I do MRI work, and my gut is that none of the claims about dance vs. exercise would replicate. The behavioral data suggests that activity of some type will improve cognitive function (main effects of time). Such beneficial effects of activity on the brain have been shown before, and this is generally accepted. However, the authors' behavioral data doesn't show any difference between the dance vs. exercise groups. This means that the study is overall off to a pretty bad start if their goal is to study dance vs. exercise differences...
The brain data claims to show that the dance vs. exercise groups showed different levels of improvement in various regions. However, the brain effects are tiny and are probably just random noise (I'm referring to those red spots, which are very small and almost certainly don't reflect proper correction for multiple hypotheses given that the authors effectively tested 1000s or 10000s of different areas). The authors' claims about BDNF are supported by a p-value of p = .046, and having main conclusions hinge on p-values of p > .01 usually means the conclusions are rubbish.
In general, my priors on "we can detect subtle changes in brain matter over a 6-week period" are also very low. Perhaps, a study with this sample size could show that activity of some kind influences the brain over such a short length, but I am extremely skeptical that this type of study could detect differences between dance vs. exercise effects.
I have done lots of free-form couples dancing (over 20 years, several times per week, some of it in complex styles like argentine tango) and in my first-hand experience the major difference from other kinds of exercise is that you need to harmonize your movements with your partner and music, and you need to improvise. The complexity of the movement is not it, nor the "exercise".
There is lots of other research suggesting that couples dancing is more beneficial to the mental health and memory than other kinds of exercise.
That said (and having no background in an very little knowledge of MRI research), I am also skeptical like you that there would appear such clear visible signs so soon in the brain images.
I'm a professional dancer and music and freestyle are the most demanding aspects of dance by far.
That said I'm also skeptical. Music and dance are being compared to "bicycle ergometers" and "training with equipment such as barbells and rubber bands". I'm pretty sure only one of these groups was having any fun. Unless the dance group were forced to social dance bachata in which case the misery probably evens out.
Thanks, that sounds more reasonable. I'm still generally bearish on this type of brain-volume-change work (and extremely so on any study trying to compare brain-volume effects between different groups), but I guess 6-months is a finer premise.
Or it could be a problem of seeking statistical detection of any difference whatsoever versus detecting a practically meaningful difference... a type III error (answering the wrong question).
My random opinion is that dance or dance like activities are a sweet spot between low intensity and high intensity exercise that involves a lot more balance, coordination and fluidity than most physical activities promoted for health overall (they're either too simple or too hard), these traits are (I believe) very important to your brain. Add the social aspect as an important bonus.
Totally anecdotal and probably 99% placebo but I started rollerblading (which also require _a lot_ of balance and coordination) for the first time in my life, like, I take courses in a skatepark and never wore rollerblades before (I’m 33). After some weeks I’m totally perceiving "something" changed in my brain. It’s like doing mental things is somehow easier.
I also happen to microdose since a few months ago but the change I felt coincided exactly about when I felt my fear to fall disappeared, when I "got" the balancing.
That’s totally an anecdote and not science but this feeling of change in my brain was so strong that I perceived it.
> The authors' claims about BDNF are supported by a p-value of p = .046, and having main conclusions hinge on p-values of p > .01 usually means the conclusions are rubbish.
Also, I don't have the references handy, but I recall other studies showing that exercise-induced BDNF changes can be mediated by e.g. air pollution. So even if the difference there is real, it might be premature to attribute it specifically to the mode of training.
Cardiovascular exercise correlates with subsequent synthesis of endocannabinoids, which affect hippocampal neurogeneration and probably thereby neuroplasticity.
> hippocampal plasticity and hippocampal neurogenesis also appear to be affected by dancing and omega-3,6 (which are transformed into endocannabinoids by the body): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109698
Also, isn't there selection bias to observational dance studies? If not in good general health, is a person likely to pursue regular dancing? Though, dance lifts mood and gets the cardiovascular system going.
Dance involves spatial sense and proprioception and probably all of the senses.
