NEW YORK, NY.- How does an art of the body affect the mind?

“Epiphany Machine,” a performance that’s also a scientific study, paints a picture of the brain on dance — onstage and in data. Two dancers move through a simple sequence of steps while wearing electroencephalography caps, which track their brains’ electrical activity. Lab technicians monitor the caps’ data on laptops. And on a large screen, kaleidoscopic projections illustrate the performers’ brain activity for the audience, in real time.

Feathery fractal trees grow, branch and recede. Chains of numbers snake around in circles, turning blue, then black. It is beautiful and eerie: a pas de quatre for two dancers and their busy minds.

“Epiphany Machine,” performed last month at Virginia Tech, is a product of the young field of dance neuroscience, which explores dance’s unusual brain-body connection. Sophisticated imaging technology has helped reveal that dance’s multifaceted demands engage the mind as intensively as the body; that dance can root our minds more firmly in our physical selves; and that dancing together can help us relate to each other.

These are ideas that dancers grasp intuitively. Unsurprisingly, many scientists in the field are also dance artists, like Elinor Harrison, whose course on the neuroscience of movement at Washington University in St. Louis is subtitled “You Think, So You Can Dance?”

“The way dance integrates the mind and the body, that’s something I’ve felt myself,” Harrison said. “So, when we see evidence of these things on a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan” — which measures blood flow in the brain — “it’s the science justifying this embodied knowledge dancers have.”

Over the past few decades, dance has been used as a rehabilitation tool for people with neurological disorders, tying into a long history of dance as a healing practice. (“Dance as therapy has probably existed for as long as dance has existed,” Harrison said.)

Participants in programs like Mark Morris Dance Center’s Dance for PD — which for more than 20 years has offered specialized classes for people with Parkinson’s disease — found them to be effective before science could fully explain why they worked. But dance neuroscience studies are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms behind dance’s positive impact on motor function, cognition and mental well-being in people with a variety of neurological conditions.

“Dance is joyful and mindful for everyone,” said Julia C. Basso, one of the creators of and performers in “Epiphany Machine” and the director of Virginia Tech’s Embodied Brain Laboratory. But for those whose brains are having difficulty communicating with their bodies, “it’s especially powerful.”

Despite anecdotal evidence of dance’s special brain-body connection, it has taken a while for dance neuroscience to gain momentum. Dance involves an unusually large number of brain regions — sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, creative. That makes it difficult to study, said Constantina Theofanopoulou, a dancer and neuroscientist who is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University: “It is a super complex behavior to decompose.”

Technology has also been a limiting factor. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, requires that the head remain motionless, a hard thing to do while dancing.

“To study the human brain in motion has been almost impossible for a long time,” Basso said.

Today it’s more possible, thanks to improvements in what’s called mobile brain body imaging. Electroencephalography caps, like those used in “Epiphany Machine,” can now monitor brain activity with impressive accuracy. And as interdisciplinary study has become more common and accepted in academia, more dancer-neuroscientists have begun to explore brain imaging in dance contexts.

Theofanopoulou is part of a team of researchers who partnered with Butoh choreographer Vangeline on “The Slowest Wave,” in which electroencephalography caps captured the brain activity of five dancers — the largest number tracked simultaneously using the caps — during a 60-minute performance. (Butoh, a form of Japanese dance theater, features extremely slow movements, streamlining the recording process somewhat.)

The brain in motion, scientists are now able to see, does its own kind of intricate dance. One of the hypotheses to emerge from this kind of research is what Basso calls “intra-brain synchrony.” Dance doesn’t just activate several different areas of the brain — sensory, cognitive, emotional — it helps them talk to one another.

“Dance enhances the flow of neural communication,” Basso said. That increased connectivity might explain the flow state dancers know well. Sadye Paez, a dancer and neuroscientist who is part of the research team for “The Slowest Wave,” calls it the “magic moment” — when the body and brain are so in tune that there is “a seamless connection between the thinking part and the feeling part and the moving and sensing part.”

