration.[6]

According to Dr. Robert Shulman, Sterling Professor (Emeritus) of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University who wrote an appreciative Foreword to our book, Thinking with the Dancing Brain has bridged the Cartesian duality between body and mind. “Faber and Minton’s fusion of movement and thought is based on an understanding of dance as thoughtful movement….We are well on to fusing the physical world with the brain when we have a degree of understanding such that as described by Faber and Minton in their analysis of teaching dance as a mental and mechanical process. Their conviction that mental process are extricable from movement when teaching dance has led them to relate teachable components in terms of mental activities that are traditionally assigned to the brain.”[7] Shulman finds that “These considerations have generated questions that were prohibited by the dualism in which thought is mapped onto the brain, questions that the present book resolves about the role of movement and thought.”[8]

You can purchase Thinking with the Dancing Brain on amazon.com here.

You can also purchase the book through Rowan & Littlefield here. Through December 31, 2016, use the promotional code RLEGEN16 to receive a 20% discount.

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[1] Faber, Rima and Sandra Minton. Thinking with the Dancing Brain: Embodying Neuroscience (MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

[2] Faber, Rima. Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts (2005) as Compared to the 21st Century Skills,

(Washington, D.C.: NDEO, 2012).

[3] Scott Grafton and Emily Cross, “Dance and the Brain,” in Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition, eds. Carolyn Asbury and Barbara Rich (New York/Washington, D. C.: Dana Press, 2008), 61.

[4] Cross, The Neurocognition of Dance, Mind, Movement and Motor Skills; Scott Grafton and Emily Cross, “Dance and the Brain,” in Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition, eds. Carolyn Asbury and Barbara Rich (New York/Washington, D. C.: Dana Press, 2008), 61-69.

[5] Brown, Stephen. “Tango and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Dance”. Scientific American. 

[6] Brown, Stephen, Michael J. Martinez, and Lawrence M. Parsons. The Neural Basis of Human Dance.  (UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), Cerebral Cortex 16: 1157-1167.

[7] Shulman, Robert G. “Forward”, Thinking with the Dancing Brain. (USA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), xi-xii.

[8] Shulman, Robert G. “Forward”, Thinking with the Dancing Brain. (USA, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), xii.

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