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Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)

467 points by prostoalex 6y ago

didibus 6y ago
Hum... 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.
- Johnjonjoan 6y ago
  I'd be inclined to think beatsabre is repetitive. Dance often involves moving your body in ways you haven't before or rarely do whilst beatsabre is pretty much different variations of the same move. I believe activating a relatively new pathways is vastly different to activating a relatively old one in terms of brain plasticity; which is why I don't think there is much promise with this particular game. Edit: when I say new and old pathway I really mean one that has been activated relatively little versus one that has been activated considerably more.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    Well, to be fair, I’ve danced quite a bit. Unless you’re actively trying, it’s quite easy to fall into a groove where you’re just doing the same things over and over again to every song. There’s probably more variation with dancing (in general) than some dance games but I do want to say, it’s possible to fall into a rut within dancing.
    - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
      I can totally see your point. Which makes me wonder... Is dance superior to repetitive exercise for seasoned dancers, or are they actually the same thing?
      - gnramires 6y ago
        There are many kinds of dance and styles. I guess the main ways to divide could be a) Partner dance b) Group dance, and a') Choreography b') Improvisation. Even for seasoned dancers there is a lot to offer in all of those. In partner dance you have to watch and adapt to your partner all the time (no matter the skill level). In choreography you of course have to learn new programs and execute them well (displaying the desired artistic expression), in improvisation you have to come up with things on the fly. Unless you get stuck in an old routine (same old choreography, not doing anything new, etc.), there is almost endless variation and learning of new tricks and nuances.
        Johnjonjoan 6y ago
        Thanks for the info. In that case I guess we can only infer that dance is better than repetitive exercise providing you are not banging out the same routines over and over. (In which case it is arguably repetitive exercise itself) This aligns much better with my view that creating and accessing relatively new/rarely used pathways is the mechanism that keeps our brains agile.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        You missed solo dance as c). Lots of hip hop is solo or semi solo, as are things like solo Charleston.
    - didibus 6y ago
      That's true, though they didn't simply have people dance. They had people learn different dance coreograhies and perform them.
  - didibus 6y ago
    I'm not sure it's the repetitiveness of the physical activity that is the issue, though could be. The way I'm interpreting it, I read it as you need to combine physical activity with sensory and cognitive tasks. Which dance provides. Beat Saber is repetitive in the physical movement, but constantly challenges you in the sensory and cognitive department.
    - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
      I do think your point that the physical repetitiveness isn't the only factor is correct, however I believe it is the main driver. Almost all physically repetitive exercises combine sensory and cognitive tasks to varying extents. I would also argue that learning and implementing new movements is a much more diverse task cognitively than getting better at beatsabre.
      - didibus 6y ago
        I can see learning dance coreographies still being better than Beat Saber for sure. I just think a lot of normally suggested activities don't really involve sensory and cognitive aspects, like walking, jogging, cycling, swimming. So compared to those, I could see something like Beat Saber possibly having better success, which is where I feel it becomes interesting, because most people would naturally assume that picking up a game like Beat Saber wouldn't be any good and it be best you'd start swimming.
  - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
    Beat Saber does have a very large amount of patterns, though. If you restrict yourself to the best designed maps, you're likely to find a unique feel to each. It does feel a lot like dancing, although, yes, it's a style of dancing that benefits from your body already knowing the basic positions. I seem to recall some of the best custom mappers are specifically into dancing/choreography, but don't quote me on this; I don't know how to validate this information (maybe someone from the community will read this and be able to confirm).
    - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
      I would like to point out we're not questioning whether repetitive activity enhances plasticity but if dancing is better. Also when the study says dance they mean learning a new dance. If you were to do variations of the same dance over and over this study doesn't prove you would also get the benefits. I'd imagine if we did study it that case would show results very similar to the benefits from repetitive activity.
- amelius 6y ago
  How about DanceDanceRevolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution
  - johnfn 6y ago
    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.
    - elliekelly 6y ago
      I loved DDR but you’re right it definitely gets stale once you’ve memorized all of the patterns. But I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to alter DDR to “randomize” different sections of the dances. Maybe have three or four choreographed patterns possible for each section of the song and every time you play the song the dance is a randomized combination of those possible patterns.
    - djmips 6y ago
      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.
    - blensor 6y ago
      I am planning a 1 on 1 battle mode in VRWorkout [1] where players have to challenge each other with exercises. I am still in the design phase but it should be a way to get a competitve fitness challenge. [1] https://vrworkout.at https://vrworkout.at
  - codr7 6y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if some of the effect comes from two minds working together. Working with a computer is...different.
- johnfn 6y ago
  I do believe that VR absolutely has potential to shake this up. VR games have a physicality to them that is unmatched in any other sort of computer game. I played ping pong on VR the other day, and it was amazing! I've played a bunch of ping pong in real life, and the physics in VR - along with the feedback in the controller - felt almost exactly life-like. It was truly a mind-blowing experience. It made me realize though that we're really at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what kinds of things we could do with VR. Up until now, the games we could play had the limit of only taking a few key presses and mouse motion as input. Suddenly we're now afforded the entire realm of physical motion. Not to hype it up too much, but the possibilities feel practically endless.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  My guess is yes. The only issue right now is that sweating with a headset on doesn't feel great.
- Liuser 6y ago
  Not VR, but "Just Dance", a video game series teaches actual dance moves.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Beat Saber is great but I find that Audica and Synth Rider feel more like dancing than Beat Saber. In all those games you really need to play at the higher levels for them to be interesting. I don't understand the comments that say the games are repetitive. In my experience most dance is repetitive. You practice certain moves and then that's it. Repeat those moves.
- p1mrx 6y ago
  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.
skookum 6y ago
If the postulated basis is correct and acts on a continuum, it wouldn't be a huge leap to think that doing physically challenging outdoor sports that require a high degree of reaction to constantly-changing surroundings would be even better than dancing. Sounds like a case for skiing, mountain biking, climbing, surfing, whitewater kayaking, etc.
- codr7 6y ago
  Don't forget martial arts. I've had good experiences from teaching Wing Chun to students who practiced dancing and/or (somewhat surprisingly in this context) Yoga before. What dancing and martial arts have in common more than the rest of your list is creativity and two minds working together.
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    Absolutely agree. Before everything shut down I used to practice yoga at a school here in Brooklyn that was very physically demanding and attracted a lot of more advanced practitioners. Most of the advanced students had long histories with dance or martial arts (or both). All of these arts teach increased awareness both physically and mentally, challenges your proprioception, and surprises the body with creative movement. I personally had been looking for a place to practice a martial art to add to my yoga practice, but then covid hit and the city shut down. Hopefully after all this is over though.
    - codr7 6y ago
      I'm far from objective, having practiced and taught Wing Chun for more than 25 years; but from the martial arts I've been in contact with, WC excels at teaching physical and emotional awareness. Cuts both ways, I've been looking for oppurtunities to teach but people are so nervous and spinning now that it's mostly impossible to reach through.
      - nickjj 6y ago
        I didn't read the paper in depth. Is the benefit of dancing from having to remember a series of steps in addition to being physically active? Just asking because a lot of martial arts forms require remembering dozens or even hundreds of specific movements in a specific order.
netcan 6y ago
There is parsimony between recent interest in fasting for health and the fact that so many cultures & religions prescribe ritual fasts. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism... That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality. Dance seems similar. It's something most cultures do... especially when they're being especially cultural. It may even go deeper. Dancing and music are kind of wired into us, possibly adjacent to speech. Babies will dance to music. I wouldn't be surprised if science confirms that dance is good.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  TL;DR: it seems trivially true that non-scientific, traditional knowledge can be a powerful source of understanding, especially when combined judiciously with science. > That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality. The belief that no knowledge exists outside of the scientific establishment is one of the biggest weaknesses of the center-left technocratic memeplex (of which I'm proudly a part). It leads not only to the myopia of believing that your opponents don't deserve a hearing because they're "anti-science" (for ever more creative interpretations of science..), but also to unforced errors from the ability to reason about uncertainty, like <everything our public health authorities have done during the pandemic>. I believe that the scientific method is the greatest engine for rapid, high-quality knowledge generation in human history, and consider its manifestation in the scientific establishment to be one of the crowning achievements of humanity. But this doesn't make its manifestation perfect: as with all human systems, it's composed of people who are not immune to pettiness, narrow-minded, selfishness, and even occasionally stupidity. And as with all institutions, the human flaws of its constituents are magnified 1000-fold due to the challenges of incentive design and modeling large systems. Please note, this is decidedly _not_ a criticism of scientists beyond "they're human"; I wouldn't be surprised if the average scientist was well below the median for all of the negative qualities I described. It's just an acknowledgement that they're human, they have flaws, and those flaws affect how science is produced. Proper science is vastly superior in efficiency and confidence to many other forms of epistemology, but the imperfection of the scientific establishment means that it occasionally mishandles or abdicates responsibility for certain whole sections of knowledge-space. In these situations, reasoning under uncertainty requires cautiously looking at other sources of knowledge; they may be "lower-quality" in many ways than the scientific method, but they're better than simply assuming that absence of evidence = evidence of absence. When I was younger, I had this insight in the context of ayahuasca rituals while in Peru (I had the insight _before_ the ritual, to be clear haha). The scientific community had abdicated its responsibility to study the potential of psychedelics for improving mental health; how else to interpret shaman guiding an ayahuasca ritual than as an analogue of a therapist[1] trained in psychedelic therapy, whose expertise is shaped not through RCTs but centuries of trial and error? The fact that the West is taking slow, halting steps towards studying psychedelic therapy 70 years after its popularization here is pretty damning, IMO: as somebody who treated science as a valuable but flawed source of knowledge, I've been a happy user of LSD for years, and consider it an immensely helpful tool for mental health. There are a million examples of this if you stop and think about it. Fifty years ago, yoga and meditation made you a kook; the scientific establishment started studying it and now, it's weird among some circles not to regularly do yoga and meditate. This is again something you can learn easily through examining "unscientific" tradition + self-experimentation, with an appropriate model of the downside risks. [1] I'm using intentionally clinical language here to make the comparison clear, though I'm aware that it's a little reductive to ignore the spiritual dimension most shamans would describe their work as having.
com2kid 6y ago
I wonder how kickboxing fairs, done properly it is mentally taxing and one of the highest calorie burning exercises out there (up to 500 calories/30 minutes as measured by HR strap). The mentally taxing part comes from the complex weight shifting and footwork that is constantly needed, complex combos require sophisticated manipulations of body weight positioning and constant shifting of stances and physical location around the bag. It is the only cardio-like activity I can stand, except it is way above the cardio zone, HR when active is above 150 (or even 160) and stays there for an entire 3 minute round.
