Articles
Live Music’s Charms, Soothing Premature Hearts (NY Times)
April 15, 2013
Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City led the research, conducted in 11 hospitals, which found that live music can be beneficial to premature babies. In the study, music therapists helped parents transform their favorite tunes into lullabies.
The researchers concluded that live music, played or sung, helped to slow infants’ heartbeats, calm their breathing, improve sucking behaviors important for feeding, aid sleep and promote states of quiet alertness. Doctors and researchers say that by reducing stress and stabilizing vital signs, music can allow infants to devote more energy to normal development.
Erik says: There are many breakthroughs in our scientific understanding of how music affects the brain and our emotional state. It is becoming more obvious that we may be genetically "programed" to be affected by music, rather than just learning how to be affected by music later in life.
Your Brain on Fiction (NY Times)
March 17, 2012
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active.
Reports in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.
Erik says: Perhaps there is something about fiction that stimulates our brain uniquely. Could dancing to music on the radio (a fictious story) or even dancing a feigned emotional dance also stiumulate our brain in the same way?
Why Bilinguals Are Smarter (NY Times)
March 17, 2012
Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. In a study bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating greater mental efficiency.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Erik says: Similar findings have occured with dance. Although dance itself is not considered a "language" by scientific standards, perhaps the brain treats dance and language similarly as it diversifies and broadeds the neurological pathways in the brain.
An Irish Tradition With an Only-in-America Star (NY Times)
March 17, 2012
Meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.
in 2010, when he became the first person of color to win the world championship for Irish dancing — the highest honor in that small and close-knit world — and a group of male dancers in their 70s, all of them Irish, offered their congratulations.
"You have two lives — the Irish dance world and the real world where you live every day,” Ms. Goldberg said. In the world of dance, “you found a place where you’re comfortable and people don’t look at you in a certain way.”
Erik says: Dance has an amazing way of transcending racial stereotypes, economics and nationalities. This story is exemplary of the power of music and dance to bond people of different backgrounds and make people more sympathetic to each other.
How Massage Heals Sore Muscles (NY Times)
Feb 6, 2012
They [Researchers] found that massage reduced the production of compounds called cytokines, which play a critical role in inflammation. Massage also stimulated mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside cells that convert glucose into the energy essential for cell function and repair.
Erik says: I've used massage to recover from gruelling rehearsal weeks or just as regular maintenance. For me, getting a massage is like putting oil in your car. If I don't do it, I eventually run into problems that take longer to solve. In our very own dance community we have theraputic massage specialists, one of my favorites is Bobby Nieto.
The Physicist Who Figured Out Ballet (discovermagazine.com)
September 11, 2008
Ken Laws is a professor emeritus of physics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also has a very serious case of balletomania. When his daughter and son decided to take ballet classes as children, so did he. After his children stopped taking ballet, Laws continued for another three decades.
Early on, frustrated with instructions from his teachers that he considered impressionistic, Laws started applying his knowledge of physics to jetés, fouettés, and other balletic motion. Conservation of angular momentum is perhaps the most important physical principle in ballet, but there’s more to ballet than rotation.
Now on a different stage, applause of a different kind (Real Estate Weekly)
March 27, 2013
In reflection, Novoa says while the stage and the applause may be different, some of the techniques she had to employ as a dancer so long ago, have remained the same. To work in the real estate business like dancing on the stage, requires a supreme amount of concentration in order to succeed, she said.
Erik says: Perhaps I'm biased about this article because it's about my mom, but I truely believe that dance gives a strong sense of consentration. Maybe the deep and complex synaptic connections that are made as a dancer can help us in our business environments.
Music, It's a Matter of Trust (Market Street)
“We know that music affects people’s behavior, their moods, their emotions,” Gefen says. “The reason happy music is played in the supermarket is so people buy more. The reason that you go into an elevator and hear soft music is because you are entering a claustrophobic metal box that can plunge you to your death. It’s not for entertainment; it’s to calm you down.
It’s been said that the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. But according to David Gefen, an MIS professor at LeBow, playing music can help; it just depends on the tune.
Erik says: It seems intuitive that music affects our emotions and our state of mind. Recent studies are confirming these feelings. What is not obvious is how music is used to manipulate our brain chemistry, thoughts and desires. Advirtisers have been using music for years. I'm sure that good dancers are able to tap into their emotional state (driven by the music) to connect and build trust with their partners to create a good, emotionally-connected dance.
Couple handcuffed, jailed for dancing on subway platform (NY Post)
It was nearly midnight when Stern and Hess, a film-industry prop master, headed home last July from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing. As they waited for the train, a musician started playing steel drums on the nearly empty platform and Stern and Hess began to feel the beat.
The cops asked for ID, but when Stern could only produce a credit card, the officers ordered the couple to go with them — even though the credit card had the dentist’s picture and signature.
When Hess began trying to film the encounter, things got ugly, Stern said.
“We brought out the camera, and that’s when they called backup,” she said. “That’s when eight ninja cops came from out of nowhere.”
Hess was allegedly tackled to the platform floor, and cuffs were slapped on both of them. The initial charge, according to Stern, was disorderly conduct for “impeding the flow of traffic.”
How Working the Muscles May Boost Brainpower (NY Times)
Scientists at the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging recently set out to examine whether changes in muscles prompted by exercise might subsequently affect and improve the brain’s ability to think. “We wondered whether peripheral triggers might be activating the cellular and molecular cascades in the brain that led to improvements in cognition,” says Henriette van Praag, the investigator at the National Institute on Aging who led the study.
Muscles are, of course, greatly influenced by exercise. Muscle cells respond to exercise by pumping out a variety of substances that result in larger, stronger muscles. Some of those compounds might be entering the bloodstream and traveling to the brain, Dr. van Praag says.
Erik says: A good night of dancing Hustle or upbeat West Coast Swing might constitute the type of exercise that helps promote brainpower.