Someone else already pointed out that this is actually quite significant, just the time might have been too short but there is clear indication something is there.

For me the key question is: what is the key ingredient (or the right mix of ingredients)? E.g. is it having a programme to follow (having aims/duties is known to increase longevity, see the famous 'plant study')? Or rhythmic fluid movements (so like tai chi or qi gong or yoga)? Or the combination with music (multimodal stimulation)? Or the social component of dancing (so e.g. encouraging proximity like mutual hair brushing, engagement that encourages touch, etc)?

Fascinating and raises many new questions. But it's clear the most deadly thing is probably inactivity.

I would guess the main driver for brain stimulation is the coordinative aspect of dealing with many motor skills over different body parts doing different things, while also coordinating the rhythms and cadence of music in your mind. So the more coordinated the movement (ballet, flamenco), the more stimulated. There's also the component of memorizing sequences. In this respect, yoga is also very fruitful. Many traditional yoga teachers say that yoga makes you more intelligent.

As a personal experience with ballet for over 5 years (starting in mid-twenties with no prior dance experience, and taking up other modalities later), it has completely reorganized my mind; now I have a strong and reliable memory for body movement, now I have a durable sense of sequentiality that I apply to everything I do (the gains are most apparent when doing many chores, cooking, getting ready for an overseas trip, etc), so that my consciousness is well ordered and doesn't get confused with simultaneity of inputs, but knows how to prioritize easily and without my ostensive effort. It's a bit like having trained a highly capable assistant that now takes over for many tasks that would previously leave my head dizzy with an influx of urgent demands.

Some of this applies to music and learning an instrument, especially not a woodwind, melody-only on, but a coordinating instrument like piano or other strings, especially if you are singing on top of the harmonny. Both dance and music are fundamentally about harmony, in dance you harmonize your body parts relative to each other and to the dance, and in choreographies like ballet, even more so to the other dancers, requiring exacting precision and balance.

Yoga and the classic dances are hard stuff, taxing the mental faculties. It may only not seems so outwardly because so many natural dancers start from early ages, and like learning a language, any mildly talented person starting so early will achieve ease eventually. But building that ease for late starters is much tougher than, say, programming a single page app, if I may be so bold.

> "I would guess the main driver for brain stimulation is the coordinative aspect of dealing with many motor skills over different body parts doing different things, while also coordinating the rhythms and cadence of music in your mind. So the more coordinated the movement (ballet, flamenco), the more stimulated."

Interesting that you mention flamenco [1]. I started dancing flamenco 8 years ago, at age 42. I am a late starter to dance, which is a polite way of saying I actively avoided it for most of my life.

When I started, I could barely put together a half-dozen steps. And if I tried to add arm, hand or head movements, my feet went out of time. My brain just didn't feel big enough There was no way I could remember even a tiny section of a choreography like this one I link to from Marco Flores.

Yet as I got more experienced, my brain gradually adjusted to think of body movements as integrated flows, not individual motions. It learnt how to "chunk" them together into logical sequences, and how they align to a piece of music. Much to my surprise, I can now remember complex choreographies several minutes long.

My next challenge is to internalize all of this, so I can relax and dance more comfortably. Maybe I'll never get good enough to improvise dancing with a guitarist and singer. But looking back, I am thrilled how far I've come.

[1] Since few people here will be familiar with flamenco, here is a clip of Spanish dancer Marco Flores performing a Seguiriya: https://youtu.be/ajVmaj6Z93o?t=397.

Notice how Marco beats out what appears a chaotic rhythm with his feet, yet it keeps coming back to the strict beat clapped out by the singer. If you try to follow along, note the rhythm here has a 5-beat bar: 1-and, 2-and, 3-and-a, 4-and-a, 5-and. So the 1, 2 and 5 are short, and 3 and 4 are long.

Hey! Yes, flamenco is well considered a complex musical instrument of percussion, much like a Jazz drummer could make complex patterns and improvise. Hope we get to dance together someday on some improvised street somewhere in the world! The great thing about flamenco is that, even though it's almost or quite involved like ballet (the national ballet in spain trains top ballet dancers to combine flamenco dance in choreographies), it's something you can start much later and also have a longer career into your seniority (keeping your wits about and Alzheimer's well away).

Also, some versions of the opera Carmen has almost an hour-long flamenco part, it's worth watching, a good french opera.

The authors of the studies seem to believe that the "combination of physical activity and sensory enrichment" and “cognitive and coordinative demands” are the key ingredients.

If this is the case then the results should also generalise to sports, which have an aspect of sensory enrichment and coordinative challenge.

But I agree with you, it would be very interesting to actually find out what the “key ingredients” are. Especially since dance is so diverse and difficult to define. In fact, I think the category of dance can be best described using Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance. There is not one essential common feature between all forms of dance, instead there are a lot of overlapping aspects.

It's only different for sports because all the coordinating (like of old the activites of hunting and war) applies to a single focus, the body is all maneouvered to the same mind state. In dance, you have to coordinate subtle muscles in precise ways. In sports, the precision is about the particular result you want (a stroke, a kick), but in dance, there are many goals and you need to mind whether your thigh muscle is holding up in just the proper, beautiful way, because the teacher and a knowing audience can tell, much like in musical performances, whether you are really achieving the coordination or faking, or being a beginner. The coordination in dance is of several (and I mean tens of body parts or muscles at the same time) parts having different purposes (supporting the movement, getting balance, showing off, giving impulse, etc) and the brain having to watch them all, all at once. It's much harder to dance beautifully than to swim or run or jump and throw a basketball beautifully, because in dance aesthetics is the primary source of goals for all those body parts, they have different roles or different relationships to the same melodies and harmonies playing over the dance.