- Klinky 6y ago
  So long as you're not knocking your noggin around. Any contact sport involving blows to the head (even padded blows) is probably more detrimental than any benefit gained.
ByThyGrace 6y ago
> An extensive pre/post-assessment was performed on the 38 participants (63–80 y) Mind the n = 38. People already taking the title at face value in this thread.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I thought the "low sample size, checkmate!" without any other analysis was limited to Reddit dilettantes.
  - booleandilemma 6y ago
    It’s here too, along with betteridge's law and references to the dunning-kruger effect. Maybe the frequency of these things can be explained by the 80/20 rule, ha.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    Canceled out by the blind acceptance of the headline without reading the article here on HN.
- smabie 6y ago
  Sample size is pretty irrelevant on its own.
aeturnum 6y ago
This feels like common sense to me. The dance they describe isn't just physical movement, it's also staying within a group movement which requires both reading where "the group" is and giving space to individual differences. Obviously the focus here is on exercise but I would be curious if a less physically demanding but similarly grouped activity would have similar effects on brain function. I suspect that linking physicality and social coordination is key. We are both brains and bodies and neglecting either is unhealthy in the long term.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  I wonder if the same effect is even stronger for many competitive sports, where the brain-muscle loop includes a more complex modeling of competing agents vs cooperative ones as in dance. Something like basketball is anti-inductive; falling into an easy pattern will be immediately exploited by the other team in a way that isn't prevented in dance.
scarface74 6y ago
I can definitely see this. I have very mild Cerebral Palsy. I can run and end up in the middle of the pack in most races and sometimes in the top 3 or four for my age group (pre-Covid). I even taught fitness classes about a decade ago. But trying to learn a dance move or take someone else’s choreography heavy exercise class was like trying to understand a second language when you are first learning it. I had to translate it to my “native language” and it took much longer for it to click even when I could physically do it. It was more mentally taxing than studying for any test or anything I had to do as a developer.
- marzell 6y ago
  This is interesting. Once you had a set of moves 'down', could you execute them accurately on a pretty consistent basis? At that point... I know dancing requires focus, but once learned was it still more mentally taxing/draining than other well-rehearsed activities?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I taught a lot of different formats but the two that required any level of choreography even though I was more drill and athletic focused were step and cardio kickboxing (this was a decade ago). I had a “bank” of 32 and 64 count combinations that I could just throw together on the fly and teaching a class became like driving. Once I memorized them and trained my body how to do them (my cp affects my left foot slightly and my left hand a lot) it was easy. The other part is that I naturally have no rhythm. I could only teach to songs with heavy, consistent beats. You can buy premixed 32 count music but I ended up mixing my own using a program called Audacity that Adobe bought and turned into Audition. Even then the only way I could mix music is by turning off the sound once I got near the mix point and mixing based on the waveforms.
paulcole 6y ago
Funny how HN eats up an n=38 study when it confirms their biases as opposed to when it doesn’t.
- secant 6y ago
  Ah yes, dance being the superior exercise, I have to admit my father engrained it into me as a child.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    I meant HN’s irresistible catnip being anything that contradicts mainstream conventional wisdom — not dance specifically.
    - veggieburglar 6y ago
      I think HN also has a very strong anti-sports leaning, especially for “traditional” sports.
- xnkap 6y ago
  If something is published, even in the soft sciences, it is always an uphill struggle on HN to criticize the paper. At the same time one can quote Feynman on social sciences or link to the relevant xkcd. Independent minds ...
acd 6y ago
This probably also translates to martial arts as that is also moving in complex patterns.
mrfusion 6y ago
How about tennis or Pickleball?
- willdearden 6y ago
  Do you have people saved in your phone with the last name “Pickleball” so your phone capitalizes pickleball?
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Now that you mention it, yes I do. That explains it.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Obligatory favorite obscure book that everyone should at least have read a Medium summary of citation: https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/dp/1597406740 https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/d... Super-tiny summary: humans have used coordinated rhythmic movement and the feelings it evokes as an aid to build communities and create efficient synchronized behavior. This behavior may even predated the human separation from other apes, and there is some evidence that certain other modern apes may use this too, though to a more limited degree. If this is truly such an ancient mechanism (the author's case is not ironclad, but good), it wouldn't be surprising to find connections between "coordinated rhythmic movement" and brain function.
hannob 6y ago
Looking 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 indicate that cognitive benefits may develop later and after structural brain changes have taken place." 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. (FWIW: I'm an active Lindy Hop dancer - ok, I have been before covid... - I love dancing and I am really looking forward to when I can visit dance festivals again.)
- MagnumPIG 6y ago
  No wonder science journalism has a hard time keeping to the facts, even with direct access to the paper we're upvoting and misunderstanding a paper of trivial significance...
- cosmojg 6y ago
  Whereabouts are you? Are there any festivals you'd recommend in particular?
  - virtue3 6y ago
    Lindy Hop? In the states the biggies are: Camp Hollywood (lotta pool time, lotta drinking) Lindy Focus (christmas -> new years, it's nuts) Nevermore (my personal favorite) Camp Jitterbug (used to be super relevent as the contest weekend event, sorta on the decline/ not sure) Lindyfest has some nice peeps at it Camp the biggest is Herrang in sweden, it's the lindy hop mecca trip. Also check out: https://www.swingplanit.com/ https://www.swingplanit.com/
    - saryant 6y ago
      I would not recommend a beginner start at Camp Hollywood. It’s a bit intense. Lindy on the Rocks in Denver is usually pretty good. There’s a huge swing dance community in the Front Range.
networkimprov 6y ago
I'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 :-)
- ninjaturtlez 6y ago
  Do you seriously not think that playing a sport requires control of your entire body? Have you ever tried to actively improve at a sport? Everything from basketball to golf is fine muscle control from the lowest to highest levels. Some people cant see their own bias I guess. :)
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    He’s describing it as a musical instrument. I think that’s a very good comparison, and is indeed not related to other sports.
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    Looks like you're just as caught up in your own bias as everyone else though :) Not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that someone saying "X is not like playing a sport" is a claim that "sports are trivially easy compared to X". I don't think the parent comment was claiming that at all, just that they're different, namely that dance is not inherently competitive.
    - cik2e 6y ago
      It’s pretty obvious that the parent post isn’t saying that dance is different in that it’s not inherently competitive, but rather that sports have to be done at a competitive level to match the physical requirements of dance. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment. My claim is that sports done with deliberate practice aimed at improving technique are just like dance done with deliberate practice aimed at improving technique.
  - cooliosis 6y ago
stevehiehn 6y ago
Nice, been 'raving' for years ;)
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Offsets the damage of XTC usage a bit ;-)
anonu 6y ago
The HN headline should match the article's. It's missing "in the elderly"
whatnidnogg 6y ago
hell yeah!
whatnidnogg 6y ago
hell yeah! dancing is kick ass.
mancerayder 6y ago
Is a complex, full-body coordinated accelerated movement like an olympic clean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk) considered 'repetitive physical exercise'? People see a barbell and they think bodybuilding, but there's a minority of weightlifting that involves a degree of complexity that's qualitatively in a different league than, say, bicep curls. I'm curious how it pans out.
- analbumcover 6y ago
  Snatches and clean and jerks are certainly more technically involved than any movement you'd see in bodybuilding or powerlifting. You train fewer motor patterns with much higher frequency than other strength sports. It lacks the variation in movement that you'd see in bodybuilding, let alone dance. It's also very rigid, there's no creative element to it. I'd hazard a guess that it's more similar, in terms of brain plasticity, to strength sports than dance.
belorn 6y ago
Did 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 well as animal studies, and the implied cause is that one trigger stress hormones while the other trigger growth). It would not surprise me if the dance group did better than the fitness training simply because the dance members enjoyed dancing more than the fitness members enjoyed fitness training, through I might be biased as I am not one who enjoy fitness training at all.
- marzell 6y ago
  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.
wittyreference 6y ago
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but: When looking at studies, there are two types of validity to pay attention to, "external" and "internal." Internal is the sort that says: does this study actually test what it claims to? If a study looks in a black box, sees there's no elephant inside, and says "there's no elephant in there! Huzzah, we've proven it's a tiger!", that's an internally invalid study. External validity is about applicability: if I give a dose of abx to a bunch of people with advanced AIDS to treat an infection, and find it doesn't work, it doesn't mean "this abx doesn't work." It means "this abx doesn't work /in this population/. Don't extrapolate it to an immune-competent population." 1. The study begins with what they describe in their registration documents as "healthy elderly." That's a bit kind: "Sixty-two normal volunteers, who responded to a local advertisement, were screened. Subjects with any neurological condition, metallic implants, claustrophobia, tinnitus, BMI ≤30, high blood pressure (systolic≤140 mmHg), diabetes mellitus, intensive physical engagement (more than 1 hour/week) and abnormal performance in a cognitive screening test (MMSE < 27)[32] and a test devoted to depressive symptoms (BDI-II > 13) [33] were excluded." In short, they started with an anomalously healthy population, who likely have a lifetime of exposure to exercise and physical activity. Do the results here extrapolate to the general population? Do they extrapolate to the same degree? It's a decent question mark, considering their results are non-significant in everything except their "looks like false positives" brain volume measures to begin with - even a little bit of "ehh... maybe not so much" takes them into the realm of "no effects", alongside every other measure in the paper. External validity is doubtful here. 2. Internal validity is a bit doubtful too, first for reasons of selection bias. They recruited 62 healthy volunteers; they had 14 dropouts. A 22% dropout rate isn't atrocious, but it's more than enough - if it's not random - to skew a study. Their enrollment figure describes the dropouts as almost entirely pre-randomisation (10/14), but the study description notes that 6 drop-outs were due to failure to achieve frequency of adherence, which clearly had to occur post-randomization, and 2 due to dissatisfaction with group assignment (obviously post-randomization). 6 got seriously ill - I'd love to know in which group, and with what. 3. Their way of controlling for equivalent physical load was to measure heart rate twice. On the one hand, not crazy. On the other hand, if you've ever seen your HR during a workout session, you'll see how noisy that is - and with a sample of a whole 38 pairs, that's a relatively huge amount of noise. Moreover, it doesn't appear that they used that to guide intensity of intervention, just "to control" (which I take to mean, to plug into a multivariate model at some point - except they don't, as they describe the covariates they plug into their model to be age, sex, and intracranial volume for brain volume t-tests) I'm skeptical this is an adequate control - I'd at least have wanted a time-weighted average HR. 3.b. The sports intervention had one effort-controllable component (sport bike), but had 3 different components. It's not at all clear they could capture the effort under the regimen above, especially as the relatively light strength exercise that the elderly tend to tolerate is the place where I'm most suspicious of them failing to capture an effort delta. 4. The differences in brain volume swung in different directions in each group, without making an awful lot of sense (more right cerebellar development in standard exercise group?? So, asymmetrically, the less-coordination-demanding intervention showed more development of the primary coordination center of the brain?). But more generally, looking at supplementary table S3, note that dancing showed improvements in anterior and posterior white matter, and standard exercise in temporal and occipital. The brain isn't that cleanly delineated - to find such statistically strong effects in such broad brushstrokes sets off a red flag for me. The fact that there was scattered growth *in both groups suggests we're looking at false positives. Not precisely a new problem for this study methodology. Their p-threshold of .001 is considered best-practices (aka, the bare minimum) for cluster-based adjustment of multiple testing in neuroimaging: so that's good. They don't report the p-values on their brain volume testing; table S3 simply notes "p<.001". An actual effect size would be better, but hard to get with cluster-based thresholds - they're sensitive to "any signal, at all, is it there?" but they're shitty at locking down precise volumes. 5. Dance group had lower BDNF plasma at baseline vs. standard exercise (1500 vs. 2100) (p .14), and equal at post (2200 to 2100, p .6). In short, they showed regression to the mean in the dance group. They report this as "the dance group had an increase in plasma BDNF from baseline." Serum levels likewise were not significantly difference pre and post between the two groups (dance went from 35K to 36K, sport went from 30K to 29K). In short, nothing happened. But they hid the "fucking nothing happened" in supplementary table 4, and dressed it up real pretty in the included figure 4. 6. Cognitive outcomes, the only thing that actually matters here: no differences. 7. At least some physical fitness differences? No, none there either. TL;DR they found nothing, made some misleading figures out of it. There are no perfect studies, but this one just boils down to "found nothing, needed publication."
