Dancing into Brain Health (S1 Ep2): From Body to Narrative w/ Dr. Adolfo Garcia

Which comes first – understanding of action language or the action itself? How are our abilities to describe actions linked to our ability to enact them?

In today’s episode of Dancing into Brain Health, our guest is neuroscientist and neurolinguist Dr. Adolfo García whose research is uncovering the neural mechanisms behind motor-language coupling and how this understanding can help individuals who are living with neurodegenerative conditions.

To learn more about Dr. Adolfo Garcia, visit his website: https://adolfogarcia.com.ar/ or follow him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adolfomgarcia/

Read Dr. Garcia’s papers:

… on the neural mechanisms of motor-language coupling:

“A moving story: Whole-body motor training selectively improves the appraisal of action meanings in naturalistic narratives”

“Body into Narrative: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Signatures of Action Text Processing After Ecological Motor Training”

… on the fast recruitment of motor circuits by action verbs:

“How meaning unfolds in neural time: Embodied reactivations can precede multimodal semantic effects during language processing”

This episode of Dancing into Brain Health was edited and produced by Magda Kaczmarska and Hilary Brown-Istrefi. The music for this show is the title cut from the album, Critical Path by Joe Venegoni and Carl Weingarten.

Here are a few highlights from the episode: 

“In the absence of telepathy, there's no form of communication that we can do without movement. Whether you want to call that dance or not, okay, that's up for discussion, but the notion that motion is instrumental to any form of communication that we've developed is clear.”

When you think about language, how is it that a person can understand and process language?

”We all think, well, it's because of the human brain, right? Okay, that makes sense. But the thing is that we are not just floating heads, right? Our brain is embedded in a body, right? So the first thing about embodied cognition is to understand that … your cognitive (affective memory, attentional, perceptual, interceptive) capacities, they are not just embrained, rather they are embodied.”

ABOUT DANCING INTO BRAIN HEALTH PODCAST

Join host Magda Kaczmarska, dancer, researcher, Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and executive director of arts and health nonprofit, DanceStream Projects, in uncovering the interconnections of dance, brain health and community. Each episode Magda brings together leading researchers, artists, advocates and thought leaders to illuminate the magical interconnections of dance and brain health and explore their influence on all aspects of our lives.

* New Episodes every month! *

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