The more I think about how the Wyymi program will work, the more I become convinced that music, rhythm and movement must play a integral part of it. Rhythm stimulates the brain subconsciously, how often have you found yourself tapping your feet in time to music without ever consciously starting? It is in part a process called entrainment, where the body responds to and synchronizes with a external rhythm. Unfortunately this is an area populated by a lot of pseudo-science and snake oil with hypnosis machines and biaural beats being hyped as solutions to every medical problem you can think of.
As well as the snake oil, there is genuine research into how our bodies respond to rhythm and what, if any, use it has in practical neurology. Dr Kevin McGrew Tic Toc Talk blog carries lots of research on the subject. Other research include this new article from Scientific American, So You Think You Can Dance? that used ingenious methods to allow a PET brain scan to be done on people dancing. The study's authors have some interesting things to say about the cerebellum:
The principal difference occurred in a part of the cerebellum that receives input from the spinal cord. Although both conditions engaged this area—the anterior vermis—dance steps synchronized to music generated significantly more blood flow there than self-paced dancing did.
Albeit preliminary, our result lends credence to the hypothesis that this part of the cerebellum serves as a kind of conductor monitoring information across various brain regions to assist in orchestrating actions. The cerebellum as a whole meets criteria for a good neural metronome: it receives a broad array of sensory inputs from the auditory, visual and somatosensory cortical systems (a capability that is necessary to entrain movements to diverse stimuli, from sounds to sights to touches), and it contains sensorimotor representations for the entire body.
The same article goes on to consider why humans dance. Whilst we have found creatures in the animal kingdom than exhibit human like behavior from tool use to waging war, we have never found an animal that makes music and dances to it. Why is this and what part does it play in making us human?
Unlike music, however, dance has a strong capacity for representation and imitation, which suggests that dance may have further served as an early form of language. Indeed, dance is the quintessential gesture language. It is interesting to note that during all the movement tasks in our study, we saw activation in a region of the right hemisphere corresponding to what is known as Broca’s area in the left hemisphere. Broca’s area is a part of the frontal lobe classically associated with speech production. In the past decade research has revealed that Broca’s area also contains a representation of the hands.
This finding bolsters the so-called gestural theory of language evolution, whose proponents argue that language evolved initially as a gesture system before becoming vocal. Our study is among the first to show that leg movement activates the right-hemisphere homologue to Broca’s area, which offers more support for the idea that dance began as a form of representational communication.
What role might the homologue to Broca’s area have in enabling a person to dance? The answer does not appear to involve speech directly. In a 2003 study Marco Iacoboni of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues applied magnetic brain stimulation to disrupt function in either Broca’s area or its homologue. In both cases, their subjects were then less able to imitate finger movements using their right hand. Iacoboni’s group concluded that these areas are essential for imitation, a key ingredient in learning from others and in spreading culture. We have another hypothesis as well. Although our study did not involve imitative movements per se, dancing the tango and copying finger actions both demand that the brain correctly order series of interdependent movements. Just as Broca’s area helps us to correctly string together words and phrases, its homologue may serve to place units of movement into seamless sequences.
How we integrate rhythm and dance into Wyymi, I don't know yet, but I do know it will be there.
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