Dancing is a sport. I bet that it's the same with other sports that require a lot of body control and coordination (being your own puppet master).
Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
181–190 of 224 posts
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#182Did both group contain similar amount of people who genuinely enjoyed the activity? An pretty old finding with physical exercise is that health benefits primarily only comes into effect in people who actually enjoy the activity. Two people doing the same mechanical physical motion get different health benefit if one enjoy it and the other disliked it (can't cite the exact study but remember findings in both human as…
I mean, even if the effect is significant, it might just come down to the fact that for one person the activity alleviates stress and for the other it does the opposite. Sure, the physical activity is good for circulation and cardio/strength will vary a lot, but I imagine most of the mood-altering aspects and impact on things like GABA/cortisol/glutamate are largely dependent on whether someone is genuinely enjoying themselves, just ok with it, or find it to be a chore.
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about DanceDanceRevolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution
As a guy who's played way way too much DDR, it's a fantastic workout but it also gets very monotonous once you've figured out all the tricks and patterns. (Monotonous in terms of novelty, mind you - it's still fun!) The difference from _real_ dance is that you're dancing with a partner who is continually thinking of new moves.
We don't know where DDR lies on the scale of brain plasticity since it wasn't tested but good points you make. In my own opinion I feel DDR would be better than repetitive physical exercise but not as good as dance.
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about DanceDanceRevolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the effect comes from two minds working together. Working with a computer is...different.
I don't feel like the people in the study were pair dancing . Or improvising. They were learning dance in a classroom setting. " Each block comprised the teaching of choreographies of five different genres: line dance, jazz dance, rock ‘n’ roll, Latin-American dance and square dance "
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#185I've been a dancer for 30 years, of many forms. The best way I can describe dancing to non-practitioners is that it's like playing a silent, wearable musical instrument that demands attention from your entire body. It is not like playing a sport, except perhaps if you do it competitively :-)
Here are just a few examples of sports that require continuous attention from your entire body in response to an external stimulus: Snowboarding, downhill skiing, mountain biking, and any martial art. These are from personal experience, I’m sure there are plenty of other examples. Even weight training, which is an experimental group in this article, when done properly, requires high levels of neuro-muscular coordinat…
Have you tried dancing? Given you have found so much depth in "simple" movements like barbell exercises, do you think it is reasonable to assume that every single move in dance (of which there are countless) would all have equivalent depth? What happens when you start linking moves - you then get a combinatorial explosion of compound movements to practice.
I recently took up dancing to improve my fight game. I went in thinking it would just be a fun/different way of working on footwork, I was quickly amazed how it is very different to most the other sports I've tried.
Someone else mentioned musical instruments on this HN post - I think that might be it. Dancing is a musical instrument where you trade sound for expressivity in your body. So suddenly you've taken a sport and you have layered rhythm and musicality on top of it - and your movements are coupled to your understanding of those.
That's quite deep, I guess at high level boxing you get similar concepts without the music element (ideas of tempo and upsetting people's tempo).
I think my biggest value I took away from dancing was learning a new energy to take to sports. Whatever you do in dancing, it needs to look smooth and soft - that is the name of the game. But there is a stiffness and explosiveness I take to most my sports and learning to apply softness has been valuable. After all most of the greatest all time athletes have an easiness about their techniques which I guess correlates to efficiency.
I think I agree with your overall point on your post - if you sleep on any activity you won't get much value from it, the corollary being that if you go deep on something you will find lots of value in it. I guess my specific reply to you was "don't sleep on dancing"
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#186Looking at this: "Dancing compared to conventional fitness activity led to larger volume increases in more brain areas, including the cingulate cortex, insula, corpus callosum and sensorimotor cortex. Only dancing was associated with an increase in plasma BDNF levels. Regarding cognition, both groups improved in attention and spatial memory, but no significant group differences emerged. The latter finding may indicat…
> May I translate: They saw improvements in things they could easily measure. They hope this translate into improved cognitive ability. But it actually didn't. But they still hope it'll do that later. I find your translation misleading. They did see improved cognitive ability, just not superior to the conventional fitness program at the time of measuring . Increased BDNF, which stands for brain-derived neurotrophic f…
In the Sports Group SG ‘We avoided combined arm and leg movements in order to keep coordinative demands low.’
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#187As a person who loves to dance, I think there is also a distinction to be made between freestyle and structured dance. I used to make up moves on the spot depending on the music/beats etc and that requires being completely lost into the music and tapping into your instinct - my brain was practically doing nothing else but imagining the moves that would be fun to match the music. Considering the feeling of euphoria when a move turned out well and/or when my partner mimicked or matched then with their own, it had to have significant impact on the brain activity. The highs were truly high without having to involve any drugs.
I'm sure specific-style of dancing also produces plenty of such feelings but the structure/grammer must impose some additional restrictions too. Though it might be a different sort of pleasure to invent something new and see that work well within that framework.
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#188Looking at this: "Dancing compared to conventional fitness activity led to larger volume increases in more brain areas, including the cingulate cortex, insula, corpus callosum and sensorimotor cortex. Only dancing was associated with an increase in plasma BDNF levels. Regarding cognition, both groups improved in attention and spatial memory, but no significant group differences emerged. The latter finding may indicat…
My first dance teacher used to refer to a similar study from 10 years ago in NEJM ( https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa022252); his commentary is at https://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/smarter.htm But yeah, getting into lindy hop 15 years ago was literally the best thing that ever happened to me. It's incredible, being able to go to any major city on the planet and instantly finding a community.
I agree completely. I do salsa and every time I travel (which was a lot pre covid) I would look up dance venues and you're always guaranteed a great time. It's also amazing how diverse the salsa community is, there are people from 20 to 80 of all social and ethical backgrounds dancing with each other (I saw similar things in the swing community when I tried it out)
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would disagree, dance requires an intimate letting go, while sports is a more mechanical shutting down. Dance is a sort of trance, and requires alot of letting go. Sports has a goal, has focus, its very “in the head” (exceptions do exist ala japanese arts, martial arts comes close but not as it is largely implemented in the west.) Not saying no brain plasticity work takes place, but dance has an active emotional el…
Dance is a sort of trance, and requires alot of letting go I know what you mean, also when you talk about that certain tenderness, I have experienced that, and I can get that same thing out of sports like climbing/bmx/snowboarding. Take climbing: slowly reaching for a difficult hold you've never touched before, where you carefully lay your fingers on it, just touching it at first to make sure it'll actually hold you…
I can imagine sports tapping into that kind of potential .. i get you
Re: Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)
#190Hum... Now this makes me wonder if VR games could achieve a similar effect, such as Beat Saber. Since VR games could combine physical and mental activity into one.
I like to imagine that when history looks back on the crumbling rubble of the 21st century, Beat Saber will be recognized as our crowning achievement.