Sure, exploring how the brain learns may be beneficial for teachers of subjects such as math and reading, but what about those teaching and promoting the arts in schools?  You’d be surprised, once you start thinking about it. Consider a dance project this summer in New York. It was titled, “The Brain Piece.” Choreographer Jody Oberfelder used interactive dance theater to help performers and the audience explore where thoughts come from. “I thought, why not get the audience to try to feel their brains, without telling them how? To set up situations where they’re interacting not only with their minds but passing that down through the body…” she told the New York Times.

In developing her project (she previously focused on the role of the heart in a piece called “4Chambers”) she said that she explored neurogenesis (the processes in which brain cells are formed and developed) with Ed Lein, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Lein told the Times he thought dance and brain science were a “natural pairing.”

That may sound cool, but just how do the two go together? Lein elaborates, “One reason I love neuroscience is there’s really an aesthetic beauty to the architecture of the brain – a choreography, if you will, to the development of that circuitry.”

But, you don’t need to delve that deeply to put dance and other kinds of physical activity into improving student learning. One of the seven key Guiding Principles in our book “Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom” is that exercise and physical activity play a key role in how we learn. Early research from 1999 at the Salk showed for the first time that physical exercise triggered chemical changes in the brain that regulate the formation of new neurons, synaptic plasticity, and learning.  A deluge of recent work is continuing to highlight the direct connection between physical activity and brain development, particularly in learning and memory.

Scientists in these studies often have mice run on treadmills to exercise, but really, isn’t it so much more fun to dance!