> The authors' claims about BDNF are supported by a p-value of p = .046, and having main conclusions hinge on p-values of p > .01 usually means the conclusions are rubbish.
Your other points I agree with but I actually think the BDNF result has some standing. I'm looking at Fig. 4 and just by an eyeball test there's clear difference in the distributions of the intra-individual BDNF increase. It's not like there's some miniscule variation in the means that they make significant with really small error bars, the actual effect size appears to be notable. Moreover there's clearly some effect on the width of the distributions which could support their ultimate conclusion (ex. even if the mean effect is the same, it's possible the population-wide ceiling on gains is higher for dance).
Now with all that said this could definitely still be a multiple comparisons thing, I'm just a statistician with no background in neuro-stuff so possibly the BDNF thing is just a bad indicator here. Certainly the behavioral outcomes not showing an interaction difference isn't a great sign as you point out, but in my personal and unimportant opinion I would at least say this study would be good justification for a follow-up with a better design and bigger population.
I know nearly nothing about BDNF specifically. Whether it should motivate a follow-up is mostly only something known to the authors, as a p = .046 suggests a chance they may have tested numerous outcome variables and reported only one (e.g,. this could very well be 1/10). The fact that the p-value is almost comically close to p = .05, makes me suspect that this happened. Perhaps, if this goes in line with other BDNF research, then that could motivate it some further work.
Notably, even if we take this p = .046 as a given, and assume there was no p-hacking, then this type of result implies that statistical power is tiny, and a proper "bigger population" study would likely have to be several hundreds of people. Even a study with 50% power, should have a majority of significant results land p < .01.
Replicability was my first thought as well. These papers make great headlines but how much shaky pyramids of conclusions are built on non-reproducible conclusions?
I think all the things that dance brings to the table over the mean "exercise" are clear first-principles wins (using your whole body, listening and dancing in rhythm, listening to music, letting yourself go / being silly)
I lack the in-depth knowledge but correcting p-value thresholds for multiple hypotheses is very basic science. I doubt your criticism is valid given that some basic error like this would never pass peer review.
Correcting for p-values in brain imaging research is kinda elaborate, since you are essentially performing a t-test separately for each brain voxel. A brain image like the authors' will have about a million voxels (0.7 x 0.7 x 0.7 mm voxels). For multiple hypothesis correction, correcting for 1 million tests would be overly strict because neighboring voxels are highly correlated with one another, and it's unlikely for brain effects to really be confined to such a small area. Hence, researchers usually define a primary threshold for voxels (here p < .001 uncorrected), and then look for patches of many p < .001 voxels together. Here, the authors stated that they looked for patches of at least 50 contiguous voxels. The authors are just using some loose old-timey heuristic without justification or citation. These have been getting phased out mostly in the past decade. These types of heuristics don't actually test to establish that these thresholds won't yield tons of false positives (one of the best ways to do this is to basically randomly shuffle your data and see what are the actual cluster sizes generated by chance).
> some basic error like this would never pass peer review
It indeed shouldn't pass peer review! Yet, here we are. I think standards have gotten better since the paper's publication (2018), but there are no doubt there are still many reviewers who don't have a good intuition about what a significant cluster size should be. Off the top of my head, I can't give an exact number on the cluster size needed, but I'd be willing to bet a ton that what the authors used is not enough.
Speaking as someone who tried to take a tap class as an adult, only to discover it was for people who were already experienced dancers: yes, dance training is vastly more complex than exercise.
Update: what absolutely killed me is that we would run through a complex step two or three times, and we were expected to be able to practice at home. I didn't understand what we were doing while we were doing it, there was no way I could reproduce it.
You got thrown into a class above your skill level. That's bad on the teacher for not telling you really. Once you know the basics the rest is easier to build on top of that, but otherwise it's like trying to tell someone about design patterns while they're still struggling with syntax in programming.
If you liked the idea, give it a go with beginners again. You'll get back to that higher level soon anyway.
