May 12, 2008

The Art and Neuroscience of Muscle Memory

Dancers have a highly developed ability to see and replicate dance moves. This skill is based on muscle memory and dancers, over time, learn to master extended dance pieces after just one or a few viewings.

In the May 2007 New York Times article, "Learning to Dance, One Chunk at a Time" Diane Solway describes how American Ballet Theatre's Angel Corella learns a new dance work:

One of the world's finest dancers, whose powerhouse technique and dramatic intensity propelled him from his native Spain to American Ballet Theater when he was still a teenager, Mr. Corella also has a rare, less visible gift: he is able to reproduce a dance simply by seeing it once -- not only his part, but everybody else's too. After observing Ms. [Gelsey] Kirkland [former ABT star], he was soon following behind her, humming as he mirrored her movements. Forty minutes after they began, he had the hundreds of steps down cold.

You can watch an excellent profile about Angel Corella, although it does not relate directly to muscle memory -- click this screen shot to be taken to YouTube:

Solway then explains the neuroscience of muscle memory:

Where initially dancers see one move and then another, eventually they merge the steps into phrases and then into longer sequences. Brain scientists refer to this process as "chunking." Dr. [Daniel] Glaser likens it to learning to tie a shoelace. First you think "left over right, right under left," and then you make a bow. But once you've learned the steps, they become one seamless movement.

"What dancers are able to do, which you and I cannot," he said, "is to take a set of those moves and turn that into one long phrase and then take a dozen of those phrases and put them into one long movement."

Kristin Sloan, creator of The Winger and a former New York City Ballet dancer, elaborates on how ballet dancers quickly process new movement sequences:

Dance is a language. Once you learn the language, you can begin to predict what steps could come next based on combinations that have become familiar to you. This is obviously very useful when it comes to ballet, where when someone says "tombé pas de bourrée glissade assemblé" you aren't thinking of each individual step on its own, because it's a recognized sequence in your ballet vocabulary. For the most part, in classical dance, there are only so many steps that can physically link to other steps based on where your body, your weight, and your momentum are at that moment. The fact that you can predict, to some extent, a handful of next possible steps, greatly cuts the amount of time it takes to learn a full sequence of steps.

The ability of dancers to remember patterns of movement always impresses me. It took about a year and a half to two years of modern dance and jazz classes before my body would start to remember dance routines taught by instructors during class. It's a very gratifying feeling to have your body magically remember a routine you have seen for the first time and then go onto the dance floor and do it. (I started dancing in my 40s and have been dancing for a few years).

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