sova 6y ago
There was a strong article in an Australian magazine claiming that ballet was one of the strongest preventative measures against dementia, and this lines up with that.
topkai22 6y ago
The key here is "repetitive". It sounds like the repetitive exercise was the exact same cardio + weights routine every day, excluding any coordinative active, while the dance routines were explicitly varied and sound far more interactive. I don't know enough about the underlying science to really understand the paper at a glance, but it's not surprising that learning a new skill provides beneficial effects. A neat follow up would be to look at what learning a musical instrument with a lower physical fitness requirement than dance does is relationship to a dance routine. Or even something like birding, that requires a moderate amount of walking with increased skills observing the physical environment. I think this probably (with low confidence, because of the low N and a high dropout rate) answers the question "is dance better for neuroplasticity than walking on a treadmill and stationary bike + repetitive and uncoordinated floor exercises" with a yes, but I'll bet plenty of other activities surpass the repetitive control group as well.
WalterBright 6y ago
Dance (at least dancing with a partner) is also very much a social activity, and social activity has very good effects on cognition.
ak39 6y ago
Dancing isn't easy for folks who are rhythm-challenged like me. Try the Jerusamela on for size. Warning: make sure the vase, and precious items in the living room are packed away before you practise. Some attempts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePuGjRRin3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePuGjRRin3c Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZVL_8D048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZVL_8D048
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I know it's off-topic but Tik-tok is really refreshing as a social network/entertainment thing to me. Lots of honest (even though the app encourages use of video effects) stuff on it, especially if you upvote things from time to time. User-generated content but haven't yet seen facebook outrage porn or twitter feud war ; lots of good vibe. edit: my feed is filled with people with goth make up mimicking lyrics or movie dialogues, skate boarding tricks, contemporary dancers and weird jokers.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    And all data funneled to the CCP.
werber 6y ago
This makes me wonder about getting “lost in the music” type dancing on your own where you connect your physical movement and it becomes intuitive. I’ve done lots of club kid to slam dancing on my own and formal dancing and the headspace is so different but the former was always more intellectually satisfying and aerobic for me
agumonkey 6y ago
I consider dance the intersection of balance, efficiency / energy conservation and probably the abstract root of a lot of activities in life. Anything can be a chore, or an effort, but if you make it into a dance like action.. it becomes both easy and joyful. And it's also reaching social boundaries.. if you think work as a set of concurrent changes driven by agents.. dancing is basically the lowest energy level for that. Everything flows, momentum conserved, impedance free.. and surprisingly people are very happy seeing and living that way. All that said... i'm not surprised it has a lot of leverage in our brain.
evo_9 6y ago
This is interesting; for the past 4 years as part of my workout I hop in VR for around 60 minutes. I typically play a mix of music while I play games like Space Pirate Trainer (highly movement oriented, my heat-rate stays at workout levels while playing). So I'm basically dancing around to music, dodging incoming fire, returning fire, etc... quite stimulating + athletic with eye/hand tracking etc. Perhaps this is doing more than a fun extra bit that's essentially my cool-down.
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
Just an anecdote, but I was at a wedding where I talked with a retirement age neurologist. He basically said the same thing. It didn't surprise me that later he and his wife were out on the dance floor start to finish, outlasting most of the 20 year olds, and dancing everything from tango to hip hop. Put a real smile on a lot of people's faces.
afterwalk 6y ago
Does anyone have suggestions on how to learn dancing during a time of social distancing? (i.e any good mooc or video courses?)
- jbroman 6y ago
  Kinda specific, but breakdancing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDaadRNPpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDaadRNPpg
dokem 6y ago
Weight lifting is better for making you more attractive and confident. If you are in good shape men and women will both take notice. Not everything's about squeezing out that last IQ point. I enjoy dancing, don't get me wrong, but weightlifting is the obvious choose when it comes to quality of life improvement. I used to run a lot too, no one gives a shit about your 5 minute mile and no one is impressed by your skinny body. Weightlifting; dudes figured it out 80 years ago.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Really cool. Would love to see this done with Beat Saber or some similar game (e.g. DDR).
thesz 6y ago
It's interesting how they matched the intensity. Because, in my opinion, dance is a sorta-kinda-like strength endurance training when you exert a modest loaded movement (say, 40%-50% of your bench press' 1RM) for 2-4 repetition and there are tens of these bouts. In calories spent such resistance exercise may match some endurance exercise but other effects can be dramatically different. Including, but not limited to, levels and utilization of brain-derived neurotophic factor. While endurance training increase BDNF level long term and modestly, the resistance exercise can effect a sharp 60%-90% increase at the end of training session, then drop to 40% of normal (to the person) level and slow recovery. This indicates overproduction of BDNF and its complete utilization of the body to build neurons everywhere.
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
As a data analyst, I once took an introductory class to modern dance. 5 sessions during one week. I though I was trained, I did calystecnics and yoga. The class included "floor work" similar but no limited to [1]. It was hard. I received a lot of feed back from the instructor, but of course I didn't achieve that amount of grace. Very worth trying if you want to experience learning something new and challenging. Incidentally, this is one area where there are many more females than males. 2¢. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jHrR8vy3OM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jHrR8vy3OM
SergeAx 6y ago
Two anecdotes from 10+ years argentinian tango dancer. 1. I dance leading part, and I found myself more self-confident in my engineering leader and manager work. Giving team a direction became more organic and easy. I actually had to start restraining myself to motivate people's creativity. It is actually kind of dance move too: stand still and give my follower firm support to decorate her part with small movements with music. 2. One of my fellow partners is playing intellectual games (local franchise of "Jeopardy!" and several others). She says her performance degrades with her progress in tango, because the follower's part in tango is to listen and not to step by her own, but only when and where the leader leads. I also believe in neuroplasticity and overall positive impact of creating and cohesion of neural links.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Dancing is one activity I’ve always struggled with. I did musical theater all through school, have gone to dance parties, different music clubs all my life, and I have just always disliked dancing and found it to be tiresome and boring. I even figured in my early 20s it was one of those things where I had to just keep trying more until I found the right style, but I took adult classes in swing, ballroom, disco, various fitness dance and modern dance and just universally hated it all. I am amazed and wowed by watching professional dancers, but I find the act of doing any kind of dancing for myself is just a deeply mentally disinteresting, grating, boring slog that I can’t get into.
nine_k 6y ago
Certain folk dances are quite a lot of exercise. Some likely descend from a ritualized exercise / demonstration, like the Ukrainian "gopak". Just estimate the level of physical fitness which allows to dance like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvD21OntHgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvD21OntHgI
scollet 6y ago
I am rhythm challenged, so for me martial arts have been mentally stimulating like improv jazz on a Go board. In sparring you can follow muscle memory to build a dynamic procedure based on your opponents' actions or reactions. You quickly learn the "dance" and when to change tempo because the alternative is pain or discomfort.
kraig911 6y ago
I wonder how Beat Saber fairs... I'm being dead serious. Since the gyms have closed it's become my new passion and i love it.
User23 6y ago
Improving the capability of your brain is a matter of stressing it in the hormetic zone, just like improving the capability of every other organ in your body. Since the brain is the control organ of the nervous system, including motor neurons, it's expected that physical stimulus would produce neural stimulus. I expect that advanced gymnastics is superior to dance with respect to brain plasticity, but only if the practitioner has already reached a level of adaption sufficient for the training stimulus to be in the hormetic zone. This hypothesis may or may not be correct, but it's certainly testable. If true, one would expect that a competent gymnast would be able to perform as a slightly less competent dancer whereas a competent dancer would have difficulty holding a planche or working a pommel horse.
twoleftfeets 6y ago
I know this is a stupid question but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do you learn to dance? Maybe I just have zero natural dance aptitude but ... I've taken maybe 8 swing dance lessons and 12 salsa lessons and I found them extremely hard and worst part is I felt horrible being so bad at it because it's not fun for the other more skilled students to dance with an unskilled noob. It's that last part that's the most frustrating. One salsa instructor said to expect at least 18 months of lessons before being able to lead. That was before seeing how bad I was at it. Another salsa instructor pretty much just gave up. She didn't want to deal with noobs. I can jump around to the music at a rave all night. I'm sure I could learn video game dance (DDR or Just Dance) but getting past the point of being a disappointment in two person dance seems really difficult for some reason.
InquilineKea 6y ago
Is yoga approximately the same? What of physical therapy?
war1025 6y ago
My grandma used to go dancing at the VFW every weekend up until I think shortly after her 95th birthday. She fell at a dance and broke her arm. She had lived on her own until then, but moved to a nursing home while her arm healed and then decided to just stay after she got better. Her memory has definitely gone downhill since she moved there, which could just be age. But I also feel like the physical activity and social aspect of always going out to dance helped keep her going longer than she otherwise would have. Hard to say I guess.
deltron3030 6y ago
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).
noisy_boy 6y ago
As 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.
nhlx2 6y ago
What about juggling a soccer ball?
Pamar 6y ago
I wonder if this would work for Martial Arts too (apologies if someone asked this already).
ivanhoe 6y ago
Isn't this perfectly logical, as dance has more complicated pattern of highly coordinated moves and in addition requires synchronization with the rhythm. I'd be much more interested in comparison of dance and some more complex fitness activity that requires high focus, say juggling the soccer ball or playing the table tennis or even jumping the rope.
WMCRUN 6y ago
Novel behavior could increase plasticity. Whether that’s novel exercise, new dances, or brushing your teeth with the opposite hand.
- WMCRUN 6y ago
  The novelty is the important part IMHO
hi41 6y ago
I am extraordinarily bad at dancing. You can get traumatized for life watching me dance. Can someone please suggest online videos you have found useful.
rondennis 6y ago
I agree. In case of physical exercise, the mind does not need to apply itself. But in case of dance, you have to think about your next move. But sports can surely be a money earner for many. source: https://wpbizblog.com/how-to-start-a-sports-blog/ https://wpbizblog.com/how-to-start-a-sports-blog/
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
LOL... i mean interpretive dance is the HIIT for the brain when dancing... (Rubs hands with glee lol) -- go to it Nerds who take such thing seriously.
InquilineKea 6y ago
How about yoga?

