NEW YORK, NY — When a ballerina pirouettes on stage, what might a dancer and a neuroscientist each see and think about her movements, and what might they learn if they sat down to talk to one another? Such a meeting earlier last month attracted a sold-out crowd at Columbia University School of the Arts's Lenfest Center for the Arts.

A conversation between Jennifer Homans, PhD, a dance critic for The New Yorker, and neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, was the first in a series of events called Where Ideas Come From. The series is designed to bring together experts from multiple disciplines who might not normally meet to discuss where and how ideas originate and evolve.

"Encounters crossing disciplines are surprisingly rare," said the event's co-moderator, Carol Becker, PhD, a professor of the arts and dean emerita at Columbia University School of the Arts. "It's really an important thing to try and break past that, because the questions that we're all facing in the world right now are way too big for any discipline to solve on its own. We truly need each other."

The conversation focused on the relationship between movement and the brain. To research typical, everyday human motion, Dr. Wolpert has attached sensors to people and recorded their movements for days. "Although we have 200 joints and 600 muscles, people explore only a tiny fraction of all the movements they could possibly make," said Dr. Wolpert, who is also a professor of neuroscience at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. "We want to contract our muscles in a way that minimizes the variability of our movements. It turns out that the best way to do this is to produce  lovely, smooth movements."

Smoothness in ballet "is a sign of accomplishment, for sure, but it also has its limits, because this is an art, not a science," noted Dr. Homans, once a professional dancer with the Pacific Northwest Ballet and now a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University and the founding director of NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts. A certain degree of variability is valuable "because otherwise it's kind of machine-like."

The other co-moderator of the event, Daphna Shohamy, PhD, director and CEO of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, explained that "as songbirds learn songs, they make mistakes, there's variability. This variability ultimately allows the sculpting of the perfect song." To learn and to create requires a “tension between efficiency, smoothness and variability," she said.

Concurring with the latter thought, Dr. Homans noted that famed ballet choreographer George Balanchine, the subject of her Pulitzer-finalist book, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, would sometimes ask a dancer to make a lot of mistakes during practice to keep everyone else on stage on their toes and to not perform as if they rehearsed too much. She added that famed ballerina Suzanne Farrell used to say, "'I rehearse options, not opinions.' There are ways to move on a stage that are going to be completely unpredictable, both to the doer and the audience, which is what makes it interesting."

Dr. Shohamy added that as one watches dancers craft these unique performances, "your body may seek to imitate them, only to be struck with awe, because most of us can't possibly conjure the necessary motor responses that could imitate them," said Dr. Shohamy, who is also co-director of Columbia's Kavli Institute for Brain Science and a Kavli professor of brain science.

Art, science and other disciplines frequently entwine at Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, which is home to both the Lenfest Center for the Arts and the Zuckerman Institute, as well as Columbia’s business school. For instance, every year the Zuckerman Institute hosts a visual artist, a writer and a jazz musician so they and the institute's neuroscientists can learn from each other.

"What artists and scientists share is a belief in the practice of experimentation," Dr. Becker said. "Tonight is an experiment across intellectual boundaries, to learn from each other and to think together."

You can watch a recording of the event here.
 

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Where Ideas Come From is a series within Columbia's School of the Arts' public program series. This first event in the series was co-presented by Columbia's School of the Arts and Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, in collaboration with the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.