“I think that this instinct towards synchrony, or being drawn to collectives, is because our curiosity is very social. People are attuned to social curiosity about other people.” ~ Manisha Biswas
Manisha Biswas danced her way into my heart.
She was the 2025 social science category winner of the Dance Your PhD contest – a prize she won for her interpretative performance of her thesis, “The Powerful Outcomes of Collective Synchrony”.
The Dance Your PhD contest was launched in 2008 to help educate people about complex theories through interpretive dance.
I ask you: What is not to love about this idea???
These dances are amazing — elaborate, inventive, fun and cover everything from Manisha’s collective rituals to chemesthesis, plant mechanisms and ultracold dipolar quantum gases.
I wondered: How might collective synchronous behaviors, rituals and curiosity intersect? And what can we learn from Dance Your PhD about embodied ways of making complex ideas accessible?
Perception is not this two-way intersection between you and the world. It’s between you and other people and the world.
Manisha and I talked about curiosity’s contagion effect and what got her dancing, the power of collective rituals and movement synchrony, what Berlin dance raves and Belgian military marches have in common, what a collective curiosity ritual at school might accomplish, synchrony’s effect on perception, research’s “lab to life” approach, whether synchrony is in tension with curiosity — and how our social curiosity might intervene.
Listen to #325: Dance Your PhD: Curiosity & Synchrony, with Manisha Biswas
Manisha Biswas, PhD is a cognitive scientist and science communicator.
The Dance Your PhD contest is jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science magazine, and SandboxAQ, an artificial intelligence company that underwrites the cash prizes. Check out the 2025 winners.
Manisha did her undergraduate work at IIT Gandhinagar, which turns out to be a wonderful source of C2BC guests. Listen to The Curiosity Lab, with Jaison Manjaly and Curious Comix, with Argha Manna.
If you’d like to think more about science communication, try these C2BC Classics: Curiosity, Science & Humor Walk into a Bar…with Kasha Patel; A Special Alchemy: Curiosity, Empathy & Social Media. with Dr. Ben Rein; India Asks Why, with Ruchi Manglunia & Schweata N. Hegde; and The Ig Nobel Prizes: A Curiosity Celebration, with Marc Abrahams.
Theme music by Sean Balick; “Mind Body Mind” & “Partly Sage” by Bodytonic, via Blue Dot Sessions.
You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
