As I write this, I am preparing to go out dancing with my favorite rave buddy—an enormous, muscled, gay, and larger than life acrobat, dancer, promoter, DJ, and drummer named Jacob Casselden. This is our first foray since the COVID pandemic began—I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that two whole years might pass between our last boogie and tonight’s return to the dance floor next to a thumping sound system.
Jacob certainly can’t.
“Having all nightclubs closed placed me in the deepest state of isolation that I’ve ever experienced,” he says.
The pandemic forced us all to reconsider our need for things that we might have previously taken for granted: the social buzz of bars and coffee shops, the ritual of a meal together in a restaurant, the simple joy of a beer with a friend after work. But for many of us, nothing stung more than the disappearance of live music. Films can be enjoyed in silence at home, art galleries and museums re-opened with social distancing long before vaccines were available, and we all got used to interfacing with all our loved ones via screens.
But music?
Musicians and venues did their best and switched to live-streamed concerts … But we all know it’s not the same. An indescribable and unique kind of magic materializes in the heady atmosphere of a live gig, in fields and warehouses and concert halls packed with other humans. For a lot of us, that sonic, social atmosphere is so irreplaceable we cannot imagine life without it.
“I honestly started to feel like I was going insane without live music,” says Casselden. “I became angry, I began acting out, I cried a few times. Eventually, I kind of gave up fighting the isolation and just went with it. Finally, a friend who runs a music studio saved me by offering me the space to use by myself for loud music for a day. I didn’t want to leave.”
One more thing about Casselden: He is “profoundly” deaf (or as I put it, 100 percent deaf, 100 percent gay). For him, the experience and enjoyment of music always involves moving his body, whether he’s playing the drums, twirling on stage, or bopping in a crowd. Contemplative listening sessions with a pair of headphones have never been an option; but he gets more joy out of an enormous sound system than almost anyone I know, despite not being able to “hear” a thing.
A UNIVERSAL PHENOMENON
Casselden is a special example, but his physical relationship with music is in all of us: Dance is as universal to the human species as music.
Not every human culture has agriculture, writing, or the number zero. But every human culture on the face of the earth makes music—and dances to it. And in many cultures, music and dance are so inseparable, one single word is used for both.
“The idea that music and dance are even separable is a very modern Western performer-consumer concept. It wasn’t even possible until the advent of instruments and recordings made it possible to sit motionless but still produce music,” says Dr. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. “Before instruments, if you wanted to produce music, you’d need to move your body—even early instruments were usually attached to your body or required some kind of physical movement to produce a sound, such as drumming.”
Today, the roots of that physical connection between music and movement are evident not only in the ubiquity of dancing in human cultures, but also in the behavior of all humans in their primal state: Babies instinctively move to music long before they can sing or speak. And as adults, those of us without musical training still find tapping our feet in time to beats completely irresistible— and completely subconscious.
But for many years, the role of dance in this body-mind relationship was largely overlooked by biologists—even when music was being studied like never before.
Over the past 20 years, neuroscientists have revealed the precise anatomic regions of the brain that are stimulated by music, ranging from the most ancient parts at the back (the brain stem and the cerebellum) right up to the most newly evolved at the front (the frontal cortex).
We also now appreciate that studying music can physically change our brains in a number of ways—most notably being the only activity that can strengthen connections between the right and left hemisphere in the “corpus callosum”.
Perhaps most exhilarating, research has revealed that hearing and creating music releases the same delicious chemicals in our brains and bodies that sex and drugs do: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins.
Yet until recently, dance was seldom scrutinized by scientists.
Given the ubiquity of dance, the remarkable range of forms it takes (from the high leaps of ballet to the studding taps of Kathak), and the sheer joy it gives us, this is puzzling. To be fair, the lack of research is partially due to technological limitations: Brain scans are traditionally performed on subjects lying motionless. While some EEG sensor arrays can now be worn while moving, it is still not possible to conduct an MRI on the brain or body of someone in motion.
