Reflections on the connection between arts and science

Reflections on the connection between arts and sciences 

In Episode 1 of Vichaar, an online production exploring the convergence of dance and science, I give an introduction of the topics I aim to cover each week. Each month, I will take an aspect of Bharatanatyam (e.g. rhythm, movement, music) and talk about its neuroscientific basis. 
While it may seem that there is not much common between arts and the sciences, I feel that the disciplines are more alike than not. Here are a few thoughts from my work in Bharatanatyam and neuroscience:  

• Both neuroscience and Bharatanatyam have a framework and structure, and the job of practitioners like myself is to first, understand and learn this framework, and then create new works and discoveries. One might think this is stifling. How can any innovation and creativity happen at all? But as dancers and scientists, and people interested in arts and the sciences, know much innovation happens on a daily, hourly basis in both these disciplines. Practitioners of the sciences and the arts continue to build on the work of others in unique and creative ways. 

• Science and dance or science and arts are all around us. While the output of the scientific enterprise might be more evident, dance, movement, and motion are really all around us. When we think of a leaf that is rustling in the wind, from the waves of the ocean, to the ions that travel in our brains to create thought movement perception that really make us who we are, we are surrounded by and subsisted by movement and motion.
• Arts and sciences bring people together. They give a common vocabulary and a common language by which people can really understand and perceive the world around us. I remember my first Society for Neuroscience conference, and still remember the feeling of awe listening to lectures about synaptic plasticity, or the process by which our brains change with experience. This feeling is not so different from the feeling of watching a performance, enraptured by the art.
• Arts and science are complementary ways of perceiving the realities around us. Dancing as a scientist made me realize how fortunate I am to experience these two very different yet connected disciplines. Whereas science is the theoretical study of reality, dance, to me, is the practical study of reality. Together, science and dance can help us appreciate more fully the world we live in. 

In the next episode, I will explore movement, see how movement and motion play out in Bharatanatyam, how the brain enables movement, and movement becomes meaning.