We dance for laughter, we dance for tears; We dance for madness, we dance for fears; We dance for hope, we dance for screams; We are the dancers, we create the dreams.
Albert Einstein
Imagine – it’s Friday night, you are going out. You enter the club/arrive at the concert and you can feel your body feeling up with the music. It’s not just that you can hear it, you can actually feel it inside you. You can feel the bass resonating in your bones. You start wiggling and before you know it, you are dancing.
Dancing is an incredibly social phenomenon. It is thought to have evolved to facilitate people from different ages and groups to meet and interact together. Music and dance are an international language: everybody understands it and you do not need to share a language to use it as a social tool. Some cultures give a lot of importance to traditional dances, everybody learns them, everybody has to take part. It doesn’t matter who you are, everybody dances together. And that’s incredible. Every culture should acknowledge the importance of dancing. It creates a strong sense of belonging, you get to create your own group not determined by social status or skin colour. Take any dance movie: nerdy girl meets super cool dancing boy, they start dancing and all of a sudden, they belong together because they danced together.
Not only does dancing create a sense of belonging, it also helps develop self-esteem, it increases self-confidence, and once people danced together, they can actually understand each other better when speaking. The fact that they danced together makes the verbal communication easier (yet another example of the importance of non-verbal communication!!!). When you dance, you get to be whoever you want at that time. You can set your shyness and social anxiety aside. You get to forget everything else, all your worries and concerns. It is even better than working out (yup, I said that), because it only takes a couple of minutes of full immersion into the music and dance to feel better and feel your mood improves. No pain, but what a gain!
Dancing is a mix of so many things and recruit many different areas of the brain: the auditory cortex to listen, the motor areas, the ones monitoring social interactions, the ones in charge of releasing hormones, the ones that control feelings and emotion, the ones that create memories… Dancing requires such a wide palette of feelings, coordinated movements, and self-confidence that researchers think it holds a strong therapeutic potential. And recent results seem to prove them right!
First, dancing in synch with someone, like in ballroom dances, seems to stimulate neuronal plasticity and activates unique combinations of neurones in the brain. That means that dancing with someone helps create new bridges between the different areas of the brain, making communication between neurones faster and more efficient. On top of that, when dancing, the activated areas in the brain are not quite the same as the ones involved in listening to music or working out, which is incredible knowing that dancing involves both processing music and moving in a specific fashion!
But it goes further than that! Studies have been conducted on people suffering from dementia, Alzheimer, and Parkinson diseases and found that dancing had a protective effect on the brain. Dancing would slow down not only the development of neuronal diseases, it could also prevent their apparition and have positive effects on people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. Dancing helped restore some motor and cognitive abilities in patients, improving not only their wellbeing, but also their quality of life and general health. Dancing makes people move, it makes them talk together, it makes them interact in a way social status doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is who you are when you dance. This social aspect of dancing is incredibly important for old people (healthy or otherwise): it keeps them socially active for longer, and social contact is really important for our wellbeing.
Dancing, thus, helps improve old people’s quality of life (and both health and social aspects), but it also has a great impact on younger minds! When 4-year-old kids dance together as pairs, moving together, moving in synch (more or less, they’re only 4 y.o…), and reproducing each other’s movements, both their empathy and cooperative tendencies were boosted! Moreover, dancing regularly helped kids regulate their emotional states, giving them a way to deal with them but also helping them to face the situation.
Something even cooler researchers found is that we are born ready to dance! If you’ve ever interacted with a baby, you might have seen them wiggling to the music. In their case, it often involves moving their arms up and down while shaking their head, but you can notice they do it following the rhythm of the music. Very early in our life, our brain attributes a special place to the processing of musical rhythms. Indeed, rhythm and tempo are going straight to the area of the brain responsible for movements, it is not over analysed like speech can be. Which means that when we hear music, we do not try to make sense to it. Unless we are actively listening to the music, trying to understand the notes or the lyrics, we do not try to “understand” it. Our brain automatically by-passes the analytical neurones and sends the rhythm straight to the motor areas. When we hear music, we start dancing.
Not everyone is equal when it comes to dancing, though. Not because not everyone can dance (everybody can), but because some people have developed some sort of inhibitory behaviours. When hearing music, some of us will start moving and wiggling around, while others can remain perfectly still. It’s like they do not register music is playing! And even though I do not have some super cool research to back this up, I would think it is linked to their personality, their personal experiences, or what they think is appropriate or not. If you think you can’t dance, or people have made fun of you, or you are super shy, you might not want to start wiggling each time you hear music. You might have developed some sort of wall between the auditory cortex and the motor area of the brain, preventing the “hear music-start dancing” connection. It is possible that you can choose when to lower the wall (in a “safe” environment, after a couple of drinks…) and when to be impervious to music. That means you probably don’t start dancing while walking in the middle of the street… but I hope they still get to dance, even in front of their mirror, in the kitchen, wherever they feel like doing it really. Dancing is good for your brain and good for your soul.
Young and older, boys and girls - everybody benefits from dancing. And everybody can dance. It’s true that not everyone is Michael Jackson or Chris Brown, but everybody can move to the rhythm in their head (which is dancing). The only limitations are the ones you create for yourself. Enjoy yourself! Who cares about the others? They are probably too busy overthinking their own moves to pay any attention to yours. They probably wished they had the confidence to join and enjoy themselves. So what are you waiting for? Get your dancing shoes on and start moving!
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