The Rockefeller University, New York, USA.
Center for the Ballet and the Arts, New York University, New York, USA.
BMC Neurosci. 2024 Nov 6;25(1):62. doi: 10.1186/s12868-024-00864-1.
Dissecting the neurobiology of dance would shed light on a complex, yet ubiquitous, form of human communication. In this experiment, we sought to study, via mobile electroencephalography (EEG), the brain activity of five experienced dancers while dancing butoh, a postmodern dance that originated in Japan.
We report the experimental design, methods, and practical execution of a highly interdisciplinary project that required the collaboration of dancers, engineers, neuroscientists, musicians, and multimedia artists, among others. We explain in detail how we technically validated all our EEG procedures (e.g., via impedance value monitoring) and minimized potential artifacts in our recordings (e.g., via electrooculography and inertial measurement units). We also describe the engineering details and hardware that enabled us to achieve synchronization between signals recorded at different sampling frequencies, along with a signal preprocessing and denoising pipeline that we used for data re-sampling and power line noise removal. As our experiment culminated in a live performance, where we generated a real-time visualization of the dancers' interbrain synchrony on a screen via an artistic brain-computer interface, we outline all the methodology (e.g., filtering, time-windows, equation) we used for online bispectrum estimations. Additionally, we provide access to all the raw EEG data and codes we used in our recordings. We, lastly, discuss how we envision that the data could be used to address several hypotheses, such as that of interbrain synchrony or the motor theory of vocal learning.
Being, to our knowledge, the first study to report synchronous and simultaneous recording from five dancers, we expect that our findings will inform future art-science collaborations, as well as dance-movement therapies.
解析舞蹈的神经生物学将有助于理解人类这种复杂而普遍的交流形式。在这项实验中，我们试图通过移动脑电图（EEG）研究五位经验丰富的舞者在表演后现代舞“舞踏”时的大脑活动。
我们报告了一项高度跨学科项目的实验设计、方法和实际执行情况，该项目需要舞者、工程师、神经科学家、音乐家和多媒体艺术家等的合作。我们详细解释了如何通过监测阻抗值等技术手段来验证我们所有的 EEG 程序，并通过眼电图和惯性测量单元等方法最小化记录中的潜在伪影。我们还描述了工程细节和硬件，这些使我们能够实现不同采样频率记录的信号同步，并使用信号预处理和降噪管道对数据进行重采样和去除电源线噪声。由于我们的实验最终以现场表演结束，我们通过艺术脑机接口实时可视化舞者之间的大脑同步，并在屏幕上展示，因此我们概述了用于在线双谱估计的所有方法（例如滤波、时间窗口、方程）。此外，我们还提供了我们在记录中使用的所有原始 EEG 数据和代码的访问权限。最后，我们讨论了我们如何设想可以使用这些数据来解决几个假设，例如大脑间同步或声音学习的运动理论。
作为第一个报告从五位舞者进行同步和同时记录的研究，我们希望我们的发现将为未来的艺术科学合作以及舞蹈运动疗法提供信息。
