The brains of dancers learning new choreography were imaged using the functional MRI at 91亚色
鈥淧ractice makes perfect鈥 may be a clich茅 but a new brain study out of 91亚色 affirms this age-old adage.
Faculty of Health researchers looked at of professional ballet dancers to measure the long-term effects of learning.
鈥淲e wanted to study how the brain gets activated with long-term rehearsal of complex dance motor sequences,鈥 said Professor , who studies and supports people with Parkinson鈥檚 disease. 鈥淭he study outcome will help with understanding motor learning and developing effective treatments to rehabilitate the damaged or diseased brain.鈥
For the study, 11 dancers (19 to 50 years of age) from the were asked to visualize dance movements to music, while undergoing fMRI scanning. measured Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) contrasts at four time points over 34 weeks, when they were learning new choreography.
鈥淥ur aim was to find out the long-term impact of the cortical changes that occur as one goes from learning a motor sequence to becoming an expert at it,鈥 said co-author Rachel Bar, who was a ballet dancer herself. "Our results also suggest that understanding the neural underpinnings of complex motor tasks such as learning a new dance can be an effective model to study motor learning in the real world.鈥
The results showed that initial learning and performance at seven weeks led to increase in activation in cortical regions during visualization of the dance being learned when compared to the first week. However, at 34 weeks, it showed reduced activation in comparison to week seven.
鈥淲e found that in the learning process, our brain function makes an inverted 鈥楿鈥 learning pattern from a slow pace at the start, accelerating to a peak at the midpoint, before returning to the original pace, once we have mastered the task,鈥 said . 鈥淎n everyday example would be learning to drive a manual car, where you constantly have to think about shifting the gears until you master it and then do it instinctively.鈥
The study, 鈥淭racking Plasticity: Effects of Long-Term Rehearsal in Expert Dancers Encoding Music to Movement鈥 was published in on Friday, Jan. 29.