467 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Hum... 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.

Johnjonjoan 6y ago
I'd be inclined to think beatsabre is repetitive. Dance often involves moving your body in ways you haven't before or rarely do whilst beatsabre is pretty much different variations of the same move. I believe activating a relatively new pathways is vastly different to activating a relatively old one in terms of brain plasticity; which is why I don't think there is much promise with this particular game. Edit: when I say new and old pathway I really mean one that has been activated relatively little versus one that has been activated considerably more.
- bradlys 6y ago
  Well, to be fair, I’ve danced quite a bit. Unless you’re actively trying, it’s quite easy to fall into a groove where you’re just doing the same things over and over again to every song. There’s probably more variation with dancing (in general) than some dance games but I do want to say, it’s possible to fall into a rut within dancing.
  - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
    I can totally see your point. Which makes me wonder... Is dance superior to repetitive exercise for seasoned dancers, or are they actually the same thing?
    - gnramires 6y ago
      There are many kinds of dance and styles. I guess the main ways to divide could be a) Partner dance b) Group dance, and a') Choreography b') Improvisation. Even for seasoned dancers there is a lot to offer in all of those. In partner dance you have to watch and adapt to your partner all the time (no matter the skill level). In choreography you of course have to learn new programs and execute them well (displaying the desired artistic expression), in improvisation you have to come up with things on the fly. Unless you get stuck in an old routine (same old choreography, not doing anything new, etc.), there is almost endless variation and learning of new tricks and nuances.
      - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
        Thanks for the info. In that case I guess we can only infer that dance is better than repetitive exercise providing you are not banging out the same routines over and over. (In which case it is arguably repetitive exercise itself) This aligns much better with my view that creating and accessing relatively new/rarely used pathways is the mechanism that keeps our brains agile.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        You missed solo dance as c). Lots of hip hop is solo or semi solo, as are things like solo Charleston.
  - didibus 6y ago
    That's true, though they didn't simply have people dance. They had people learn different dance coreograhies and perform them.
- didibus 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's the repetitiveness of the physical activity that is the issue, though could be. The way I'm interpreting it, I read it as you need to combine physical activity with sensory and cognitive tasks. Which dance provides. Beat Saber is repetitive in the physical movement, but constantly challenges you in the sensory and cognitive department.
  - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
    I do think your point that the physical repetitiveness isn't the only factor is correct, however I believe it is the main driver. Almost all physically repetitive exercises combine sensory and cognitive tasks to varying extents. I would also argue that learning and implementing new movements is a much more diverse task cognitively than getting better at beatsabre.
    - didibus 6y ago
      I can see learning dance coreographies still being better than Beat Saber for sure. I just think a lot of normally suggested activities don't really involve sensory and cognitive aspects, like walking, jogging, cycling, swimming. So compared to those, I could see something like Beat Saber possibly having better success, which is where I feel it becomes interesting, because most people would naturally assume that picking up a game like Beat Saber wouldn't be any good and it be best you'd start swimming.
- pteraspidomorph 6y ago
  Beat Saber does have a very large amount of patterns, though. If you restrict yourself to the best designed maps, you're likely to find a unique feel to each. It does feel a lot like dancing, although, yes, it's a style of dancing that benefits from your body already knowing the basic positions. I seem to recall some of the best custom mappers are specifically into dancing/choreography, but don't quote me on this; I don't know how to validate this information (maybe someone from the community will read this and be able to confirm).
  - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
    I would like to point out we're not questioning whether repetitive activity enhances plasticity but if dancing is better. Also when the study says dance they mean learning a new dance. If you were to do variations of the same dance over and over this study doesn't prove you would also get the benefits. I'd imagine if we did study it that case would show results very similar to the benefits from repetitive activity.
amelius 6y ago
How about DanceDanceRevolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_Dance_Revolution
- johnfn 6y ago
  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.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I loved DDR but you’re right it definitely gets stale once you’ve memorized all of the patterns. But I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to alter DDR to “randomize” different sections of the dances. Maybe have three or four choreographed patterns possible for each section of the song and every time you play the song the dance is a randomized combination of those possible patterns.
  - djmips 6y ago
    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.
  - blensor 6y ago
    I am planning a 1 on 1 battle mode in VRWorkout [1] where players have to challenge each other with exercises. I am still in the design phase but it should be a way to get a competitve fitness challenge. [1] https://vrworkout.at https://vrworkout.at
- codr7 6y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if some of the effect comes from two minds working together. Working with a computer is...different.
johnfn 6y ago
I do believe that VR absolutely has potential to shake this up. VR games have a physicality to them that is unmatched in any other sort of computer game. I played ping pong on VR the other day, and it was amazing! I've played a bunch of ping pong in real life, and the physics in VR - along with the feedback in the controller - felt almost exactly life-like. It was truly a mind-blowing experience. It made me realize though that we're really at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what kinds of things we could do with VR. Up until now, the games we could play had the limit of only taking a few key presses and mouse motion as input. Suddenly we're now afforded the entire realm of physical motion. Not to hype it up too much, but the possibilities feel practically endless.
Aerroon 6y ago
My guess is yes. The only issue right now is that sweating with a headset on doesn't feel great.
Liuser 6y ago
Not VR, but "Just Dance", a video game series teaches actual dance moves.
gfxgirl 6y ago
Beat Saber is great but I find that Audica and Synth Rider feel more like dancing than Beat Saber. In all those games you really need to play at the higher levels for them to be interesting. I don't understand the comments that say the games are repetitive. In my experience most dance is repetitive. You practice certain moves and then that's it. Repeat those moves.
p1mrx 6y ago
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.

