A premiere event at the 2024 Paris Olympics shows athletes performing rhythmic footwork, jumping into inverted poses supported on one hand and spinning overhead.
That’s right: Breaking, popularly known as “breakdancing,” has made her Olympic debut.
As with other athletic events that involve intricate movements and explosive acrobatics, some remarkable brain science supports dancers’ ability to perform this style. In particular, such dance training causes changes in the vestibular system, a sensory system that is crucial to our sense of balance.
This system is responsible for tracking the head’s acceleration through space as it moves, he said Maxim Maheuan assistant professor at the University of Montreal and a researcher at the Center for Research in Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation. Thus, the vestibular system is particularly important for dance styles that involve rotations, such as pirouettes.
“I would be inclined to say that breakdancers would probably show similar findings,” Maheu told Live Science in an email. “As long as the vestibular system is repeatedly challenged, I would think we could find similar results.”
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The science behind the break
breakage originated in the Bronx in New York City in the 1970s and remains an essential element of hip-hop culture to this day. It includes movements performed on foot and other movements performed on the ground, as well as movements that pass between two levels.
It features freezes, which are “powerful and impactful poses” in which the offender often balances on their hands, elbows or head, it said. Chadwick Gasparda Los Angeles-based dancer who is currently working with him The Jacob Jonas Company. Breakers also promote power moves that involve rapidly flipping and twisting their bodies; spinning over their heads; or waving your legs in the air. “It’s like the ‘wow’ or the ‘statement piece’ of the break,” Gaspard said of the power moves.
Especially as you watch the power moves unfold, you might wonder how Olympic sprinters keep their bearings as they spin and twist at speed. This is where the vestibular system comes in.
Maheu studies the inner workings of the vestibular system, in part to help patients with chronic vertigo and other conditions that disrupt balance. He has conducted several studies comparing dancers with people without dance training to see if dancers’ unique nervous system can inform vestibular rehabilitation programs.
He looked in vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), an involuntary reflex that moves the eyes to stabilize the visual field during head movements. VOR starts when you focus on a fixed point—say, a poster on a wall—while turning your head quickly. However, the VOR is suppressed when you track a moving object—like a passing car—while moving your head in the same direction.
In a 2023 study in Journal of NeurophysiologyMaheu and colleagues worked with professional dancers with 10 to 20 years of experience. Dancers were asked to focus on a fixed point while a researcher quickly turned their head to one side. In a comparison group of non-dancers, the eyes moved at the same speed as the head but in the opposite direction to maintain gaze on the target. However, the dancers’ eyes moved slightly faster than the head for the first millisecond it moved.
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This suggests that VOR can potentially be increased with training. “We don’t know for sure how dance training may explain this result, but it may offer interesting new avenues to pursue for vestibular rehabilitation,” Maheu said.
In addition, a 2018 study from the same group found that dancers can more easily suppress their VOR when needed compared to non-dancers. In this study, dancers were trained in a variety of styles – including salsa, ballet, modern and hip-hop – and were asked to track a moving target while their heads also moved.
“They didn’t completely turn off the VOR, but they were able to move their eyes earlier to correct [their focus]”- said Maheu. This difference between non-dancers and dancers increased with experience; dancers with more than 10 years of training showed more efficient VOR suppression.
The team ran another study with the same dancersbut this time, dancers and non-dancers faced each other in a balance test. This test is designed to find out if a person relies more on visual cues, body sensations or the vestibular system to maintain their balance. Dancers appeared to rely less on vestibular reflexes and more on other cues, particularly vision, to outperform non-dancers.
These last two studies involved only a small group of people, so that makes their results less certain. However, this overarching idea that dance training changes the vestibular system is also supported by brain scans.
For example, a 2014 study of dancers, skaters and slackliners (who practice something similar to tightrope walking) found similarities between the brains of these athletes and the brains of people with vestibular impairments. The study looked at the density of white matter tracts — the isolated wires that connect brain cells — and found that areas of lower-than-average density overlapped in the brains of the two groups. These overlapping tracts were involved in a wide range of functions, including sensory processing and movement control.
Why would people with severe balance problems show the same white matter patterns as certified balance experts? One explanation is that “both [groups] may need to suppress or reinterpret vestibular input to maintain balance,” the study authors suggested. For example, “ballerinas reduce vestibular responses to increase balance during a pirouette.”
In short, responding too strongly to vestibular cues during a turn can be detrimental, making a person more dizzy.
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Beyond the vestibular system
It is likely that these distinct changes in the vestibular system also appear in highly trained switches, Maheu proposed. But, of course, it’s not just the vestibular system that enables switches to perform impressive feats.
Similar to elite gymnasts like Simone Bilesbreakers repeatedly practice movement sequences, gradually increasing complexity to build confidence and muscle memory. Studies suggest that, over time, complex movement sequences are made encoded in a single efficient burst of brain activity. This may help explain why trained athletes don’t have to consciously think about every little thing their body is doing to maintain control.
When learning to do head turns, breakers start with quarter turns and half turns before working up to full and multiple turns, said Gaspard, who started breaking about a decade ago, training in South Florida. with Masters crew on the road and others.
“As you keep increasing the amount of turns you can do — at first you’re going to get dizzy, but at some point, it’s like there’s less and less dizziness until you start drilling like a crazy amount,” he said.
As for being upside down, “maybe in a few weeks or months, being upside down isn’t so scary,” Gaspard added.
The most exciting part of seeing her break into the Olympics is that “this culture that I’ve been a part of is getting a lot of attention and exposure to a wider audience,” Gaspard said. The Breakers have gained new accolades and job opportunities in recent years, and now, “their art is in the Olympics.”
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