I've danced extensively, and tap can be brutal for the sheer number of steps you need to remember. Other dance disciplines, like ballet, tend to chunk sets of smaller movements into a larger, named one, so once you learn those sequences, it's easy to learn and recall longer routines. The way ballet is put together aligns with advice from brain science about chunking objects in memory for better recall. But tap has few of those chunked sequences, other than the "time step," so you're left trying to parse long strings of very finite instructions. "Left ball right heel left flap ball change..." Personally I found it overwhelming and didn't pursue tap into the most advanced levels for that reason.
Aside: it seemed like neurotypical folks struggled less with tap than I did as an AuDHD person, so tap may land differently with different neurotypes.
I have experience with a few types of dance including salsa and bachata, and also compete as a strength athlete- and find some of the more complex weight lifting moves- such as the push jerk- a lot harder and more technical than anything I’ve learned dancing. If every aspect of your timing and form aren’t perfect, it simply does not work at heavier weights, and can take years of constant practice to perfect. The extra burden of having to output 100 percent effort while trying to do everything else perfect is very mentally demanding.
I think gp’s point was that “exercise” encompasses a range from stationary bike to olympic lifts. Dancing is on the same end of that range as olympic lifting or a sport like basketball insofar as they all require intentional practice.
Try taking modern dance. They have the huge choreography that you need to memorize, with like 19 degrees of freedom and then 40 minutes through the class the instructor says, "flip it over" and you need to perform the mirror image of all those movements. You can't handle the chirality!
I teach Karate to kids and many of the forms require some amount of coordination and quick movement. A little thinking ahead and awareness of where your own limbs are (I think it's called proprioception). I've been doing this for a long time and can make reasonable accurate judgments about my physical abilities (how far I can jump etc.). But it's a skill that's quite demanding for new learners and that became quite apparent to me when I started teaching. I think it would be similar learning dancing (especially complex moves).
For forms, we had to practice it till it became muscle memory and then it would automatically come up when we needed it and influence our moves even outside of the forms. I can relate to your experience about not understanding. However, the knowledge is additive and if you start small and keep practicing, you develop a skill to understand the forms/patterns at a larger level with some kinds of cues and it's vastly easier to remember and perform. THis also requires a teacher who can ease you into the complex stuff without dumping it all on you.
What works is to go through the steps very slowly. As it moves into muscle memory, you can speed it up.
Dance training is a whole body thing. There's steps, ankle position, foot turnout, posture, what to do with your arms, what to do with your fingers, where your eyes are looking, and on and on.
The very first thing, though, is getting the steps into your muscle memory. Then one by one, you start layering on the rest.
Another factor also seems to be how learning differs between adult brains, and non-adult brains.
A child's brain isn't finished forming till about age 25-26, when the prefrontal cortex finally matures, from my understanding. [1][2]
Once Adult brain is in the drivers seat, learning isn't how it used to be in school. That can be better and worse. Generally, for adults, it can be more useful to try to start from where they are and learn one step outward from there.
Adults having to learn something new can.. sometimes by different means. A dance instructor friend mentioned they could make two left feet better (not perfect) by teaching them to practice the micro movements, one at a time, sometimes for hundreds of reps, and then putting them together slowly.[3][4]
Anecdotal again, but when I tried learning a move the same way, it wasn't as hard learning it a bit at a time vs just throwing myself into it.
We know muscle memory is a thing for using tools like Vim and keyboard shortcuts, so I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility.[5][6]
In fact dance based exercise like Zumba, or boxing even, is very helpful with folks suffering Parkinson’s because it require multiple tasks be processed at once - rhythm, hand, foot, observation of the lead. This induces plasticity which is crucial in staving Parkinson’s decline. So I find it strange to assert exercise alone is the beneficial component as it’s clear in pathological situations where increasing plasticity yields slower declines dance and complex exercise that requires many integrated tasks is superior to simple exercise.
I was thinking the same thing too. I mean shocker: high cardio + spatial awareness > high cardio alone.