skookum 6y ago

If the postulated basis is correct and acts on a continuum, it wouldn't be a huge leap to think that doing physically challenging outdoor sports that require a high degree of reaction to constantly-changing surroundings would be even better than dancing. Sounds like a case for skiing, mountain biking, climbing, surfing, whitewater kayaking, etc.

codr7 6y ago
Don't forget martial arts. I've had good experiences from teaching Wing Chun to students who practiced dancing and/or (somewhat surprisingly in this context) Yoga before. What dancing and martial arts have in common more than the rest of your list is creativity and two minds working together.
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  Absolutely agree. Before everything shut down I used to practice yoga at a school here in Brooklyn that was very physically demanding and attracted a lot of more advanced practitioners. Most of the advanced students had long histories with dance or martial arts (or both). All of these arts teach increased awareness both physically and mentally, challenges your proprioception, and surprises the body with creative movement. I personally had been looking for a place to practice a martial art to add to my yoga practice, but then covid hit and the city shut down. Hopefully after all this is over though.
  - codr7 6y ago
    I'm far from objective, having practiced and taught Wing Chun for more than 25 years; but from the martial arts I've been in contact with, WC excels at teaching physical and emotional awareness. Cuts both ways, I've been looking for oppurtunities to teach but people are so nervous and spinning now that it's mostly impossible to reach through.
    - nickjj 6y ago
      I didn't read the paper in depth. Is the benefit of dancing from having to remember a series of steps in addition to being physically active? Just asking because a lot of martial arts forms require remembering dozens or even hundreds of specific movements in a specific order.

netcan 6y ago

There is parsimony between recent interest in fasting for health and the fact that so many cultures & religions prescribe ritual fasts. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism... That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality. Dance seems similar. It's something most cultures do... especially when they're being especially cultural. It may even go deeper. Dancing and music are kind of wired into us, possibly adjacent to speech. Babies will dance to music. I wouldn't be surprised if science confirms that dance is good.