I, however, would argue that another reason for the oversight was simply prejudice. When biologists seek to identify what makes us human—what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom—it is usually our cognitive skills that receive attention: the capacity for language; the ability to think about the past, present, and future; mathematical competence. You can tell a lot about what we think about our species by the name we have given ourselves: Homo sapiens, Latin for “wise man”. The monkey that thinks. What goes on inside our skulls is considered exceptional, while our bodies are generally regarded as unexceptional. We don’t after all have the ability to fly, bioluminesce, change color, produce venoms, or metamorphose. It seems we only remember what incredible feats the human body is capable of every four years when the Olympics come around.
EMBODIED COGNITION
Dr. Aniruddh Patel, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, has a more philosophical explanation:
“Music psychology emphasized the mental over the physical processes for a long time, probably because there was a historic turn away from behaviorism and the outward study of our actions, and more of a focus on what was happening in the mind: what processes gave rise to our experiences of the world and our perceptions,” he explains.
“The body was mostly seen as just a set of muscles and effectors that slavishly followed commands from the brain. This has now changed a lot. We now understand more about how the body has its own computational principles, and how those influence cognition.”
The term psychologists use to describe how the body can influence how the mind operates is “embodied cognition”, and increasingly neuroscientists are embracing this concept to study the ways our movements affect our minds. “A helpful phrase to illustrate this concept is ‘the hand maketh the mind,’” says professionally trained dancer-turned-psychologist Dr. Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge.
“You can think with your mind, or you can think with your body. Dancers already know this very well—particularly when it comes to choreographed dances. You have to think with your mind to learn and remember step sequences, but once you have learned them, you need to just do them,” she says. “At that point, you are best off telling the mind to go on a lovely restful holiday—leave the body’s muscle memory to take over. Overthinking will cause you to slip up.”
Dance is one of the most important ways we can “think without words”, says Clayton and her partner Professor Clive Wilkins, Artist in Residence in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.
“We are interested in how ideas flow between people wordlessly,” says Wilkins.
Ultimately, say Wilkins and Clayton, dance did not evolve because it worked well as a tool for signaling sexual fitness and attracting mates (as Darwin believed). Instead, they believe it arose as a means to tell stories. “It’s a way of communicating without words—ideas the brain maybe has difficulty with,” says Wilkins. “But the brain can recognize these movements as stories that help explain our reality.”
Professor Marc Leman of the University of Ghent in Belgium and director of the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM), who has studied music cognition for over two decades, agrees that dancing isn’t just a form of interacting—it’s a form of communicating, and a complex one.
“You really could see it as a kind of language—you can think of [dance moves] as sonic gestures, bio-social-signals that we send to others, and which they respond to with their own bio-social-signals,” says Leman.
Anthropologist Professor Steven Mithen of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom went further than this, arguing 16 years ago in his in uential book The Singing Neanderthals (2005) that dance, music, and language were once all one and the same. Drawing on evidence from neuroscience, archaeology, genetics, and psychology, he hypothesized that early hominids employed a dancing, gesticulating, sing-song form of communication he called ‘Hmmmmm’ (for holistic, manipulative, multimodal, musical, and mimetic). Eventually music and language diverged for one to express ideas (language) and another emotions (music), but today we can see vestiges of this communication form in what is known as “motherese”, the sing-song “baby talk” which is found in every—every—culture on earth.
Could dancing then be tied to the very origins of music? Is the urge to get into the groove embedded in our anatomy, programmed by evolution?
BOPPING PARROTS
These ideas bring us some way to understanding why dance would have evolved: In some way, shape, or form, it helped us communicate and form social alliances. But how might it have evolved?
In an essay published in the scientific journal Current Biology in 2016 simply titled “The evolution of dance”, Wilkins and Clayton argue that the human ability to dance hinges on our ability to imitate and mimic other people, animals, and objects.
“Dancing may only be possible because its performance exploits the neural circuitry employed in imitation,” they argue. And this would be useful: “Dancing in a synchronous manner would induce warm feelings … Being imitated makes individuals more cooperative, while being in a cooperative frame of mind makes one more likely to imitate others.”
