Brain dance. (News).

What switches on in the head of a dancer during a performance? A recent scientific study provides a surprising answer: a lump of brain tissue at the back and base of your skull called the cerebellum.

"The difference between Baryshnikov and me could be that his cerebellum works better than mine," says James Ashe of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In the journal Science, his team reports that this small part of the brain crackles with electrical activity when lessons learned during a training session shine through in performance.

For practical reasons, the performance these neuroscientists measured was far simpler than Swan Lake. To spy on brain activity, they used a technique called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which requires volunteers to keep their heads still while being scanned by the imaging machine. So Ashe's team asked each volunteer to watch a set of four lights fire in sequence and then match that pattern by letting the fingers of their fight hand dance over a set of four buttons.

The study subjects were also given a second job to distract them: counting a set of colored lights. While trying to do both tasks, scans showed the subjects' cerebellums stayed cold and their performances didn't improve. But once the distraction was removed and they could focus on perfecting the choreography of their digits, their cerebellums lit up and their speed increased. "Learning lies elsewhere in the brain," says Ashe. "But performance seems to be in the cerebellum."

The result is of immediate importance to brain scientists, but can performance artists really learn anything from it? At the very least, Ashe says his work lends a scientific rationale for what many dancers know intuitively. The inability of the cerebellum to multitask, for instance, explains why it is so important to clear your mind when performing new choreography.

And as Ashe points out, it may be that some cerebellums are better than others in translating hours in the studio to brilliant movement onstage. But as for the difference between him and Misha, Ashe admits his brain might lack something other than a muscular cerebellum. "I'm interested in many art forms," he says. "But I have to admit, I don't know much about dance."