Transcriber: Helene Yao Reviewer: David DeRuwe
A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting opposite of the director
of the bioastronautics program at MIT.
Dr. Young has become very well-known because he was one of the first people
to ask the question,
"So why is it that astronauts are puking in space all the time?"
and has since become very well-known and respected
for his work on the vestibular system
and on the challenges that astronauts face in space
related to balance and spatial orientation.
And he asked me,
"So how does the bioastronautics work that we do here relate to dance?"
I reflected on my four years, nearly, with the Duke Dance Department
and remembered a masterclass with a woman named Helen Pickett
who taught us methods
in the William Forsythe technique in modern dance,
including a set of exercises
called "cross-hemispherics," in which we were challenged
to cross our bodies as many times as we could
while still remembering the pattern enough to reverse it
or do it on the other side or teach it to somebody else.
And these exercises are meant to adapt a dancer
to learn choreography quickly, by mirroring it
to better appreciate the connection between different body parts,
and to understanding the relationship between different parts of your body
in the dancing space.
So I said,
"Well, we already give astronauts exercises for bones and muscles in space.
Why not give them exercises for their vestibular systems,
so that they, like dancers,
can adapt to a new environment by learning
to understand the space and challenging their brains
with these teasers, these brain-body teasers?"
You might be wondering what kind of nut I must be to get myself in this situation.
Well, my name is Katrina Wisdom,
I'm a senior in mechanical engineering here at Duke,
and I'm also a lifelong ballet dancer.
And last year, I presented to the Duke community some of my ideas,
and I challenged engineers to apply what they knew to the art of ballet,
and I challenged dancers to connect bits of their physical intuition
that they had developed to technical terms in math and science.
And I challenged everyone to make connections in unlikely places
to see what wisdom could be gained.
So I'd like to share with you a couple of the connections
that I like to play with when I'm taking a ballet class.
So it may look effortless when you see a dancer on stage in a balance,
but I assure you it's anything but.
And dancers have developed bad habits in learning how to do it,
including clenching their fists or their neck
or staring at a spot on the wall,
and these don't really help.
But what does help, for me, is to remember
that like every other object in the universe,
I'm an object that has a center of mass,
and physics tells me that if my center of mass is between my supports,
no matter what position I'm in,
as long as there's alignment there,
I should be able to balance.
And so this has helped me tremendously -
by being conscious of my body alignment,
I can balance.
As you can see here, the partnering couple
even has their joint center of mass directly above their support.
Dancers will do anything also to improve their extensions -
how high and straight they can get their legs.
So how can we can actually improve our extension
in a way that won't allow us to compromise technique
or become injured?
Well, let's think of torque -
the effect of a force acting at a distance.
The same reason why we use a wrench to tighten or loosen a screw,
in order to magnify the effect of the force of our hands.
Well, we want to minimize the torque on our hip,
if this our leg out this way,
and the position we most want to avoid
is the one in which our leg is as far away as possible from our hip,
which is this position here at 90 degrees.
So what if we could avoid that situation entirely and still get our leg up high?
We could do that by lifting our knee up and extending it.
And that is also technically correct in dance,
to go through passe, before lifting your leg.
So here we've avoided the situation with the most amount of torque on our hip,
and we've done it technically correctly.
And so here you can see,
just like a lever, just like a seesaw,
we want to reduce that torque on our hip.
Finally, Betsy over here has incredible turns,
and consecutive turning in dance is always a crowd-pleaser.
So how can you achieve these consistent reliable turns?
Well, let's look at a concept called resonance.
Resonance is the reaction of a system
that is driven at the frequency it would naturally oscillate.
So imagine your friend on a swing set.
You want to make your friend go swing very high.
Do you just push randomly?
No.
Do you push once and then just walk away?
No.
You try and match the cadence of their swing,
in order to transfer your energy maximally.
And if we think of our bodies
in this kind of consecutive oscillating turning motion
to be like an oscillating system,
we're driving it,
with our head spotting,
our arms going in and out,
our bottom leg pushing up and down,
and our top leg whipping around.
So if we can coordinate all of these oscillations together to drive the system,
we'll have efficient, reliable turns.
Lastly, a bit of a conceptual idea here,
Resolution is the number of pixels in a given image.
So you see a high-resolution image and a low-resolution image.
If pixels were conscious choices in dance, what would high-resolution dancing be?
Well, low-resolution would be -
someone just told me to do a plié, so I'm going to bend my legs.
What if instead, we could break that down into a thousand smaller choices,
and we were more conscious of our entire bodies and how they were moving in space,
so instead I'm going to think:
My toes are pushing through the ground
and I'm going to bend my knees outward through my hips.
My arm's going to come up.
This pinky's going to connect to this shoulder,
my neck's going to be up,
and my eyes are going this way.
And the movement is so much fuller and more deliberate that way.
And likewise, what if we could live in a way that's high resolution?
It'd mean nothing is on autopilot,
and all of our choices were deliberate and conscious,
and we were constantly asking ourselves,
"Do they relate to my intentions and my goals right now?"
So, so who cares?
Well, the National Academy of Engineering
has put forth 14 grand challenges to engineers of this generation,
and one of them is to advance personalized learning,
to tap into individual styles of learning and speed and interest
to engage the students in science, math, and engineering.
And this is the one I felt most poised to address
because I'd done it for myself.
And so I can envision a future
in which science homework gives students, more easily,
the chance to connect their personal interests,
the languages they speak,
to the languages of math, science, and engineering,
so that they can stay engaged
and find their way through this often-rigorous curriculum, as I have.
And so I leave you with this thought,
which is to make your own connections to stay engaged and to find your way.
Thank you.
(Applause)