The brain is a natural problem solver; dance, by strengthening its internal networks, can help it find better solutions. Neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, for example, break down existing neural pathways. When that happens, said Sofia Martins, a neuroscientist and psychotherapist, the brain will try to create new pathways and neurons, so it can do the same tasks using alternate resources. “Because dance is so neurologically demanding,” she said, “it’s really giving the brain more options” — helping it locate or create new neural pathways to replace the broken ones.

Partner dance can be particularly good for some neurological disorders. Madeleine Hackney, an associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine who was a professional contemporary and ballroom dancer, said that external movement cues — like the touch of a dance partner’s hand — can prompt the brain to sidestep its damaged regions.

Some of Hackney’s research has focused on Parkinson’s disease, which causes movement problems as nerve cells in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain involved in motor control, become impaired or die. A common symptom is freezing of gait, in which the feet seem glued to the floor. But “if you put your foot directly in front of the person’s foot,” Hackney said of someone afflicted with freezing of gait, “as you might do in tango, they can step over it. The cue from the partner helps the brain bypass the broken basal ganglia networks, and snap over to a different connection.”

Though neuroscientists have studied dance’s effects on neurological conditions including Alzheimer’s disease and autism spectrum disorders, much of the research has concerned Parkinson’s. In addition to being one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson’s “has these sort of obviously very salient problems of motor ability,” Hackney said.

David Leventhal, a former dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group who is the program director and a founding teacher of Dance for PD, has been a co-author on several recent scientific papers about Parkinson’s and dance.

“In Dance for PD, what we’re really doing is ‘re-music-ing’ the body,” Leventhal said. Because the basal ganglia are involved in rhythmic processing, people with Parkinson’s often lose their internal metronome, affecting their gait and speech. Music can be an excellent external cue to promote more rhythmic movement. “Music denotes a beat, it denotes a quality, it denotes phrasing — it’s basically a road map for people to move,” Leventhal said.

Morris’ choreography also uses music as a road map, hewing attentively to its rhythms and melodies. And it often incorporates simple walking steps and upper-body gestures, which are both helpful and friendly to people with Parkinson’s. Leventhal has taught excerpts from Morris’ percussive “Grand Duo” and incandescently simple “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” in Dance for PD classes.

“What’s so beautiful about using dance in this context is that music and movement are fully entwined,” he said.

The brain’s ability to do that kind of entwining, to synchronize movement to a beat, has deep evolutionary roots — which suggests that dance might, too. Theofanopoulou and Paez are researching the neurological processes behind rhythmic synchronization, a skill that appears to be distinctive to the small group of animals who are vocal learners. Vocal learners — humans, parrots, dolphins — can hear and then reproduce, using the tiny muscles of the mouth and larynx, complex sounds. They can also, after hearing a musical beat, reproduce its patterns with their bodies. (Think of the viral videos of parrots bobbing their heads in time to music.)

“What we are finding is that some of the same brain regions that are activated when we speak are also activated when we dance,” Theofanopoulou said. “It could be that the species that are able to speak also are able to dance because evolutionarily there were similar pressures guiding them toward needing to coordinate their muscles in a rhythmic fashion.” That might also, she said, make dance helpful for people with speech deficits.

The idea of dance as something primal and elemental, hard wired in our brains, will ring true to dancers — or anyone who’s had a transcendent experience on a dance floor. Neuroscience has even begun to explain one of the most spiritual aspects of dance: its ability to create a sense of connection within a group.

In both “Epiphany Machine” and “The Slowest Wave,” the electroencephalography recordings showed the dancers’ neural oscillations, or patterns of brain activity, beginning to sync up as they performed. “When we talk about ‘getting on the same wavelength’ — that’s basically what’s happening,” Basso said of the phenomenon, which she calls “interbrain synchrony.” Notably, this kind of synchronization occurs even in the absence of rhythmic music, suggesting that it derives from the dancing itself.

Maybe dance, by creating connections not just within but also between our brains, could help us all get along.

“Talking with my colleagues, we’ve discussed, well, could we use this in marriage counseling? Could we bring this into a political or government environment?” Basso said. “There are so many potential applications to explore.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.