(below is an excerpt from an article found via the link--interesting that more blood flow to motor areas occured with music listening. could this have anything to do with ability to dance even when normal movements are not achievable? or is one able to execute dance steps well without music- as in walking upstairs? or one could consider the newest accessory for youth--the iPod -- a brain exercise device)

http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_101506d

WHEN LISTENING TO MUSIC, YOUR BRAIN IS ‘MOVING’ EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT


ATLANTA, October 15, 2006 - Recent findings have uncovered that when listening to a rythmic sound, the motor region of our brain is active even if our body isn't. Research also shows, for the first time, activation of another area of our brain, the visual center, when temporarily blinded individuals recognize an object by touch...


...While you listen to music, the areas of your brain that enable your body to move are active, even if you are not. Recent research shows that you don't have to think about the music's rhythm or tap your feet to the beat to engage your brain's motor control areas.

"This finding goes against the traditional view that the brain's motor regions are involved only in executing body movement," says Robert Zatorre, PhD, of McGill University in Montreal.

Does this research help explain the irresistible urge to dance, or at the least, to tap your fingers, when music is played? "Research carried out in our laboratory and in others have already shown that both auditory and motor regions of our brain become engaged when we listen to a musical rhythm and concurrently tap our fingers with it," says Joyce Chen, who collaborated with Zatorre.

"More interestingly, we also know that when we listen to a musical rhythm and just think about, or imagine ourselves, tapping along with it, motor regions of our brain are also engaged," she adds.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Zatorre and Chen pinpointed the brain areas in which neurons became active when the human volunteers listened to music. The fMRI measures the changes in blood flow that occur when neurons are active.

The researchers used fMRI to monitor the volunteers' brains during three conditions. In the first, they asked the volunteers just to listen to the music. Next, the volunteers were instructed to anticipate, as they listened to the music, that they they would tap their fingers to the beat of the music. In the third condition, they actually tapped their fingers while listening to the music.

"The results revealed that the brain's motor regions were involved in all three conditions, surprisingly, even when the volunteers were listening to a sequence of sounds that had no explicit association to movement," Chen says.

"The sounds we used sounded like a wood block, that is, they had no pitch, so there was no melody per se. So we really think it's the complex time patterns involved in rhythm that engage the motor system."...