wutbrodo 6y ago
TL;DR: it seems trivially true that non-scientific, traditional knowledge can be a powerful source of understanding, especially when combined judiciously with science. > That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality. The belief that no knowledge exists outside of the scientific establishment is one of the biggest weaknesses of the center-left technocratic memeplex (of which I'm proudly a part). It leads not only to the myopia of believing that your opponents don't deserve a hearing because they're "anti-science" (for ever more creative interpretations of science..), but also to unforced errors from the ability to reason about uncertainty, like <everything our public health authorities have done during the pandemic>. I believe that the scientific method is the greatest engine for rapid, high-quality knowledge generation in human history, and consider its manifestation in the scientific establishment to be one of the crowning achievements of humanity. But this doesn't make its manifestation perfect: as with all human systems, it's composed of people who are not immune to pettiness, narrow-minded, selfishness, and even occasionally stupidity. And as with all institutions, the human flaws of its constituents are magnified 1000-fold due to the challenges of incentive design and modeling large systems. Please note, this is decidedly _not_ a criticism of scientists beyond "they're human"; I wouldn't be surprised if the average scientist was well below the median for all of the negative qualities I described. It's just an acknowledgement that they're human, they have flaws, and those flaws affect how science is produced. Proper science is vastly superior in efficiency and confidence to many other forms of epistemology, but the imperfection of the scientific establishment means that it occasionally mishandles or abdicates responsibility for certain whole sections of knowledge-space. In these situations, reasoning under uncertainty requires cautiously looking at other sources of knowledge; they may be "lower-quality" in many ways than the scientific method, but they're better than simply assuming that absence of evidence = evidence of absence. When I was younger, I had this insight in the context of ayahuasca rituals while in Peru (I had the insight _before_ the ritual, to be clear haha). The scientific community had abdicated its responsibility to study the potential of psychedelics for improving mental health; how else to interpret shaman guiding an ayahuasca ritual than as an analogue of a therapist[1] trained in psychedelic therapy, whose expertise is shaped not through RCTs but centuries of trial and error? The fact that the West is taking slow, halting steps towards studying psychedelic therapy 70 years after its popularization here is pretty damning, IMO: as somebody who treated science as a valuable but flawed source of knowledge, I've been a happy user of LSD for years, and consider it an immensely helpful tool for mental health. There are a million examples of this if you stop and think about it. Fifty years ago, yoga and meditation made you a kook; the scientific establishment started studying it and now, it's weird among some circles not to regularly do yoga and meditate. This is again something you can learn easily through examining "unscientific" tradition + self-experimentation, with an appropriate model of the downside risks. [1] I'm using intentionally clinical language here to make the comparison clear, though I'm aware that it's a little reductive to ignore the spiritual dimension most shamans would describe their work as having.

com2kid 6y ago

I wonder how kickboxing fairs, done properly it is mentally taxing and one of the highest calorie burning exercises out there (up to 500 calories/30 minutes as measured by HR strap). The mentally taxing part comes from the complex weight shifting and footwork that is constantly needed, complex combos require sophisticated manipulations of body weight positioning and constant shifting of stances and physical location around the bag. It is the only cardio-like activity I can stand, except it is way above the cardio zone, HR when active is above 150 (or even 160) and stays there for an entire 3 minute round.

Klinky 6y ago
So long as you're not knocking your noggin around. Any contact sport involving blows to the head (even padded blows) is probably more detrimental than any benefit gained.

ByThyGrace 6y ago

> An extensive pre/post-assessment was performed on the 38 participants (63–80 y) Mind the n = 38. People already taking the title at face value in this thread.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
I thought the "low sample size, checkmate!" without any other analysis was limited to Reddit dilettantes.
- booleandilemma 6y ago
  It’s here too, along with betteridge's law and references to the dunning-kruger effect. Maybe the frequency of these things can be explained by the 80/20 rule, ha.
- paulcole 6y ago
  Canceled out by the blind acceptance of the headline without reading the article here on HN.
smabie 6y ago
Sample size is pretty irrelevant on its own.

aeturnum 6y ago

This feels like common sense to me. The dance they describe isn't just physical movement, it's also staying within a group movement which requires both reading where "the group" is and giving space to individual differences. Obviously the focus here is on exercise but I would be curious if a less physically demanding but similarly grouped activity would have similar effects on brain function. I suspect that linking physicality and social coordination is key. We are both brains and bodies and neglecting either is unhealthy in the long term.

wutbrodo 6y ago
I wonder if the same effect is even stronger for many competitive sports, where the brain-muscle loop includes a more complex modeling of competing agents vs cooperative ones as in dance. Something like basketball is anti-inductive; falling into an easy pattern will be immediately exploited by the other team in a way that isn't prevented in dance.

scarface74 6y ago

I can definitely see this. I have very mild Cerebral Palsy. I can run and end up in the middle of the pack in most races and sometimes in the top 3 or four for my age group (pre-Covid). I even taught fitness classes about a decade ago. But trying to learn a dance move or take someone else’s choreography heavy exercise class was like trying to understand a second language when you are first learning it. I had to translate it to my “native language” and it took much longer for it to click even when I could physically do it. It was more mentally taxing than studying for any test or anything I had to do as a developer.

marzell 6y ago
This is interesting. Once you had a set of moves 'down', could you execute them accurately on a pretty consistent basis? At that point... I know dancing requires focus, but once learned was it still more mentally taxing/draining than other well-rehearsed activities?
- scarface74 6y ago
  I taught a lot of different formats but the two that required any level of choreography even though I was more drill and athletic focused were step and cardio kickboxing (this was a decade ago). I had a “bank” of 32 and 64 count combinations that I could just throw together on the fly and teaching a class became like driving. Once I memorized them and trained my body how to do them (my cp affects my left foot slightly and my left hand a lot) it was easy. The other part is that I naturally have no rhythm. I could only teach to songs with heavy, consistent beats. You can buy premixed 32 count music but I ended up mixing my own using a program called Audacity that Adobe bought and turned into Audition. Even then the only way I could mix music is by turning off the sound once I got near the mix point and mixing based on the waveforms.

paulcole 6y ago

Funny how HN eats up an n=38 study when it confirms their biases as opposed to when it doesn’t.

secant 6y ago
Ah yes, dance being the superior exercise, I have to admit my father engrained it into me as a child.
- paulcole 6y ago
  I meant HN’s irresistible catnip being anything that contradicts mainstream conventional wisdom — not dance specifically.
  - veggieburglar 6y ago
    I think HN also has a very strong anti-sports leaning, especially for “traditional” sports.
xnkap 6y ago
If something is published, even in the soft sciences, it is always an uphill struggle on HN to criticize the paper. At the same time one can quote Feynman on social sciences or link to the relevant xkcd. Independent minds ...

acd 6y ago

This probably also translates to martial arts as that is also moving in complex patterns.

mrfusion 6y ago

How about tennis or Pickleball?

willdearden 6y ago
Do you have people saved in your phone with the last name “Pickleball” so your phone capitalizes pickleball?
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Now that you mention it, yes I do. That explains it.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Obligatory favorite obscure book that everyone should at least have read a Medium summary of citation: https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/dp/1597406740 https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Together-Time-Dance-History/d... Super-tiny summary: humans have used coordinated rhythmic movement and the feelings it evokes as an aid to build communities and create efficient synchronized behavior. This behavior may even predated the human separation from other apes, and there is some evidence that certain other modern apes may use this too, though to a more limited degree. If this is truly such an ancient mechanism (the author's case is not ironclad, but good), it wouldn't be surprising to find connections between "coordinated rhythmic movement" and brain function.

hannob 6y ago

Looking 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 indicate that cognitive benefits may develop later and after structural brain changes have taken place." 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. (FWIW: I'm an active Lindy Hop dancer - ok, I have been before covid... - I love dancing and I am really looking forward to when I can visit dance festivals again.)

MagnumPIG 6y ago
No wonder science journalism has a hard time keeping to the facts, even with direct access to the paper we're upvoting and misunderstanding a paper of trivial significance...
cosmojg 6y ago
Whereabouts are you? Are there any festivals you'd recommend in particular?
- virtue3 6y ago
  Lindy Hop? In the states the biggies are: Camp Hollywood (lotta pool time, lotta drinking) Lindy Focus (christmas -> new years, it's nuts) Nevermore (my personal favorite) Camp Jitterbug (used to be super relevent as the contest weekend event, sorta on the decline/ not sure) Lindyfest has some nice peeps at it Camp the biggest is Herrang in sweden, it's the lindy hop mecca trip. Also check out: https://www.swingplanit.com/ https://www.swingplanit.com/
  - saryant 6y ago
    I would not recommend a beginner start at Camp Hollywood. It’s a bit intense. Lindy on the Rocks in Denver is usually pretty good. There’s a huge swing dance community in the Front Range.