For your money, you can't beat games like Pump It Up for a combination of HIIT (High Intensity Interval training) and the additional cognitive load that comes from the choreography of your steps and rhythmic timing.
Sure, it sounds like it would make sense, but that's not necessarily how the brain actually works.
This study doesn't really seem to prove or even suggest anything either way, assuming GP's evaluation of their methodology is correct.
"Armchair neuroscientist" is not a game anyone can play well. (I say this because I know several actual neuroscientists, and they are constantly telling me about ways the brain works that are very counterintuitive.)
Depends on what you mean by "improvements". Is it coordination? Is it sustained increased blood flow?
I would imagine that different bike exercise regimens could induce more variation in fitness than the comparison dance vs exercise alone.
I would like to see a comparison with other types of physical exercise that contain an element of continuous learning. Wrestling, BJJ, even boxercise, crossfit and such. Since the argument seems to be specifically about learning new routines and how that impacts neuroplasticity, dance vs other more cognitively challenging workouts would be an interesting comparison.
Peter Attia had a guest on his podcast who said something along these lines. He was really into training people to do Olympic lifting because of the cognitive component that goes along with the exercise. He also said hiking is good because the terrain is inconsistent, and you have to think about each step to some degree.
Good martial arts instructors are very experienced at working with unathletic beginners who have never had much coaching before. “No, the other left.” Probably easier to find a class at level as a total beginner where you’re still expected to make a lot of progress than some other things.
Not sure if you have experienced martial arts. It's constant learning. Sparring is a small part of the process. See kata in karate, hundreds of moves and transitions in BJJ, etc
With most martial arts you are constantly learning new material comparable to dance (that's to say nothing of martial arts like Capoeira and Silat which incorporate dance into their training).
It is also quite common for martial artists to add new skills that cover different aspects of combat. E.g. once karate-ka have a solid foundation in unarmed combat they often learn to use weapons. Practitioners of striking oriented martial arts commonly cross train in grappling or throwing oriented arts. Practitioners of Northern Kung Fu (generally focused on long range) might train in Southern Kung Fu (generally focused on short range). Many martial artists also incorporate supplemental practices such as meditation, qigong, or hojo undo.
So those square dancers are constantly coming up with new material? Ballroom innovators are patenting never before seen ways to articulate the human body? Sure.
No one is getting regularly choked out in BJJ. You always tap. The goal is not to injure your partner but to learn together. Source: 5 years of BJJ, I have never been choked out, I am not an idiot.
"Regarding cognition, both groups improved in attention and spatial memory, but no significant group differences emerged."
So, the dance group showed increase volume of brain matter. Is there a benefit to having the extra brain volume, even if it doesn't lead to improved cognition?
Is it possible that increased volume just helped them become better dancers?
Musical cognition is loosely connected to attention (maybe disconnected entirely by this metric, music seems special) and spatial memory is irrelevant. So "better dancers" seems a bit myopic, they might be improving their understanding of rhythm and melody in a more general sense.
(IMO the headline-level conclusion of this study is unsurprising - dancing is far more cognitively demanding than gym exercise!)
Cognition and memory are easily measurable brain functions but are not the exclusive function of the brain. As a conserving machine a healthy brain building volume is indicative of improvement in some function otherwise it wouldn’t bother building the volume.
I got into dance a few years ago, and N=1 sure, but the big changes I observed as a result were improvements in proprioception, balance, sense of tempo, and I also gained the ability to deconstruct music in my head, and listen to different parts of it (e.g. only pay attention to the guitar or the drums or the vocals).
Like does this make me better at programming? Probably not. But the skills you gain do have other usages outside of dance, and honestly also kind of enrich life in general.
A book I read 'spark' by John J Ratey, discussed this in a few chapters. Cardio/Running at 70% maximum heart rate lead to brain plasticity and even allowing new synapses to make connections and grow. However, he did argue an exercise that also required concentration e.g dancing, basketball, skateboarding would have better results.
It's absolutely crazy, that we misunderstand how our brains are intended to work in the old world. Our brains are for movement, the ability to think, plan and utilize tools appears to have been a happy accident that allowed our ancestor an advantage in survival.
