AOI 3

Dance combines arts and sports, providing fun, confidence, and competition. It involves movement, memory, and hearing. Dance helps people with Parkinson's disease. The brain and dance are connected. The frontal lobe controls movements and decision-making. The parietal lobe receives sensory input for correct movements. The temporal lobe processes auditory cues. The occipital lobe is responsible for visual processing. All four lobes work together for dancing. Hi, my name is Nico Sherpa, and today I want to dive into one of my favorite activities, dance. Dance is something I've done since I was three. I seriously love dance. It combines the arts and sports resulting in fun, confidence, and competition. It combines movement, memory, and hearing all at the same time. And a fun fact is that it even helps people with Parkinson's disease with rhythmic cues. But today I will discuss how the brain and dance work hand-in-hand. I will be talking about the four main lobes of the brain. The frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. The frontal lobe helps us with many things. Firstly, it's responsible for carrying out our movements. It also controls our ability to make decisions, act appropriately socially, plan and judge problems, and is responsible for various parts of memory. The frontal lobe helps dancers perform their movements, which is pretty essential to dance. Without the frontal lobe sending a message down to the rest of our body, the execution of movement would not be possible. When you're dancing, you're moving all the time, whether you've got to move fast and slow or your movements have to be smooth and hard. The frontal lobe carries out these movements. The parietal lobe receives sensory input, such as touch, if something's hot or cold, pain, and taste. Dancers utilize touch to know if their movements are correct. Dancers often get corrected by choreographers who use touch to move our limbs into the proper position. You can't learn dance without touch. You're always touching different surfaces, whether it's the floor, a person, or a prop. Not getting the sensory inputs would make it so you don't know if you're executing the moves correctly. The temporal lobe is responsible for auditory processing, which is vital for dance. You need to listen for various rhythmic cues, words, and beats. Your sense of hearing is crucial when it comes to dance. When you're on that stage, you don't have a mirror or someone else in front of you who you can copy their movements. You need your sense of hearing to listen for musical cues and to know what to do. The last lobe I will be discussing is the occipital lobe, which is responsible for visual processing. To learn dance, you need to see. In many dance studios, or all dance studios, there are mirrors covering the wall so you can see what you are doing and what you look like when you're doing it. Visualizing what you look like can help you tweak your movements if they're wrong, and to watch your choreographer who is teaching you these moves. To learn them, you gotta see them. An occipital lobe takes care of that. With all of this information in mind, it's wild to see how hard the brain works to execute what we consider a relatively straightforward task. Next time you dance, think about how hard the four lobes are working together to get you to complete that task. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.