May I ask what the “plant study” you are referring to is?

Sorry for not being more clear, I meant Langer's classic study. A critical/write-up here:

https://www.coyneoftherealm.com/2014/11/05/re-examining-elle...

Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group. To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded.

> May I translate: They saw improvements in things they could easily measure. They hope this translate into improved cognitive ability. But it actually didn't. But they still hope it'll do that later.

I find your translation misleading. They did see improved cognitive ability, just not superior to the conventional fitness program at the time of measuring. Increased BDNF, which stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor, is actually pretty significant so they are not pulling potential future development from thin air.

Mind you the sample population is the elderly, for which the prospect of neural growth/protection is pretty important, and this might have further applications to other populations such as recovering alcoholics, methamphetamine users, and even depression/anxiety sufferers where hippocampal volume decrease is indicated.

In the Sports Group SG ‘We avoided combined arm and leg movements in order to keep coordinative demands low.’

Always amazed on how dancing and music can lift ones mood :)

My first dance teacher used to refer to a similar study from 10 years ago in NEJM (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa022252); his commentary is at https://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/smarter.htm

But yeah, getting into lindy hop 15 years ago was literally the best thing that ever happened to me. It's incredible, being able to go to any major city on the planet and instantly finding a community.

I agree completely. I do salsa and every time I travel (which was a lot pre covid) I would look up dance venues and you're always guaranteed a great time. It's also amazing how diverse the salsa community is, there are people from 20 to 80 of all social and ethical backgrounds dancing with each other (I saw similar things in the swing community when I tried it out)

Similarly, contradance (though that's much more limited to the US).

What is contradance? Do you have any experience you’d like to share?

The English country dance tradition in the USA evolved into contradance (corruption of "country dance"). It diverged in the 18th century when English country dances were almost entirely longways dances, so there are only a few squares formations left, almost vestigial. Then in English the whole explosion when the quadrille arrived from France and began hybridizing with English country dance happened, and then the waltz... Meanwhile in the USA, contradance continued on without that influence. Though they later picked up the waltz, and a contradance today conventionally ends each half of the dance with a waltz, the first of which you conventionally dance with someone not your significant other and the second you dance with your significant other if you have one.

Contradance is where I tend to start totally new dancers. The community tends to be extremely welcoming. Most dances have an expectation that experienced dancers will spend at least part of the evening dancing with newcomers and trying to get them up to speed and comfortable. Once they've got the sense of weight and motion, then you can drag them off to swing, ballroom, or whatever else, but it really is an incredibly effective setting for instilling some fundamentals and confidence.

It's also interesting because you can go from Virginia to Washington state and walk into a contradance and wonder if you traveled at all.

Contra is now pretty popular amongst folkies in the UK (well, England, anyway). Ceilidh (around the UK) is the wander-in-and-give-it-a-go thing, less taxing and more energetic than contra, and should be very welcoming and age-blind. (Less chance of throwing a whole set if you get it wrong, and typically less intricate.) I guess with most genres you'd feel at home joining in somewhere else. The big long festival of folk dance/music in England should have been happening from this weekend. There's plenty of video of Sidmouth Folk Week on youtube^Winvidio.us if anyone's interested, though more of the displays than the social dancing.

Does that mean contra is supplanting the necromancy that was reconstructed English country dance in the UK?

...to any major city with modern values. While I share the sentiment with you :)

I knew someone teaching it in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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...

> The latter finding may indicate that cognitive benefits may develop later and after structural brain changes have taken place."

I'm confused by this part. How does the "latter finding" indicate that benefits may develop later? The "latter finding" is that there hasn't been any benefits yet. Does that suggest anything whatsoever about what will happen later?

If something hasn't happened yet it indicates that if it does happen it will happen later. For example, since pigs haven't flown yet, if they do fly, it will have to be later.

Seriously, though, I think the researchers were trying to put a positive spin on a negative result but went too far.

I suspect they meant the former finding, i.e.: "volume increases in more brain areas, including the cingulate cortex, insula, corpus callosum and sensorimotor cortex"

That still doesn't make sense. They take it is a forgone conclusion that volume increases will _eventually_ result in cognitive benefits, but provide no evidence or sources to support that notion. Of course, it seems to intuitively make sense that "bigger brain means smarter", but in a science article I would imagine they would be more rigorous about substantiating things.

Fellow lindy hopper here too. Yes the communities around the world have been hit hard. Social dancing is unfortunately an ideal setup for the virus to spread. I share your hope and look forward to dancing again.

I danced latin and ballroom during my masters and first two years of PhD. I never knew i would have that level of coordination.

Then I danced salsa and butchata when I moved university and it made me much more sociable. Whether or not its translated to cognitive ability, I'll never know. But it has translated to confidence and sociability, and it's a great way to get out if my own head and have fun.

Whereabouts are you? Are there any festivals you'd recommend in particular?

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/

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.

I respectfully disagree. They have a ton of beginner classes and a lot of opportunity to be exposed to contests and good live music.

Yeah the party scene is a bit nuts but you don't have to be a part of that.