I like trail running. It combines cardio with balance and problem solving (where do you place your feet, dodging obstacles, recovering from stumbles, very dynamic compared to running on a road or treadmill).
I strongly believe that trail running is much less prone to cause repetitive stress injuries, I see so many people pound thousands of kilometres on pavement and then wonder why their knees give out at 45.
On the other side I know people getting injured when trail running, but it always seems to be acute (like scraping a knee or spraining an ankle) and they are back at it within a week or two.
Finally, at a pseudoscience level I believe that we as humans evolved to run over uneven semi-soft ground and therefore trail running is one of the most natural movements.
sophisticated coordination and balance are the most effectful brain stimulation i know, it also makes you develop a different understanding of space and time which makes you calmer (larger planning abilities maybe ?)
For a research article, modifiers may be more important in imposing constraints and necessary insights in cause and effect. The full title of this article is "Dance training is superior to repetitive physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity in the elderly".
While the current title on HN is "Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity".
My own personal experience, but my 80 year old FIL changed a lot after he started going to dance classes. He was always in decent physical health, but prior to the classes he was a very stressed, unhappy, solitary type of person. Since then he's become much more extroverted, social, and generally happier.
Obviously I think the benefits are more than just the dancing itself, such as the community, but even when you ask him directly about what he thinks caused the change he points to dance classes.
I think the difference in outcomes is likely to be down to "continuous learning of new movement patterns and choreographies" vs "participants performed the same exercises repeatedly ... We avoided combined arm and leg movements in order to keep coordinative demands low".
That said, dance is a really fun way to package repetitive movements. And if younger people did more of it, the men on this site would spend less time bitching about how hard it is to meet women. *cough*
Yes, you will “meet” more women by dancing than by playing games on your computer. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will make any meaningful connections.
Simply going places and interacting with people will also help you meet women. In fact, I think you’d sooner find a date by becoming a grocery store employee than a dancer, because you’re more likely to be having conversations with the people you meet.
Dancing, especially where you are learning, is not really socializing.
The structure of our modern society really does make it more difficult to meet new people. Women complain too, not just men.
That said, dancing is super hard. It just doesn't click with some brains. Like at all. With mine for example. I can't repeat full body movements. I can't remember sequences of those movements even as short as 3. Any diagrams that attmempt to teach dancing make no sense to me. Foot placement seems completely arbitrary. I always had a very hard time learning things I don't understand and I'm not sure if I ever actually learnt any. I see no connection between dancing and music. Regardless of the professional level of dancers when I look at them dancing I recognize no connection between what I hear and what they do. Like those two things are at completely separate layers without any meaningful sync between them.
And that's all before even considering things like social anxiety or being a highly sensitive person which makes various stimuli including social ones so strong that they become unpleasant.
The closest I ever was and probably I'll ever be to drawing any pleasure from dance like activity is Light Saber.
Readit News
The brain data claims to show that the dance vs. exercise groups showed different levels of improvement in various regions. However, the brain effects are tiny and are probably just random noise (I'm referring to those red spots, which are very small and almost certainly don't reflect proper correction for multiple hypotheses given that the authors effectively tested 1000s or 10000s of different areas). The authors' claims about BDNF are supported by a p-value of p = .046, and having main conclusions hinge on p-values of p > .01 usually means the conclusions are rubbish.
In general, my priors on "we can detect subtle changes in brain matter over a 6-week period" are also very low. Perhaps, a study with this sample size could show that activity of some kind influences the brain over such a short length, but I am extremely skeptical that this type of study could detect differences between dance vs. exercise effects.
There is lots of other research suggesting that couples dancing is more beneficial to the mental health and memory than other kinds of exercise.
That said (and having no background in an very little knowledge of MRI research), I am also skeptical like you that there would appear such clear visible signs so soon in the brain images.
