If you are a dancer already or if you have seen others dancing, you probably think it is a great workout! It is a lot of fun, it can relieve stress, and it can make you healthier. It can improve your coordination and awareness of the people or objects around you. The benefits are endless.
Did you know that dancing also helps your brain, can improve your mental health, and can even make you smarter? Growing evidence shows that dancing is great for reducing or even relieving the symptoms you feel when you get depressed. Since dancing focuses on body movement and expression of emotions, it is wonderful and therapeutic.
How dancing can make you smarter:
- Dancing supports intellectual brain functions – Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) is also known as movement psychotherapy. It is a psychological therapy using body movements to improve and maintain motor, intellectual, and emotional abilities of the whole body.
- Dancing helps development of cognitive functions – Dance therapy creates a supportive environment for cognitive development. As an example: while dancing, the person is working to make very fast decisions about which moves they will be doing next. They think about where their feet will be going, and what each body part will be doing. This kind of quick decision making can help the brain learn how to act and think fast in times of stress. The more experienced you art are at dancing, muscle memory comes into play and you do not need to think about what to do all the time. That brings us to our next benefit, memory improvement.
- Dancing boosts your memory – Several studies show that dancing reduces your risk of dementia, and improves a cognitive domain called spatial memory. Dancing into old age can help you preserve your motor skills, cognitive function, and perceptual abilities. In addition, muscle memory forms in those who practice dance regularly. The brain creates brand new neural pathways just for the dance moves you do the most often. The more moves you master, the more pathways your brain has made. That brings us to the next one: nerve growth factors.
- Dancing stimulates growth of new brain nerves – Nerve growth factors are the proteins that are important to sensory neuron health. Dancing creates a connection between the right and left brain. Long term dancing has a positive effect on brain activity, including improved neuroplasticity – which is how well the brain can create neural connections/pathways for adapting to changes.
Due to all of these benefits, dancing can be used as intervention and prevention for brain diseases such as cerebral palsy, strokes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and more.