difficulty dancing: cognitive explanations
Aug. 7th, 2008 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslAt dinner tonight, Meredith was teaching me sign language. She started making fun of me for repeatedly screwing up the handedness: I always made my hand so that it looked the same as her hands from my perspective (when, in fact, it should look like the mirror image, since we were facing each other). This reminded me of how I always find it easier to observe my dance teachers from behind their back. One possible explanation is that mental rotation is harder for me than for most people. Another explanation is that I don't find it easy or natural to take the other person's perspective.
I've recently been asking myself why learning to dance is so difficult for me.
I seem to have a gift for remembering and manipulating melodies. I explain this as being due to my obsession with solfege: encoding notes as syllables. By means of solfege, my mind builds a different language model for each musical style, compressing melodies. Essentially, I'm borrowing some processing power from my language faculty, coopting it for remembering and producing music. My mind seems to be good at this sort of language learning. As a result, I find it easy to transcribe and to improvise melodies.
One might theorize that I'm generally clumsy, bad at motor things, but this would be wrong. I am quite good at some specific tasks, e.g. soccer, ping-pong, and throwing stuff in faraway trash cans from a moving bicycle, and rather decent at playing solos on stringed instruments. I'm generally quite good at sports that require aim. So "bad at motor things" is, at best, a very unsatisfactory explanation.1
And yet, after about 50 lessons on Swing dancing over many years, I still struggle with introductory lessons. I've also tried Salsa, and I run into the same troubles. OTOH, I seem to have no trouble with Square dancing, Scottish barn-dancing, or medieval dancing. This post is about the former, the couple dances, with which I have difficulty:
(1) For one thing, the lessons don't stick with me. Perhaps I am lacking names with which to anchor the moves in my mind. I have consciously tried to remember them in detail, and I had a hard time visualizing all the parts in my body and my partner's body in full motion: my memory doesn't seem to be big enough to fit entire 3D movies. It seems I just have to trust that things will fall into place... and most of the time, they do. It's very much "muscle memory", rather than symbolic memory... and muscle memory is hard to rehearse. 2
(2) And when, through sheer focus and stubbornness, I finally manage to remember my moves and perform them correctly, I am told that I am "stiff". My conversation with Meredith suggests a possible explanation: it's not natural for me to mirror other people, so I just move the way I find easiest (mechanically as well as mentally).
(3) I have another idea that explains my "stiffness", which also explains why I can come across as so tentative, not just in dancing, but also in many complex social situations: I am often trying to do consciously (serial processing) what other people do intuitively (parallel processing). As a result, my mind is always lagging behind, trying to catch up. As a result, my dance moves become less smooth. My real-life moves likewise. I often say unexpected things. Some people see a pattern in this, and call it spontaneity.
(4) I should mention that, for a large part of my life, I had difficulties with rhythm, but I've mostly overcome them, I think. Still, I think that my perception of rhythm today may be quite different from most people's. 3
Even when I'm able to perfectly reproduce what I hear, I find it hard to transcribe it. Nevertheless, I can remember rhythms well for a long time. Retrieving is easy, especially when cued by music.
(5) Finally, for the sake of completeness, I should mention I might have a slight tendency towards an executive dysfunction of the kind by which the mind has difficulty suppressing salient actions. This can mean that imagined moves leak out into real moves, that it's easy to get ahead of oneself. But it's hard to tell how much of this is normal.
1 - all the motor tasks I can think of that I'm good at are well-practiced tasks that don't demand my continued attention. None of these require complex, instantaneous motion planning. So it could be that dancing is a more complex skill.
2 - Muscle memory is reactive: my mind can learn to recognize the cues, but it can't consciously memorize them, because the cues don't fit into neat symbols. Thus, I can't rehearse the dancing in my mind, as I do with melodies.
3 - When I was 22, a music teacher once had to double the metronome's tempo before I could tap to him what he was tapping to me (I just needed to hear more time cues, as if my mind's clock were imprecise). He seemed to find this odd.
I've recently been asking myself why learning to dance is so difficult for me.
