What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [62]
Indeed, mounting evidence from brain imaging studies and other neurological research supports Thomas’s sense that the work of learning to dance professionally has had cognitive and other benefits. In 2003, a twenty-one-year study of 469 senior citizens, seventy-five and older, that was led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that of the several activities it studied, frequent social dancing was the only physical activity associated with a significant decrease in the incidence of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. “Dance is not purely physical. In many ways, it also requires a lot of mental effort,” said the study’s lead researcher Joseph Verghese. Among the participants of the study, those who danced three or four times a week, showed 76 percent less incidence of dementia than those who danced only once a week or not at all. Heightening interest in the neural benefits of dance, in 2005 McGill University researcher Patricia McKinley found that older adults who learned the Argentine tango, which combines the mental challenge of learning complicated dance steps with physical exercise and social interaction, performed better at multitasking—doing a complex cognitive task while walking or standing on one foot—than a group of older adults whose only exercise was walking. The tango dancers also improved in balance and motor coordination.
Investigators are continuing to search out the reasons the brain seems to benefit so distinctly from dance. Several neuroscientists with whom I spoke suggested to me that the level of physical activity and the “learning load,” or demand, that Thomas has placed on his brain has, hypothetically, increased the blood flow to his brain and helped to stimulate the growth of blood vessels. Not only would such growth, known as angiogenesis, protect the brain against stroke, there is reason to suspect that his regular dancing and exercise have strengthened and stimulated the development of brain synapses (critical to learning and brain plasticity), neurogenesis (the growth of new brain cells), and the release of enzymes that help maintain the energy of brain cells that otherwise declines with age.
Bolstering that view are findings in 2007 by researchers at Columbia University who found for the first time that exercise targets a region of the brain within the hippocampus, the part of the brain that modulates memory and learning and which underlies normal age-related memory decline. The study was particularly significant because researchers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), identified neurogenesis within the region known as the dentate gyrus following exercise. “I, like many physicians, already encourage my patients to get active, and this adds yet another reason to the long list of reasons why exercise is good for overall health,” said Dr. Scott A. Small, the study’s lead author. Still other researchers have begun to find evidence that dance activates the pleasure centers of the brain, explaining in part why we like to dance, and that the sensory experience of watching other dancers move entrains movement areas of the brain in professional dancers, making it easier for them to replicate dance steps done by others.
Over time Thomas not only pushed himself to challenge his physical limitations, he learned to exploit them. His movements became even more authentic and arresting. “It’s one thing to see someone move flowingly and energetically in their twenties, but a much different thing to see it