Moreover, they say, it’s notable that the only animals that have been proven to have the ability to move in time to a beat—known as “entrainment”—are also capable of mimicry and imitation. Only a handful of animals have demonstrated the ability to move in time to music, almost all of which are birds—parrots in particular—which exhibit “vocal learning” as a core quality of their development. They learn their songs by hearing and imitating them, just as we learn to speak, sing—and dance.
Dr. Patel knows better than most that birds are capable of keeping a beat: In 2009 he published the world’s first scientific demonstration that an animal can move in time to music. In a paper modestly titled “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal”, Dr. Patel and his co-authors demonstrated that Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora), could keep time with a degree of accuracy exceeding that of most humans.
You’ve probably seen Snowball before: A video clip of him dancing to “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen has been viewed over eight million times on YouTube— alongside clips of him grooving to Michael Jackson, The Backstreet Boys, and more. Until this 2009 study, many biologists had argued that whilst some animals could compose melodies (whales, birds, and more), and some could create a rhythmic beat (crickets, frogs, and more), only humans could move in time to an external beat. Dr. Patel returned two years ago to study Snowball’s behavior (because, why not?), and reported that the bird not only has a “diverse repertoire” of 14 dance moves, he can also speed up or slow down his movements when the tempo is changed.
Patel and his co-authors believe that “spontaneous movement to dance” can appear in any species when five traits converge: complex vocal learning, the capacity for nonverbal movement imitation, the tendency to form long-term social bonds, the ability to learn complex sequences of actions, and attentiveness to communicative movements.
“Those traits very rarely come together—but they came together in our brains, which gave us this propensity to want to move in creative, flexible and rhythmic ways to beat-based music,” says Dr. Patel. “Having the ability to move to the beat of a rhythmic sound in a way that is exible, creative, and also sensitive to the timing of the beat—that is rare.”
In fact, humans are even more unique than this, argues Dr. Steven Brown, director of the NeuroArts Lab in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University in Canada. Other animals may be able to “entrain” to a beat—but only humans can both entrain to the beats of others and generate them on our own. “That combined capacity seems to be human specific,” he says. And it’s far easier to visualize how that might evolve when we think about dance as something that involves group-wide coordination—rather than individual competition.
DANCING FOR PARKINSON’S
Though today we can bounce and groove to our favorite tunes alone in our bedroom, before the invention of recorded sound it was simply not possible to dance in solitude. Just like music, dance has traditionally always required other people. The colorful ads for the original iPod 20 years ago, all bright neon colors and svelte silhouettes, may have looked shiny and aspirational. But these portrayed the phenomenon of human dancing in a manner utterly divorced from its evolutionary origins— and its biological meaning.
“The bottom line is that dance is social,” says Susie Tate, who works with Thriving Communities Carlisle to provide dance and movement therapy to stroke survivors, and people living with Alzheimer’s and other age-related conditions.
Hers is one of many organizations across the world employing “music therapy” to improve the lives of people in medically relevant ways.
Another is Dance for Parkinson’s, who since 2001 have provided dance lessons and staged performances with people living with Parkinson’s Disease, which specifically inhibits the ability of sufferers to move easily or keep the internal rhythm necessary for even simple acts such as walking.
“It’s difficult for people with PD to maintain a walking speed—but music has a way of providing a very strong and delicious external cue that they can easily latch onto,” says David Leventhal, Program Director of Dance for PD, which now operates in 26 countries. “They can start to regulate their movements to that rhythm.”
Seeing is believing: In Capturing Grace, the 2014 documentary that follows one group of Dance for PD participants from inception to performance, Cyndy Gilbertson demonstrates that she can’t walk across her living room. But—if she puts on music—she can waltz. “Music is like a red carpet that folds out in front of them,” says Leventhal.
As for Jacob and I, we had an incredible night (if you’re a music nerd—we saw Max Cooper in a London venue with a Funktion-One sound system—sonic candy for techno fans) which was to be expected, because Jacob is the most fun person ever to dance with. All of us feel music with our bodies as well as our ears, but Jacob feels it more than anyone I know—and because of his hyper somatic relationship with music, he can articulate more in one sentence than I can with this entire piece about what it really means to dance:
“I feel everything in every inch of me—my whole body is an instrument,” he explains. “Life is a rhythm, and I am the rhythm.”