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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Rhythm In Your Genes

By The Daily Dish
Jun 19 2008, 5:27 AM ET

A study on the neuroscience of dance:

Perhaps the most fascinating question for neuroscientists to explore is why people dance in the first place. Certainly music and dance are closely related; in many instances, dance generates sound...As a result, we have postulated a “body percussion” hypothesis that dance evolved initially as a sounding phenomenon and that dance and music, especially percussion, evolved together as complementary ways of generating rhythm. The first percussion instruments may well have been components of dancing regalia, not unlike Aztec chachayotes.

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.

The rest of today's blogging will take the form of interpretive dance. Maybe not.



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