That said I'm also skeptical. Music and dance are being compared to "bicycle ergometers" and "training with equipment such as barbells and rubber bands". I'm pretty sure only one of these groups was having any fun. Unless the dance group were forced to social dance bachata in which case the misery probably evens out.
And there are findings like these https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I also happen to microdose since a few months ago but the change I felt coincided exactly about when I felt my fear to fall disappeared, when I "got" the balancing.
That’s totally an anecdote and not science but this feeling of change in my brain was so strong that I perceived it.
Also, I don't have the references handy, but I recall other studies showing that exercise-induced BDNF changes can be mediated by e.g. air pollution. So even if the difference there is real, it might be premature to attribute it specifically to the mode of training.
From "Environment shapes emotional cognitive abilities more than genes" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40105068#40107602 :
> hippocampal plasticity and hippocampal neurogenesis also appear to be affected by dancing and omega-3,6 (which are transformed into endocannabinoids by the body): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109698
Also, isn't there selection bias to observational dance studies? If not in good general health, is a person likely to pursue regular dancing? Though, dance lifts mood and gets the cardiovascular system going.
Dance involves spatial sense and proprioception and probably all of the senses.
Your other points I agree with but I actually think the BDNF result has some standing. I'm looking at Fig. 4 and just by an eyeball test there's clear difference in the distributions of the intra-individual BDNF increase. It's not like there's some miniscule variation in the means that they make significant with really small error bars, the actual effect size appears to be notable. Moreover there's clearly some effect on the width of the distributions which could support their ultimate conclusion (ex. even if the mean effect is the same, it's possible the population-wide ceiling on gains is higher for dance).
Now with all that said this could definitely still be a multiple comparisons thing, I'm just a statistician with no background in neuro-stuff so possibly the BDNF thing is just a bad indicator here. Certainly the behavioral outcomes not showing an interaction difference isn't a great sign as you point out, but in my personal and unimportant opinion I would at least say this study would be good justification for a follow-up with a better design and bigger population.
Notably, even if we take this p = .046 as a given, and assume there was no p-hacking, then this type of result implies that statistical power is tiny, and a proper "bigger population" study would likely have to be several hundreds of people. Even a study with 50% power, should have a majority of significant results land p < .01.
> some basic error like this would never pass peer review
It indeed shouldn't pass peer review! Yet, here we are. I think standards have gotten better since the paper's publication (2018), but there are no doubt there are still many reviewers who don't have a good intuition about what a significant cluster size should be. Off the top of my head, I can't give an exact number on the cluster size needed, but I'd be willing to bet a ton that what the authors used is not enough.
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Best pun ever.
Dead Comment
Dance vs basketball or some other high coordination/skill activity might have less disparity than say dance vs. exercise bike.
Update: what absolutely killed me is that we would run through a complex step two or three times, and we were expected to be able to practice at home. I didn't understand what we were doing while we were doing it, there was no way I could reproduce it.
If you liked the idea, give it a go with beginners again. You'll get back to that higher level soon anyway.
Aside: it seemed like neurotypical folks struggled less with tap than I did as an AuDHD person, so tap may land differently with different neurotypes.
For forms, we had to practice it till it became muscle memory and then it would automatically come up when we needed it and influence our moves even outside of the forms. I can relate to your experience about not understanding. However, the knowledge is additive and if you start small and keep practicing, you develop a skill to understand the forms/patterns at a larger level with some kinds of cues and it's vastly easier to remember and perform. THis also requires a teacher who can ease you into the complex stuff without dumping it all on you.
Dance training is a whole body thing. There's steps, ankle position, foot turnout, posture, what to do with your arms, what to do with your fingers, where your eyes are looking, and on and on.
The very first thing, though, is getting the steps into your muscle memory. Then one by one, you start layering on the rest.
A child's brain isn't finished forming till about age 25-26, when the prefrontal cortex finally matures, from my understanding. [1][2]
Once Adult brain is in the drivers seat, learning isn't how it used to be in school. That can be better and worse. Generally, for adults, it can be more useful to try to start from where they are and learn one step outward from there.