networkimprov 6y ago

I'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 :-)

ninjaturtlez 6y ago
Do you seriously not think that playing a sport requires control of your entire body? Have you ever tried to actively improve at a sport? Everything from basketball to golf is fine muscle control from the lowest to highest levels. Some people cant see their own bias I guess. :)
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  He’s describing it as a musical instrument. I think that’s a very good comparison, and is indeed not related to other sports.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Looks like you're just as caught up in your own bias as everyone else though :) Not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that someone saying "X is not like playing a sport" is a claim that "sports are trivially easy compared to X". I don't think the parent comment was claiming that at all, just that they're different, namely that dance is not inherently competitive.
  - cik2e 6y ago
    It’s pretty obvious that the parent post isn’t saying that dance is different in that it’s not inherently competitive, but rather that sports have to be done at a competitive level to match the physical requirements of dance. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment. My claim is that sports done with deliberate practice aimed at improving technique are just like dance done with deliberate practice aimed at improving technique.
- cooliosis 6y ago

stevehiehn 6y ago

Nice, been 'raving' for years ;)

louwrentius 6y ago
Offsets the damage of XTC usage a bit ;-)

anonu 6y ago

The HN headline should match the article's. It's missing "in the elderly"

whatnidnogg 6y ago

hell yeah!

whatnidnogg 6y ago

hell yeah! dancing is kick ass.

mancerayder 6y ago

Is a complex, full-body coordinated accelerated movement like an olympic clean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_and_jerk) considered 'repetitive physical exercise'? People see a barbell and they think bodybuilding, but there's a minority of weightlifting that involves a degree of complexity that's qualitatively in a different league than, say, bicep curls. I'm curious how it pans out.

analbumcover 6y ago
Snatches and clean and jerks are certainly more technically involved than any movement you'd see in bodybuilding or powerlifting. You train fewer motor patterns with much higher frequency than other strength sports. It lacks the variation in movement that you'd see in bodybuilding, let alone dance. It's also very rigid, there's no creative element to it. I'd hazard a guess that it's more similar, in terms of brain plasticity, to strength sports than dance.

belorn 6y ago

Did 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 well as animal studies, and the implied cause is that one trigger stress hormones while the other trigger growth). It would not surprise me if the dance group did better than the fitness training simply because the dance members enjoyed dancing more than the fitness members enjoyed fitness training, through I might be biased as I am not one who enjoy fitness training at all.

marzell 6y ago
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.

wittyreference 6y ago

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but: When looking at studies, there are two types of validity to pay attention to, "external" and "internal." Internal is the sort that says: does this study actually test what it claims to? If a study looks in a black box, sees there's no elephant inside, and says "there's no elephant in there! Huzzah, we've proven it's a tiger!", that's an internally invalid study. External validity is about applicability: if I give a dose of abx to a bunch of people with advanced AIDS to treat an infection, and find it doesn't work, it doesn't mean "this abx doesn't work." It means "this abx doesn't work /in this population/. Don't extrapolate it to an immune-competent population." 1. The study begins with what they describe in their registration documents as "healthy elderly." That's a bit kind: "Sixty-two normal volunteers, who responded to a local advertisement, were screened. Subjects with any neurological condition, metallic implants, claustrophobia, tinnitus, BMI ≤30, high blood pressure (systolic≤140 mmHg), diabetes mellitus, intensive physical engagement (more than 1 hour/week) and abnormal performance in a cognitive screening test (MMSE < 27)[32] and a test devoted to depressive symptoms (BDI-II > 13) [33] were excluded." In short, they started with an anomalously healthy population, who likely have a lifetime of exposure to exercise and physical activity. Do the results here extrapolate to the general population? Do they extrapolate to the same degree? It's a decent question mark, considering their results are non-significant in everything except their "looks like false positives" brain volume measures to begin with - even a little bit of "ehh... maybe not so much" takes them into the realm of "no effects", alongside every other measure in the paper. External validity is doubtful here. 2. Internal validity is a bit doubtful too, first for reasons of selection bias. They recruited 62 healthy volunteers; they had 14 dropouts. A 22% dropout rate isn't atrocious, but it's more than enough - if it's not random - to skew a study. Their enrollment figure describes the dropouts as almost entirely pre-randomisation (10/14), but the study description notes that 6 drop-outs were due to failure to achieve frequency of adherence, which clearly had to occur post-randomization, and 2 due to dissatisfaction with group assignment (obviously post-randomization). 6 got seriously ill - I'd love to know in which group, and with what. 3. Their way of controlling for equivalent physical load was to measure heart rate twice. On the one hand, not crazy. On the other hand, if you've ever seen your HR during a workout session, you'll see how noisy that is - and with a sample of a whole 38 pairs, that's a relatively huge amount of noise. Moreover, it doesn't appear that they used that to guide intensity of intervention, just "to control" (which I take to mean, to plug into a multivariate model at some point - except they don't, as they describe the covariates they plug into their model to be age, sex, and intracranial volume for brain volume t-tests) I'm skeptical this is an adequate control - I'd at least have wanted a time-weighted average HR. 3.b. The sports intervention had one effort-controllable component (sport bike), but had 3 different components. It's not at all clear they could capture the effort under the regimen above, especially as the relatively light strength exercise that the elderly tend to tolerate is the place where I'm most suspicious of them failing to capture an effort delta. 4. The differences in brain volume swung in different directions in each group, without making an awful lot of sense (more right cerebellar development in standard exercise group?? So, asymmetrically, the less-coordination-demanding intervention showed more development of the primary coordination center of the brain?). But more generally, looking at supplementary table S3, note that dancing showed improvements in anterior and posterior white matter, and standard exercise in temporal and occipital. The brain isn't that cleanly delineated - to find such statistically strong effects in such broad brushstrokes sets off a red flag for me. The fact that there was scattered growth *in both groups suggests we're looking at false positives. Not precisely a new problem for this study methodology. Their p-threshold of .001 is considered best-practices (aka, the bare minimum) for cluster-based adjustment of multiple testing in neuroimaging: so that's good. They don't report the p-values on their brain volume testing; table S3 simply notes "p<.001". An actual effect size would be better, but hard to get with cluster-based thresholds - they're sensitive to "any signal, at all, is it there?" but they're shitty at locking down precise volumes. 5. Dance group had lower BDNF plasma at baseline vs. standard exercise (1500 vs. 2100) (p .14), and equal at post (2200 to 2100, p .6). In short, they showed regression to the mean in the dance group. They report this as "the dance group had an increase in plasma BDNF from baseline." Serum levels likewise were not significantly difference pre and post between the two groups (dance went from 35K to 36K, sport went from 30K to 29K). In short, nothing happened. But they hid the "fucking nothing happened" in supplementary table 4, and dressed it up real pretty in the included figure 4. 6. Cognitive outcomes, the only thing that actually matters here: no differences. 7. At least some physical fitness differences? No, none there either. TL;DR they found nothing, made some misleading figures out of it. There are no perfect studies, but this one just boils down to "found nothing, needed publication."

sova 6y ago

There was a strong article in an Australian magazine claiming that ballet was one of the strongest preventative measures against dementia, and this lines up with that.

topkai22 6y ago

The key here is "repetitive". It sounds like the repetitive exercise was the exact same cardio + weights routine every day, excluding any coordinative active, while the dance routines were explicitly varied and sound far more interactive. I don't know enough about the underlying science to really understand the paper at a glance, but it's not surprising that learning a new skill provides beneficial effects. A neat follow up would be to look at what learning a musical instrument with a lower physical fitness requirement than dance does is relationship to a dance routine. Or even something like birding, that requires a moderate amount of walking with increased skills observing the physical environment. I think this probably (with low confidence, because of the low N and a high dropout rate) answers the question "is dance better for neuroplasticity than walking on a treadmill and stationary bike + repetitive and uncoordinated floor exercises" with a yes, but I'll bet plenty of other activities surpass the repetitive control group as well.

