Visual Memory

Dancers learn by watching, doing, marking, and creating imagery that helps to retain movement patterns. These approaches may have developed intuitively, but recent brain studies in memory confirm they were on the right track. 

Consider the work of movement science pioneers Lulu Sweigard and Mabel Todd (founders of Ideokinesis), who heavily employed visualization in their methods. They intuited the mirror neuron theory, which holds that there are special groups of neurons in the brain that respond in a similar fashion whether watching or doing a movement.

Dancers are lay brain scientists of sorts, on the forefront of understanding the interplay between learning, memory, and the relationship between mind and body.