Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Dissecting the relationship between speech and dance in humans: from brain pathways to clinical therapy
Poster E1 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Constantina Theofanopoulou1,2, Erich D. Jarvis1,3; 1Rockefeller University, 2New York University, 3Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Evidence from different levels of analysis points to intriguing commonalities between vocal learning, a core feature of human speech, and beat synchronization, a core feature of human dance. Recent findings go beyond the fact that both behaviors rely on rhythmic motor control and on a tight auditory to motor integration. For example, parrots, who are complex vocal learners, like humans, were shown to be able to entrain their body movements to a musical beat (i.e., dance) in a spontaneous and sporadic way, something that led to the hypothesis that the ability to move in time with an auditory beat originated in the neural circuitry for complex vocal learning (Keehn et al. 2019; Patel et al. 2009). Further, developmental studies in human children showed that the development of the ability for a sustained beat perception and synchronization predicts the development for phonological production ability until late childhood (Nave, Snyder, and Hannon 2023). In this talk, we aim to shed light on this hypothesis by introducing our projects and preliminary findings, in a series of studies in humans, ranging from behavioral neuroscience, and genetics, to clinical applications. First, we will discuss our past and current efforts to compare the speech and dance brain pathways, starting from our methodology (Theofanopoulou et al. 2023) to run mobile electroencephalography in 5 dancers while dancing simultaneously, and a comparison between the oscillatory patterns we identified during speech production vs. dance movement production. We will also introduce our methodology to assess brain activity, via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), while speaking vs. while dancing, with the latter taking place while the participants’ heads are fixed in the scanner. Second, we will talk about how these fMRI MNI coordinates from speech and dance brain areas will inform our brain dissections of 6 frozen human brains with the objective to profile gene expression in speech vs. dance brain regions, via single nucleus RNA-sequencing, and of our current methodology and progress to reconstruct these human brain sections in a 3D space, a necessary step before gene expression profiling. Third, we will present how this hypothesis led us to test the effect of dance in the speech profile and brain activity (via fMRI) of patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) diagnosed with speech deficits (i.e., dysarthria). In this context, we will present our preliminary findings showing that 8 months of dance training in PD patients, without undergoing any speech therapy, led to significant activation changes in brain regions that have been shown to be involved in speech production (e.g., Dichter et al. 2018), e.g., in the dorsal Laryngeal Motor Cortex. We will further present our ongoing efforts to test whether by activating the dance brain pathways (through dancing) we can stimulate activity in the speech brain pathways, and, hence, drive improvement in speech deficits in PD. Independently of the evolutionary hypothesis that links vocal learning and beat synchronization, our lecture will unravel a comparison between the neurobiology, genetics and clinical applications of two complex sensorimotor behaviors that serve human communication.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Speech Motor Control