WalterBright 6y ago

Dance (at least dancing with a partner) is also very much a social activity, and social activity has very good effects on cognition.

ak39 6y ago

Dancing isn't easy for folks who are rhythm-challenged like me. Try the Jerusamela on for size. Warning: make sure the vase, and precious items in the living room are packed away before you practise. Some attempts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePuGjRRin3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePuGjRRin3c Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZVL_8D048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZVL_8D048

johnchristopher 6y ago
I know it's off-topic but Tik-tok is really refreshing as a social network/entertainment thing to me. Lots of honest (even though the app encourages use of video effects) stuff on it, especially if you upvote things from time to time. User-generated content but haven't yet seen facebook outrage porn or twitter feud war ; lots of good vibe. edit: my feed is filled with people with goth make up mimicking lyrics or movie dialogues, skate boarding tricks, contemporary dancers and weird jokers.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  And all data funneled to the CCP.

werber 6y ago

This makes me wonder about getting “lost in the music” type dancing on your own where you connect your physical movement and it becomes intuitive. I’ve done lots of club kid to slam dancing on my own and formal dancing and the headspace is so different but the former was always more intellectually satisfying and aerobic for me

agumonkey 6y ago

I consider dance the intersection of balance, efficiency / energy conservation and probably the abstract root of a lot of activities in life. Anything can be a chore, or an effort, but if you make it into a dance like action.. it becomes both easy and joyful. And it's also reaching social boundaries.. if you think work as a set of concurrent changes driven by agents.. dancing is basically the lowest energy level for that. Everything flows, momentum conserved, impedance free.. and surprisingly people are very happy seeing and living that way. All that said... i'm not surprised it has a lot of leverage in our brain.

evo_9 6y ago

This is interesting; for the past 4 years as part of my workout I hop in VR for around 60 minutes. I typically play a mix of music while I play games like Space Pirate Trainer (highly movement oriented, my heat-rate stays at workout levels while playing). So I'm basically dancing around to music, dodging incoming fire, returning fire, etc... quite stimulating + athletic with eye/hand tracking etc. Perhaps this is doing more than a fun extra bit that's essentially my cool-down.

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

Just an anecdote, but I was at a wedding where I talked with a retirement age neurologist. He basically said the same thing. It didn't surprise me that later he and his wife were out on the dance floor start to finish, outlasting most of the 20 year olds, and dancing everything from tango to hip hop. Put a real smile on a lot of people's faces.

afterwalk 6y ago

Does anyone have suggestions on how to learn dancing during a time of social distancing? (i.e any good mooc or video courses?)

jbroman 6y ago
Kinda specific, but breakdancing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDaadRNPpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDaadRNPpg

dokem 6y ago

Weight lifting is better for making you more attractive and confident. If you are in good shape men and women will both take notice. Not everything's about squeezing out that last IQ point. I enjoy dancing, don't get me wrong, but weightlifting is the obvious choose when it comes to quality of life improvement. I used to run a lot too, no one gives a shit about your 5 minute mile and no one is impressed by your skinny body. Weightlifting; dudes figured it out 80 years ago.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

Really cool. Would love to see this done with Beat Saber or some similar game (e.g. DDR).

thesz 6y ago

It's interesting how they matched the intensity. Because, in my opinion, dance is a sorta-kinda-like strength endurance training when you exert a modest loaded movement (say, 40%-50% of your bench press' 1RM) for 2-4 repetition and there are tens of these bouts. In calories spent such resistance exercise may match some endurance exercise but other effects can be dramatically different. Including, but not limited to, levels and utilization of brain-derived neurotophic factor. While endurance training increase BDNF level long term and modestly, the resistance exercise can effect a sharp 60%-90% increase at the end of training session, then drop to 40% of normal (to the person) level and slow recovery. This indicates overproduction of BDNF and its complete utilization of the body to build neurons everywhere.

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago

As a data analyst, I once took an introductory class to modern dance. 5 sessions during one week. I though I was trained, I did calystecnics and yoga. The class included "floor work" similar but no limited to [1]. It was hard. I received a lot of feed back from the instructor, but of course I didn't achieve that amount of grace. Very worth trying if you want to experience learning something new and challenging. Incidentally, this is one area where there are many more females than males. 2¢. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jHrR8vy3OM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jHrR8vy3OM

SergeAx 6y ago

Two anecdotes from 10+ years argentinian tango dancer. 1. I dance leading part, and I found myself more self-confident in my engineering leader and manager work. Giving team a direction became more organic and easy. I actually had to start restraining myself to motivate people's creativity. It is actually kind of dance move too: stand still and give my follower firm support to decorate her part with small movements with music. 2. One of my fellow partners is playing intellectual games (local franchise of "Jeopardy!" and several others). She says her performance degrades with her progress in tango, because the follower's part in tango is to listen and not to step by her own, but only when and where the leader leads. I also believe in neuroplasticity and overall positive impact of creating and cohesion of neural links.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

Dancing is one activity I’ve always struggled with. I did musical theater all through school, have gone to dance parties, different music clubs all my life, and I have just always disliked dancing and found it to be tiresome and boring. I even figured in my early 20s it was one of those things where I had to just keep trying more until I found the right style, but I took adult classes in swing, ballroom, disco, various fitness dance and modern dance and just universally hated it all. I am amazed and wowed by watching professional dancers, but I find the act of doing any kind of dancing for myself is just a deeply mentally disinteresting, grating, boring slog that I can’t get into.

nine_k 6y ago

Certain folk dances are quite a lot of exercise. Some likely descend from a ritualized exercise / demonstration, like the Ukrainian "gopak". Just estimate the level of physical fitness which allows to dance like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvD21OntHgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvD21OntHgI

scollet 6y ago

I am rhythm challenged, so for me martial arts have been mentally stimulating like improv jazz on a Go board. In sparring you can follow muscle memory to build a dynamic procedure based on your opponents' actions or reactions. You quickly learn the "dance" and when to change tempo because the alternative is pain or discomfort.

kraig911 6y ago

I wonder how Beat Saber fairs... I'm being dead serious. Since the gyms have closed it's become my new passion and i love it.

User23 6y ago

Improving the capability of your brain is a matter of stressing it in the hormetic zone, just like improving the capability of every other organ in your body. Since the brain is the control organ of the nervous system, including motor neurons, it's expected that physical stimulus would produce neural stimulus. I expect that advanced gymnastics is superior to dance with respect to brain plasticity, but only if the practitioner has already reached a level of adaption sufficient for the training stimulus to be in the hormetic zone. This hypothesis may or may not be correct, but it's certainly testable. If true, one would expect that a competent gymnast would be able to perform as a slightly less competent dancer whereas a competent dancer would have difficulty holding a planche or working a pommel horse.

twoleftfeets 6y ago

I know this is a stupid question but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do you learn to dance? Maybe I just have zero natural dance aptitude but ... I've taken maybe 8 swing dance lessons and 12 salsa lessons and I found them extremely hard and worst part is I felt horrible being so bad at it because it's not fun for the other more skilled students to dance with an unskilled noob. It's that last part that's the most frustrating. One salsa instructor said to expect at least 18 months of lessons before being able to lead. That was before seeing how bad I was at it. Another salsa instructor pretty much just gave up. She didn't want to deal with noobs. I can jump around to the music at a rave all night. I'm sure I could learn video game dance (DDR or Just Dance) but getting past the point of being a disappointment in two person dance seems really difficult for some reason.

InquilineKea 6y ago

Is yoga approximately the same? What of physical therapy?

war1025 6y ago

My grandma used to go dancing at the VFW every weekend up until I think shortly after her 95th birthday. She fell at a dance and broke her arm. She had lived on her own until then, but moved to a nursing home while her arm healed and then decided to just stay after she got better. Her memory has definitely gone downhill since she moved there, which could just be age. But I also feel like the physical activity and social aspect of always going out to dance helped keep her going longer than she otherwise would have. Hard to say I guess.

deltron3030 6y ago

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).

noisy_boy 6y ago

As 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.

nhlx2 6y ago

What about juggling a soccer ball?

Pamar 6y ago

I wonder if this would work for Martial Arts too (apologies if someone asked this already).

ivanhoe 6y ago

Isn't this perfectly logical, as dance has more complicated pattern of highly coordinated moves and in addition requires synchronization with the rhythm. I'd be much more interested in comparison of dance and some more complex fitness activity that requires high focus, say juggling the soccer ball or playing the table tennis or even jumping the rope.

WMCRUN 6y ago

Novel behavior could increase plasticity. Whether that’s novel exercise, new dances, or brushing your teeth with the opposite hand.

WMCRUN 6y ago
The novelty is the important part IMHO

hi41 6y ago

I am extraordinarily bad at dancing. You can get traumatized for life watching me dance. Can someone please suggest online videos you have found useful.

rondennis 6y ago

I agree. In case of physical exercise, the mind does not need to apply itself. But in case of dance, you have to think about your next move. But sports can surely be a money earner for many. source: https://wpbizblog.com/how-to-start-a-sports-blog/ https://wpbizblog.com/how-to-start-a-sports-blog/

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

LOL... i mean interpretive dance is the HIIT for the brain when dancing... (Rubs hands with glee lol) -- go to it Nerds who take such thing seriously.

InquilineKea 6y ago

How about yoga?