Get Synched with Humanity: Dance!

Hanna Poikonen's University of Helsinki's doctoral dissertation has developed methods for understanding the processes that dance generates in the cortex. She found that dancers would make good gunfighters in that their brains react quicker to changes in music-- even faster than musicians and much faster than those who are neither musicians nor dancers. In fact, the reaction in the brain is so fast, it happens before the dancer is conscious of it. 

Dancers also showed stronger synchronization powers (our word) which link to memory and emotion which are "central to all personal interaction and self-understanding," ie, the stuff that makes us human. She reminds us that the synchronizing elements of dance are "touch and cooperation," that "without them, there can be no dance."

Flow is also an integral element of dance, the phenomena where people become fully immersed in an activity to the point that they are more relaxed while in synch with the processes on a subconscious level. Like musicians in a band or in an orchestra, once dancers' brains are in synch, seamless cooperation flows. 

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