Scientists Say Dancing May Protect Your Brain From Aging
SHARE
Pixabay
Get ready to break it down. A new study compares the neurological effects of country dancing to other physical activities and found that this type of social dancing may help to slow down the aging process in brains of people over 40. As it turns out, the older you get, the slower your brain is at processing and responding to new information. So don’t yell at your parents when they go into technology crisis mode. Scientists say that this decline in processing speed comes from eroding white matter in the brain. This white matter is made of specialized cells that relay messages between neurons and different parts of the brain. When you’re young, those messages go back and forth at lightning speeds but as you age, this process becomes less efficient.
The study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, recruited 174 healthy people in their 60s and 70s and tested them at a lab for their aerobic fitness and mental capacities. They also scanned the participants’ brains with a high-end M.R.I machine. The volunteers were then separated into three different groups. One group started to take brisk walks for one hour three times a week, another began gentle stretching and balance training three times a week and the third group learned to dance.
The dancing group of men and women were asked to go to a studio three times a week for one hour and practice complex country-dance choreography. This involved a lot of moving from partner to partner and molding into fluid lines and squares with the group. It looks like the third group lucked out, this sounds like a pretty fun study. After six months, volunteers returned for a second brain scan and the results were encouraging, but also kind of confusing at the same time.
The study’s lead author Agnieszka Burzynska, who also happens to be a professor of human development and neuroscience at Colorado State University, found that all of the participants, again who were all in their 60s and 70s, had a “degeneration of white matter.” The eroding white matter was most significant in the oldest volunteers of the group, who had a sedentary lifestyle prior to the study. In addition to the third group having the most fun, it looks like these participants now had a denser section of white matter in the part of the brain associated with processing speed and memory. Dr. Burzynska seems to think we can attribute this change to the demanding nature of country dancing and the intricate choreography. So who’s ready to sign up for some dance classes ASAP?
Among all three groups, everyone appeared to perform better after six months of these activities. The weird part was that even though the dancers’ brains had more physical improvements, their cognitive performance wasn’t on the same level. Dr. Burzynska says, “The message is that we should try not to be sedentary.” In general, engaging in physical activities with a social aspect might impact mental capabilities in already aging brains.
Next on
