My new favorite yoga instructor had our class run through our hatha series blindfolded, which led me to think about the faculties of proprioception and kinesthesia - our sense of our bodies in space.
First, from Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz’s You: The Owner’s Manual:
“Try this self-test: Stand on one leg and close your eyes. The longer you can stand without falling, the younger your brain (fifteen seconds is very good if you are forty-five or older). That balancing act is just one sign of your brain strength. To develop better balance, you should use free weights - that is, dumbbells and barbells - because exercising with them works your proprioception (your ability to balance). Weight machines don’t have the same effect because the weights are attached to a fixed surface, so you don’t develop your balancing abilities as you lift them.”
The peer-reviewed literature about yoga and proprioception is very limited. I could find only one open-access article (actually a letter):
Krishnamurthy M, Telles S. Effects of Yoga and an Ayurveda preparation on gait, balance and mobility in older persons. Med Sci Monit. 2007 Dec;13(12):LE19-20. PMID: 18049442
So what else is available? PubMed currently lists 67 open-access review articles on proprioception, including one very intriguing paper:
Brown S, Martinez MJ, Parsons LM. The neural basis of human dance. Cereb Cortex. 2006 Aug;16(8):1157-67. Epub 2005 Oct 12. PMID: 16221923
For their study, researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio brain-scanned experienced amateur tango dancers with positron emission tomography as they performed tango steps to music. In just one of the useful aspects of their article, they provide a broad perspective on the role of dance in human development:
“Dance is a universal human behavior, one associated with group rituals (Sachs, 1937; Farnell, 1999). Although it is depicted in cave art from more than 20 000 years ago (Appenzeller, 1998), dance may be much more ancient than that. Dance may in fact be as old as the human capacities for bipedal walking and running, which date back 2–5 million years (Ward, 2002; Bramble and Lieberman, 2004). “
The article provides a detailed tour of these dancers’ brains as several areas lit up while they learned the steps (anterior cerebellar vermis), then danced to a regular, metric rhythm (right putamen, medial superior parietal lobule).
Since existing PET technology requires that participants lie supine in a scanner, it isn’t clear how balance can be addressed in this research model. Still, this innovative study reflects an emerging capability to investigate physical processes that support skillfulness in movement, and certain aspects of the model may be applied to kinetic and proprioceptive functions of yoga practice.
“Our findings specifically elucidate for the first time the neural systems and subsystems that underlie dance. These observations imply that dance, as a universal human activity, involves a complex combination of processes related to the patterning of bipedal motion and to metric entrainment to musical rhythms. More broadly, this study brings us closer to a richer understanding of the neural and psychological bases of complex, species-specific creative and artistic behaviors. This study is part of a contemporary wave of research exploring new neuroscientific hypotheses in the context of activities such as musical performance, drawing, visual aesthetics, dance observation and the viewing of cinematic narratives (Ino et al., 2003; Kawabata and Zeki, 2003; Makuuchi et al., 2003; Cela-Conde et al., 2004; Hassan et al., 2004; Calvo-Merino et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2005).”
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