[Link] Social dance and cognitive maintenance
Frequent dancing causes a 76% reduction in the risk of dementia. The benefit seems to be from freestyle social dancing, though I don’t think that part is as well-verified. The benefit seems to be from making large numbers of quick decisions.
I wonder if playing jazz has similar good effects.
For something a little geekier, Shiva Nata, a system of keeping the mind fresh by doing more and more complex movements. The author of the blog is a silly person, but the system seems to be for real.
Edited to correct html which was entered in the text field instead of the html field. It wouldn’t surprise me if having to deal with electronics and computers tends to prevent dementia, considering the number of fiddly and changing details one has to deal with. Or is fun required?
No, actually, it doesn’t. This is an observational study of two variables, which means it can’t tell which direction the causality goes, or whether there’s a common cause. And it’s quite obviously a common cause: poor health makes people disinclined to dance.
It’s possible that there’s still some beneficial effects from dancing, but the study does not show them, and the effect sizes won’t be anything near 76%.
This is one of the things I find astounding around here.
People here are so quick to poo poo the evidence afforded by anything but double blinded placebo controlled studies, and then turn right around and make claims with no backing at all. And a bunch of people mod them up for it.
You know that “it’s quite obviously a common cause”. And you know that the effect can’t be “anywhere near 76%”? On the basis of what do you claim to know these things?
This is perhaps the wrong time to voice this complaint—because rejecting the claim made by the dance instructor is the obviously correct response. The study just doesn’t say that frequent dancing causes a 76% reduction in the risk of dementia. Even the people who wrote the study would cringe if they saw their work being used to make that claim! This isn’t “poo poo”, it’s “WTF?”!
Before I defend that statement—are you arguing that poor health does not cause dementia, that poor health does not disincline one to dance, that the types of poor health which cause these two things are different, or that the effect size somewhere is small enough that most of the observed correlation must be explained by something else?
(The claim of causation, by the way, was not in the study; it was added by Richard Powers.)
Change the phrasing here to be more charitable and I would say instead:
“There is an obvious common factor that explains some of the variance: dementia would stop people from dancing; the beginning stages would likely do so as well. Thus we should expect to see a correlation between dancing and good health even in the absence of dancing being preventative. Because of this expectation, seeing a strong link may be enough to locate the hypothesis, but it is likely to be some combination of statistical outlier and reversed causality. Thus if an effect exists, it is likely to be much smaller than the first measurement.”
I was ready to argue with you on this, because jimrandomh seemed to be applying a sensible heuristic here, namely: discount exaggerated reports of a study that say you can massively cut your risk of a chronic disease by doing an arbitrary thing. Normally there are only a few lifestyle factors that have such big effects: smoking, drinking, exercise, and diet. Maybe stress.
But of course frequent dancing is regular exercise. So, on reflection, the true causal effect could be on the order of 76% (though probably less). However, I predict it won’t be substantially more than the true causal effect of regular exercise in general.
I don’t agree with your general point; just because a claim isn’t explicitly justified doesn’t mean it has “no backing at all”. I would happily pooh-pooh double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies concluding that acupuncture can cure AIDS, even without “backing” my pooh-poohing, because it just isn’t plausible that acupuncture can cure AIDS and most people should have that as background knowledge (or at least be able to deduce it).
Still, we’re hardly talking about acupuncture & AIDS, so in this case your questions are fair. Dancing is exercise, exercise can have big preventive effects on chronic disease, and dementia is a chronic disease. Maybe dancing can reduce dementia risk a lot. I think an anti-halo effect from the sloppy argument in NancyLebovitz’s link made people underrate the hypothesis’ prior probability.
From the study: “The physical-activity score was not significantly associated with dementia, either when analyzed as a continuous variable or when the study cohort was divided into thirds according to this score ”
That’s what I get for running my mouth without looking at the paper. Skimming it now, the “dancing [was] associated with a reduced risk of dementia” result smells like multiple testing throwing up spurious crap. There’s a dementia hazard ratio listed for 9 physical activities, and the ratio for dancing was the only one that was “significant” — but it’s only barely significant as the confidence interval goes from 0.06 to 0.99! And the hazard ratios for the other physical activities are all over the place, half of them less than 1.00, half of them at least 1.00. There doesn’t seem to be any real evidence of an association between exercise & dementia, taking this paper as a whole.