Adults having to learn something new can.. sometimes by different means. A dance instructor friend mentioned they could make two left feet better (not perfect) by teaching them to practice the micro movements, one at a time, sometimes for hundreds of reps, and then putting them together slowly.[3][4]
Anecdotal again, but when I tried learning a move the same way, it wasn't as hard learning it a bit at a time vs just throwing myself into it.
We know muscle memory is a thing for using tools like Vim and keyboard shortcuts, so I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility.[5][6]
References:
[1] Development Period of Prefrontal Cortex "Prefrontal cortex matures around age 25." https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/70083
[2] Development of the Prefrontal Cortex "Prefrontal cortex development extends into adulthood." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-019-0149-4
[3] Neuroplasticity Subserving Motor Skill Learning "Motor skill learning involves neuroplasticity." https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(11)00903-9
[4] Motor Learning and Plasticity "Practice leads to changes in motor cortex organization." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921001/
[5] Experience-Dependent Structural Plasticity in the Adult Human Brain "Adult brain changes structurally with new experiences." https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/15/4/458/312872
[6] Micro-learning in the Age of Neuroscience https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6401... "Micro-learning enhances retention and mastery."
Social interaction has been shown over and over and over to have a beneficial effect on people.
For your money, you can't beat games like Pump It Up for a combination of HIIT (High Intensity Interval training) and the additional cognitive load that comes from the choreography of your steps and rhythmic timing.
This study doesn't really seem to prove or even suggest anything either way, assuming GP's evaluation of their methodology is correct.
"Armchair neuroscientist" is not a game anyone can play well. (I say this because I know several actual neuroscientists, and they are constantly telling me about ways the brain works that are very counterintuitive.)
It is also quite common for martial artists to add new skills that cover different aspects of combat. E.g. once karate-ka have a solid foundation in unarmed combat they often learn to use weapons. Practitioners of striking oriented martial arts commonly cross train in grappling or throwing oriented arts. Practitioners of Northern Kung Fu (generally focused on long range) might train in Southern Kung Fu (generally focused on short range). Many martial artists also incorporate supplemental practices such as meditation, qigong, or hojo undo.
So, the dance group showed increase volume of brain matter. Is there a benefit to having the extra brain volume, even if it doesn't lead to improved cognition?
Is it possible that increased volume just helped them become better dancers?
(IMO the headline-level conclusion of this study is unsurprising - dancing is far more cognitively demanding than gym exercise!)
Like does this make me better at programming? Probably not. But the skills you gain do have other usages outside of dance, and honestly also kind of enrich life in general.
ever seen megamind?
It's absolutely crazy, that we misunderstand how our brains are intended to work in the old world. Our brains are for movement, the ability to think, plan and utilize tools appears to have been a happy accident that allowed our ancestor an advantage in survival.
brains be braining.
I strongly believe that trail running is much less prone to cause repetitive stress injuries, I see so many people pound thousands of kilometres on pavement and then wonder why their knees give out at 45.
On the other side I know people getting injured when trail running, but it always seems to be acute (like scraping a knee or spraining an ankle) and they are back at it within a week or two.
Finally, at a pseudoscience level I believe that we as humans evolved to run over uneven semi-soft ground and therefore trail running is one of the most natural movements.
While the current title on HN is "Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity".
Obviously I think the benefits are more than just the dancing itself, such as the community, but even when you ask him directly about what he thinks caused the change he points to dance classes.
That said, I think dance is great.
Simply going places and interacting with people will also help you meet women. In fact, I think you’d sooner find a date by becoming a grocery store employee than a dancer, because you’re more likely to be having conversations with the people you meet.
Dancing, especially where you are learning, is not really socializing.
The structure of our modern society really does make it more difficult to meet new people. Women complain too, not just men.
And that's all before even considering things like social anxiety or being a highly sensitive person which makes various stimuli including social ones so strong that they become unpleasant.
The closest I ever was and probably I'll ever be to drawing any pleasure from dance like activity is Light Saber.