Dancing is good for the brain and keeps us young

«Balert makes you smarter, longer»: the triumphant title appears on the Stanford University website to summarize the meaning of scientific research.

It might seem excessive if you don’t read the results of the studies and in particular of one, historical, appeared on the New England Journal of Medicine.

It was conducted for 21 years in New York on 469 seniors aged 75 and older, to measure the effects of hobbies and sports on mental acuity. The surprise, for the researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, came from dance.

The survey found that dancing often is the absolute best practice for brain health: reduces the risk of cognitive decline by 76 percent, more than double reading (35 percent) and much, much more than all other recreational, intellectual and physical activities, from tennis to crossword puzzles.

A younger mind

The authors of the work attribute the power of moving with music to the involvement of mind and body together, but also to another non-secondary aspect: social interactionwhether it takes place as a couple or in a disco.

«At the Institute of Neurosciences of the Cnr a brain training program has been developed, precisely called Train the Brain, which has been shown to stave off Alzheimer’s in patients with mild cognitive decline» explains Michela Matteoli, director of the Institute, as well as head of the Neuro center of Humanitas in Milan.

«It includes motor exercises, including dance, a healthy diet and a social component, which makes a very significant contribution. The protocol isn’t miraculous, of course, but it does represent a significant model for medical care. It leverages neuroplasticity, that is, our brain’s ability to modify itself and repair itselfadapting to the signals that come from our body or that arrive from the outside, as happens when we dance».

When prodded by curiosity, learning, and exercise reflexes, our major organ may age the least of all others, less than the skin, liver, or heart. Dance is one of those experiences that involve many neural areas and we can therefore say that it is a sort of elixir of youth for our head.

Many brain areas are stimulated

When you indulge the notes of a summer hit or a salsa on the track, it is as if the whole brain is lit up with electric discharges which travel through various paths.

Motor neurons and areas of the spatial awarenesswhile the cerebellum, responsible among other things for regulating the sense ofequilibrium, receives information from the vestibular apparatus, in the inner ear, and helps synchronize steps. With neuroimaging techniques, it has been seen that favorite tunes have the power to engage the amygdala and other areas involved in emotion.

Dancing also opens the box of memories, that majestic archive that is in the hippocampus, so as to recognize the piece and recover the movements learned in the past. Meanwhile, the signals travel to the muscles through the spinal cord and the whole body sways, bends, abandons itself to an almost hypnotic state, perhaps regaining its wild nature.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, when we listen to music, “we listen with all our muscles”. The fingers want to drum, the foot to beat.

Scientists from the University of Oslo have discovered that standing still is impossible: hearing a song, but also just the beat of a metronome, we involuntarily swing our head by seven millimeters per second. How to say, the very conformation of the brain leads us to respond to sounds with movements.

We are not the only species. Animals like parrots have also been found to keep time. Snowball, a male cockatoo, is famous in the academic world (but also on YouTube, with millions of views) for his performances to the tune of Another one bites the dust of Queen.

Improve memory

The fact remains that only for us humans do movements coordinated with music exist as a collective ritual, to the point of becoming an art form. In the caves of Val Camonica, in Lombardy, dancing figures of about ten thousand years ago have been found and it is believed that large group dances date back much earlier: anthropologists and evolutionary biologists theorize that they have established themselves to strengthen tribal ties and thus improve the individual’s chances of survival.

According to Charles Darwin, the harmony of sounds is “closely linked to the strongest emotions that a human being is capable of feeling”. Dances often have a story to tellwhether it concerns a tradition handed down for generations such as minuet and polka, the culture of a people such as the Argentine tango or the echo of the adolescent world.

“Thanks to research we know that dancing stimulates memory extraordinarily,” explained French neurobiologist Lucy Vincent in her book Make your brain dance. Dancing to train your mind and happiness (translated into Italy by Ponte alle Grazie). “When we run, we put one foot in front of the other and start again: we don’t create new networks in the brain. Dance, on the other hand, requires learning and coordinating complex movements».

Enhanced intelligence

Dancing promotes the creation of neural pathways and this appears to boost intelligence in toddlers and prevent cognitive decline in the elderly.

«All types of exercise increase the production of a substance that promotes the birth of new neurons in the adult brain and which facilitates the formation of synapses, of neural connections» continues Matteoli, author of the best seller The talent of the brain (Sonzogno). “This is BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor), a protein that is found in large quantities in the hippocampus and in specific regions of the cortex and cerebellum.”

Double game of pleasure

Moving with music is a double game of pleasure, what is triggered by the muscles in action and what comes from listening. Like and more than other sports it favors the release of endorphins, endogenous opioids with exciting and analgesic power at the same time. They raise the pain perception threshold, drive away stress, instill serenity.

And there’s dopamine, renamed the euphoria molecule to give an idea of ​​its characteristics: its release caused by the universes of sounds was demonstrated for the first time by Canadian research, published in 2011 on Nature Neuroscience.

In studies with neuroimaging it was noted that a melody can activate the primordial systems of gratification, like food or sex. Your favorite tracks, whether it’s the song Maracaibo of 1981 or the Waltz of the flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, activate the primary and high-level auditory cortices and from here they reach the pleasure centers.

For all known melodies, there is an expectation that will be fulfilled by the arrival of that chord, that topical cadence. It is the dialectic of expectation and response: we desire something and, as soon as it arrives, we are satisfied with it. The music flows generating an escalation of enjoyment.

Notes have had a huge influence on us since we came into the world. According to anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, it is by being rocked and cradled that human beings have acquired the ability to coordinate their movements with those of others.

It was the Pleistocene, between one million eight hundred thousand and ten thousand years ago. After all, the lullaby is a primordial form of dance in pairs and continue to quiet each child.

Eliana Liotta is a journalist, writer and science popularizer. On iodonna.it and on the main platforms (Spreaker, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast) you can find her podcast series The good that I want.

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