Article: Brain dance. (News).(researchers examine role of cerebellum in dancers)

What switches on in the head of a dancer during a performance? A recent scientific study provides a surprising answer: a lump of brain tissue at the back and base of your skull called the cerebellum.

"The difference between Baryshnikov and me could be that his cerebellum works better than mine," says James Ashe of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In the journal Science, his team reports that this small part of the brain crackles with electrical activity when lessons learned during a training session shine through in performance.

For practical reasons, the performance these neuroscientists measured was far simpler than Swan Lake. To spy on ...

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