Reflections on the covid-19 situation and Lojong

I figured the times make it almost imperative to take into account the covid-19 situation in my #lojongchallenge blog series. Thankfully, the Lojong slogans pretty much all are suitable to work with whatever situation. I found that slogan 23, "always abide by the three basic principles" also gives some useful advice to deal with the current situation.

My last trip abroad before the lockdown started in the Duomo of Milan (notice gloves!)

So let's start by breaking down this slogan: what are the three principles? Those are first to stay committed to working against self-importance, second, to not act outrageously or show off, and third, to be impartial and equanimous. Before we go into this, let me talk a bit about how I am coping with the situation. I count myself lucky because I do have a secure job, a nice place to live, and all the things that I find important can be done online in some way. It is strange to not leave the house apart from for errands and running once a week, but I am not thinking about that so much. Every day I start the working day by doing a few dances that get my blood flowing and my brain going. Then I sit down behind my computer and do the usual--meetings, e-mail, writing, except that all meetings take place in front of a computer screen rather than in real life. And then my normal past-times, ballet and Buddhist gatherings, also happen from behind the same screen. My calendar is the tool that I use to distinguish between all of those. I make sure to plan in the Buddhist gatherings and ballet classes such that they surely happen. I feel sad to not really meet people in real life, but I feel excited about learning so many new things and seeing all the creative things that people have developed.

Now back to the principles. The first principle, reducing self-importance is basically what we are all doing right now: while we may not be at too much risk for the virus, we have to give up a social life for a little while so others can stay healthy. If I work from home then the person in the hospital will better be able to manage the tremendous workload of patients. I also notice that everyone seems more aware of each other as we move around each other in the streets to maintain our 1.5m distance. While it may seem that letting go of self-importance is all about the other, it is important to realize that dropping self-importance does not mean letting go of self-care. Self-care is especially important to ensure you can be there for others. This is why I try to prioritize sleep and ballet, so I am happy and healthy.

Life at home: dancing with the vacuum cleaner

The second principle, not to act outrageously refers primarily to showing off one's spiritual practice. In a wonderful advice for these times, Khandro Rinpoche emphasises the importance of simply coming back to being kind to one another. Don't try to impress others with what a good practiioner you are. Simpler is better. What I also find helpful in this slogan is that by reducing our tendency to show off, we are reducing our own anxiety because any time we show off, we are anxious about others' responses. Good reminder to self in this age of social media, that make it so easy to get trapped in the tendency to seek for others' approval..

The last principle, maintaining equanimity is also helpful. For me it brings a lot of peace to realize that not all is in our own hands. I am currently trying to practice this by not thinking too much about what will happen in the future, and just stay with what happens day by day. Because every day things will change. I was supposed to go to India right when the lockdown happened, and most of the other things that were supposed to happen this summer--summer schools, conferences, ... have been cancelled. But who knows what the world will look like even a few weeks from now. It is surreal to think about what has happened. Never has the truth of impermanence and interdependence be so clear!

Your brain on ballet

A few months ago I attended the lecture-performance "Dancing and the Brain" at Nationale Opera and Ballet in Amsterdam. I thought it was really cool to discuss how dancing affects our brain, and join lecture with dance demonstrations. Inspired by the lecture, here is my version of dancing and the brain, with an emphasis on ballet, the form of dance with which I have most personal experience.

Cortical representations of hand and foot in Meier et al (2016)

To understand how dancing affects the brain, we need to start with discussing what dancing really is in general, and then how ballet differs from that. In general, dancing can be defined as a combination of movement, often with music, often in the service of artistic expression and conveying a certain aesthetic experience (but sometimes also a social action). As such, dancing inevitably is a training of motor coordination, which is requires coordination between many brain areas, including the parietal and premotor cortex (Cross et al., 2009). Each type of dance has a specific movement vocabulary, and when dancers watch their "own" type of dance, their ventral premotor cortex gets more active than when they watch other forms of dance (Pilgramm et al., 2010). This suggests that dancing helps to set up specific motor programs (for example, in ballet dancers it has been shown that the area of motor cortex associated with the foot has increased; Meier et al., 2016). Dance has also been shown to be associated with more sensitivity in the recognition of other's movements (Sevdalis & Keller, 2009).

In my home office

Now let's move on to the specific form of dance that is ballet. What is unique about ballet is that it consists of a very specific movement vocabulary that has changed little over the centuries. A strong emphasis is placed on the lines created by poses and movements. As such, I would expect that this is associated by a very strong sensitivity to small differences in the production and perceptions of these patterns of movement. A lot of this sensitivity is visual because ballet dancers perfect their movements largely with the help of mirrors. This is probably different in many other forms of dance that do not rely so strongly on mirrors. Moreover, because ballet involves the precise repetition of a relatively fixed movement vocabulary, this is associated with increased ability to memorize movement sequences (Smyth & Pendleton, 1994). This often happens by chunking a series of movements into bite-size pieces, which ballet dancers have been shown to be relatively good at Foley et al. 1991 . I am very curious whether this also transfer to better memory in general. I would not be surprised if ballet were a good training method for memory and cognitive control (see also van Vugt (2014) for similar ideas).

Apart from training memory and cognitive control, ballet is likely to be also excellent training for your attention. When you are in the studio, you need to focus on many pieces of information at the same time: the series of movements you are supposed to produce, the muscles you are supposed to be tensing and relaxing (while dancers have been training for years to automatize those patterns, they keep honing them every single day of their careers).

During an EEG experiment at the Night of Arts & Sciences, 2019

Apart from those technical aspects, ballet is most importantly an art, so the best part for a dancer usually comes when they can forget about the steps and totally inhabit the character or the mood that comes with the dance. They then typically forget everything around them and enter something like a flow state. I would not be surprised if ballet dancers are very good at imagination, but I have not found any studies that test that. I would predict this would lead to a strengthening of a set of brain areas called the default mode network, involving the posterior cingular cortex, medial prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe, which are all involved in creating stories in your mind, and disconnecting from outside distraction. While there have been

claims that ballet improves creative thinking, i am not so sure about that, and I think this is mostly true for those dancers who have specialized in improvisation (indeed, all the dancers in this study did, including some ballet dancers).

But ballet is not typically something you only do by yourself. In fact, one of the most beautiful things about ballet is when the corps the ballet moves in perfect synchrony, such as the entry of the shades in La Bayadere. To make this happen, dancers need to be highly aware of the dancers that are in front of them, to the side, and behind them. In fact, they are even told to breathe together. As such, I would strongly suspect that not only their bodies synchronize, but even their brains synchronize (here is a video where I talk about inter-brain synchrony in dancers.

A final unique aspect of ballet is the extreme balance expertise required, Women even balance on the tips of their toes! Recent research has shown that dancers are better at balancing than non-dancers (Burzynska et al., 2017). Such balancing expertise was associated with changes in dancers' hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus (thought to be crucial for orientation in space), insula (thought to be important for feeling sensations inside your body)Dordevic et al., 2018).

Brain areas larger in ballet dancers than in controls (from Dordevic et al., 2018)

, and cingulate motor cortex (

In summary, dance, and in particular ballet, is great for lots of things. Indeed, I found that in the last few weeks, when I was stuck at home due to the covid-19 situation, ballet was really my outlet and saving grace. The good news is that dance in general, and ballet in specific is nowadays also used in interventions for diseases such as Parkinsons (read more here). It has also been found that people who have been dancing their whole life tend to suffer less from dementia and age-related cognitive decline (Verghese et al., 2003). So, keep dancing!