My Lunch With Katherine H. (very diarrhea)

Katherine Himes (Neuro Expert) and I sat down for lunch.  I forgot my audio recorder.  I did however take a notebook and a pen.  The following are my notes and some additional thoughts.

Senses and movement are mapped in parallel regions in the brain.  This leads to the power of visualization - imaging yourself doing something w/o physicalizing.  Inside your brain is a map of yourself called the Homonculus (the little man)  The homonculus map is based on how many receptors (touch) there are in the body for that region, thus the homonculus has a tiny torso w/tiny arms and legs with giant head, hands, genitals and feet.  If you think about movement without moving these areas of the brain are activated.  Perhaps the audience feels a feeling of movement - thinking about movement while watching movement.  Katherine said that visualizing movement is as good as doing movement.  (insert audio descriptions of movement here...) She also thought that it was possible that a dancer's homunculus might be distorted, perhaps with larger areas devoted to areas that dancers have built a larger awareness of through training and the brain is very plastic in its capacity to adapt.  Perception and Patterns.  Part of the brains work in perceiving is recognizing patterns.  WE ARE PATTERN SEEKERS.  We are wired to look for familiar patterns and have pattern recognizing systems wired into our brain.  Moving yellow rectangle + windows + engine sound = BUS.   So perhaps contemporary dance is difficult for new audiences to watch and engage with because the patterns are hard to recognize or they are totally alien to the watcher on the mini and the meta levels.   Or perhaps there is too much stimulus in the first place -> overload.  Perhaps its why many like Bach but not Stravinsky.  (perhaps that is too simple)  Does an audience prefer less information or predictable patterns?  Here is a psychology test:  Subject is told to look for something particular happening between a man and a woman on the street together "what color are their jackets?" perhaps.  The subject is then shown a movie with the said man and woman together on the street.  The subject is then asked to watch the movie a second time.  The subject realizes that they failed to notice a naked man running through the film when they were watching with a particular task in mind.  Perhaps this test demonstrates the power of repetition, especially in a complex, movement situation - the second look allows the viewer a chance to see not just what was familiar in the first look but what was unfamiliar.  Repetition makes the familiar unfamiliar?  Or more familiar. {side note:  How do we know that we are connected with other people?  at a very early age (3mo.), babies can tell if  they are being looked at.  is this important.  Does an audience need to know that they are involved in what they are watching - that they are being 'looked at'}  STATE DEPENDENT LEARNING -> I need to listen to DeathMetal on my iPod to take this test.  Can we engage an audience in state dependent learning in the course of an hour - creating states for them to experience and learn from - to later remember?  Self-talk.  There is usually self talk happening at all times - a voice in the head narrating the minutia of living.  In my experience it is hard to turn that voice off when watching performance.  How can we help an audience turn it off? How could we prime the audience to better see what we will make?  Have you ever taken a Meyers-Briggs personality test?