Actually, I now strongly suspect that many (though certainly not all) of the claimed benefits of exercise originated from the same error as seen here. But that is a claim that would require substantial research, to separate the real benefits from the fake ones and get the true effect sizes.
From the article:
While he’s inferring a lot here, I’d suspect this is accurate, and the most prevalent dancing in that age group was partnered lead-follow dances—which is what Powers means by “social dance”. The guy is an historian and teacher of social dance.
http://richardpowers.com/
I doubt that the limit of the benefits, even from dementia in particular, are from making lots of quick decisions. An xbox would be enough for that.
Pleasant physical contact for hours on end with members of the opposite sex, with expressive interaction with your partner and the music, in a community of people similarly engaged. I’d expect that to be good for your mental health in an enormous number of ways. And that’s not even counting the cardiovascular benefits of hours at a time of mild aerobic exercise, or the exercise to your nervous system in terms of balance and proprioception.
I’ve been social dancing for about 15 years. Mainly Salsa for the last decade. I’m pretty good. I’m in my mid 40s, and pretty young things in their 20s will just light up and give me a big hug when they see me because I can twirl them around and show them a good time on the dance floor. I suspect that’s good for my mental health. The health benefits of social dance are likely enormous, particularly for overly intellectualized introverted technoweenies completely out of touch with their own bodies, like I once was. I share that on the off chance that there is someone on this list that bears a passing resemblance to that description, and could similarly benefit from a new hobby.
Here is an article (with embedded TEDx talk) on more thorough research being done at the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire.
The most interesting conclusion to me is that choreographed dance raises your level of convergent thinking (questions with one answer, like math problems), while improv dance raises your level of divergent thinking (open ended questions such as “What are some alternative uses for this brick?”).
I recommend viewing the TEDx talk embedded in the article, which goes into more detail on that particular point, I believe.
Aside from all the boring stuff about fertility, hormonal background and dance attractiveness, there’s a fascinating bit at the beginning—Peter Lovatt, the presenter, was close to illiterate. However, he was a very good dancer, and by the time he was 22, he figured out how to apply the sort of memory he needed for dancing to be able to focus on reading. Later, he got a masters in mathematical modelling of brain functioning.
I wonder how much can be accomplished by encouraging people to build on their strengths rather than trying to remedy deficits by using the same methods people who don’t have those deficits use for learning.
I have been wondering if anyone from LW knows of the most efficient way to learn to dance. I enjoy dancing and suspect being better at it would cause me to enjoy it more.
I (like everyone else) will assume you mean social dancing, like swing.
In which case, my number one advice for efficiently learning is DON’T BE SHY about asking for dances.
So many new people in the swing community have very slow growth because they don’t pro-actively seek out dance partners. The ones who get best the fastest are the ones who spend the majority of songs actually dancing, NOT just hanging around hoping someone will ask them to dance!
Most mid-sized cities have at least one swing community. Most decent-sized colleges have a swing club, and they almost always allow non-students to participate. Just Google ” swing”. I recommend social swing to ballroom.
Classes are good, and will teach you things step by step, but you then have to go to open dances to practice what the class taught. I would say at least 3 hours of open dance per hour of class. (These are cheaper too!)
my uni has a salsa club. Looks like fun and I wouldn’t have gone seeking this without the prompt. Thanks!
What kind of dance? My experience of things that are helpful in learning social dance (swing, contra, etc.) 1) Try the other role sometimes—if you normally dance lead, try dancing follow so you discover the good and bad things leads sometimes do. 2) Ask for feedback from good dancers. 3) Ask leads how they do particular things you want to learn. Follows normally can’t teach you much about leading because they don’t know how to do it.
Find a social community around dancing. The main reason that I learned swing dancing and stuck with it is that there was a large and friendly circle of swing dancers in the Bay Area, and multiple dance venues (some of them free!) every week.
I see in a reply of yours that you’re interested in salsa dancing. By far the most important factor in getting better is to quickly achieve a level of competency that makes salsa socials really fun. I don’t think I’ve gone more than 7 days in the last 2.5 years without attending a salsa social, and this has been the biggest factor in my improvement.
You may already be at this stage since you said you enjoy dancing, but if not I suggest you learn the basics from a friend or a class (I would spend no more than 10 hours on this stage), and then force yourself to attend a bunch of salsa socials, until you start really enjoying the experience.
Once you’ve reached this stage, you’ve solved the motivation problem, and now you can optimize towards becoming a really good dancer (if you even want to at this point—it’s not necessary to reap the majority of the benefits).