Did you know that dance influences your brain in many ways?

Dance is often an underestimated way how to improve your health and happiness.

Dancing on your own or with your friends or your partner is not just a weekend pastime activity. It's also a reasonable activity that has a positive impact on your physical and mental health. New research proves the connection between regular dancing and neurological health that will definitely make you want to appear on the dancefloor.

Check out the following three things that will happen to your brain when you start dancing regularly

1. Dance improves your neuroplasticity

In the study led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers measured mental acuity in aging to monitor rates of dementia. The 21-year study targeted senior citizens, 75 and older. The goal of the study was to find out whether any physical activities influenced mental or cognitive acuity. 

The findings of the study show that most of the physical activites appeared to have almost no positive influence on mental acuity with the exception of one: dance. Frequent dancing decreases the risk of dementia by incredible 76%. Neurologist Dr. Robert Katzman explains that these persons are more resistant to the effects of dementia as a result of having greater cognitive reserve and increased complexity of neuronal synapses. Dance makes brain improving neural qualities and rewire its neural pathways which helps neuroplasticity. 

2. Dance can make you smarter

Intelligence is quite unclear to define but to put it simply intelligence is what we use when we don't already know what to do. In other words, when your brain evaluates various and reasonable responses to a situation and chooses one of the options, this process is considered to be intelligent. 

That's why the best way how to measure our intelligence is to be introduced into a situation that requires a quick response. Dancing is a perfect activity for using and improving your intelligence because you will often find yourselves in situations that require quick responses. When dancing, you must make a decision how fast you move, how you make a turn, respond to the rhythm of the song, etc. Dancing often improves the response time of your brain and improves your intelligence in the process.

3. Dance slows down aging and improves your memory

The more complex your neuronal synapses are, the healthier your brain is. According to Dr. Katzman, you should do everything you can to create new neuronal pathways and dancing is a great way how to achieve that goal.

As we're aging, our brain cells die and the pathways through which your neural synapsies travel are much weaker. That's the reason why it's more difficult to remember names when you get older. It's because there's only one neural path that leads to this information in your brain. However, if you exercises and train your brain and learn new things such as dance, you can create new paths. If one of the pathways, due to your age, is blocked, you can create an alternative one to take its place.

So, shall we dance?