I seem to have a gift for remembering and manipulating melodies. I explain this as being due to my obsession with solfege: encoding notes as syllables. By means of solfege, my mind builds a different language model for each musical style, compressing melodies. Essentially, I'm borrowing some processing power from my language faculty, coopting it for remembering and producing music. My mind seems to be good at this sort of language learning. As a result, I find it easy to transcribe and to improvise melodies.
One might theorize that I'm generally clumsy, bad at motor things, but this would be wrong. I am quite good at some specific tasks, e.g. soccer, ping-pong, and throwing stuff in faraway trash cans from a moving bicycle, and rather decent at playing solos on stringed instruments. I'm generally quite good at sports that require aim. So "bad at motor things" is, at best, a very unsatisfactory explanation.1
And yet, after about 50 lessons on Swing dancing over many years, I still struggle with introductory lessons. I've also tried Salsa, and I run into the same troubles. OTOH, I seem to have no trouble with Square dancing, Scottish barn-dancing, or medieval dancing. This post is about the former, the couple dances, with which I have difficulty:
(1) For one thing, the lessons don't stick with me. Perhaps I am lacking names with which to anchor the moves in my mind. I have consciously tried to remember them in detail, and I had a hard time visualizing all the parts in my body and my partner's body in full motion: my memory doesn't seem to be big enough to fit entire 3D movies. It seems I just have to trust that things will fall into place... and most of the time, they do. It's very much "muscle memory", rather than symbolic memory... and muscle memory is hard to rehearse. 2
(2) And when, through sheer focus and stubbornness, I finally manage to remember my moves and perform them correctly, I am told that I am "stiff". My conversation with Meredith suggests a possible explanation: it's not natural for me to mirror other people, so I just move the way I find easiest (mechanically as well as mentally).
(3) I have another idea that explains my "stiffness", which also explains why I can come across as so tentative, not just in dancing, but also in many complex social situations: I am often trying to do consciously (serial processing) what other people do intuitively (parallel processing). As a result, my mind is always lagging behind, trying to catch up. As a result, my dance moves become less smooth. My real-life moves likewise. I often say unexpected things. Some people see a pattern in this, and call it spontaneity.
(4) I should mention that, for a large part of my life, I had difficulties with rhythm, but I've mostly overcome them, I think. Still, I think that my perception of rhythm today may be quite different from most people's. 3
Even when I'm able to perfectly reproduce what I hear, I find it hard to transcribe it. Nevertheless, I can remember rhythms well for a long time. Retrieving is easy, especially when cued by music.
(5) Finally, for the sake of completeness, I should mention I might have a slight tendency towards an executive dysfunction of the kind by which the mind has difficulty suppressing salient actions. This can mean that imagined moves leak out into real moves, that it's easy to get ahead of oneself. But it's hard to tell how much of this is normal.
1 - all the motor tasks I can think of that I'm good at are well-practiced tasks that don't demand my continued attention. None of these require complex, instantaneous motion planning. So it could be that dancing is a more complex skill.
2 - Muscle memory is reactive: my mind can learn to recognize the cues, but it can't consciously memorize them, because the cues don't fit into neat symbols. Thus, I can't rehearse the dancing in my mind, as I do with melodies.
3 - When I was 22, a music teacher once had to double the metronome's tempo before I could tap to him what he was tapping to me (I just needed to hear more time cues, as if my mind's clock were imprecise). He seemed to find this odd.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 05:56 pm (UTC)Most of the steps do have names, even in swing--I neurotically keep track of these, or have trouble reconstructing sequences/routines. Linked to each name is kind of a "how-to" in words as well as a fuzzy still image or two of the most interesting part of the step, or the moment it most strongly deviates from the basic step of the dance. On that note, the easiest way to build muscle memory for dancing is just to do the basic step until you don't have to think about it any more, and then everything else can be learned from that framework: i.e. leading a turn is just a basic with special arm movements, a New Yorker is just a basic with the rockstep /here/ instead of /there/. Or at least, that's how I seem to pick up dancing.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-24 11:37 pm (UTC)