Dancing has a way of taking your cares away. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Electric Slide, the Macarena or your own crazy moves. Who hasn’t gotten lost in an upbeat song as they jumped around?As well as being fun, dancing might have helped us to survive as a species. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoAjE1aioHE
As much as we all love to dance when there’s nobody watching, there’s something irresistible about dancing with other people, whether it’s with a partner or a class-full of fellow booty shakers.
The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggest that getting footloose on a regular basis is linked with a 76 percent reduction in dementia risk — about as much as playing board games or a musical instrument. Other physical activities, such as bicycling, walking and doing housework, weren’t associated with any decreased risk.
For all humans, dancing is intimately connected to our love of music and is likely to be one of our oldest cultural practices. But why would our ancestors have wasted energy on what superficially seems to serve no survival benefits? Evolutionary anthropologist Bronwyn Tarr tells us that one clue lies in the brain. When we dance with others our brains reward us with a cocktail of feel-good hormones and this likely leads to profound social effects.
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