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We have a wealth of data, and by we, I mean both the researchers who
work with humans and those who work with animals, often rodents or monkeys or beagles, that suggests
that staying physically active is neuro-protective. That is, as a young child, you tend to do
better in school, you have a better memory, you have a better attention span, you
have larger brain regions and more efficient neural networks. As you get older, individuals who
stay physically active, tend to be diagnosed at a much lesser rate with age-associated
neuro-degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's dementia and vascular dementia, and other forms of dementia.
So physical fitness is certainly one important variable that's useful throughout the lifespan
in maintaining high levels of cognition, and fending off, or at least delaying, the onset of some of
these age-associated, neuro-degenerative disorders.
It was fascinating really because, to be totally coordinated in the moment,
you have to coordinate everythihg, everything is like, on. You know what I mean?
It's a really empowering thing. And I know I don't, I don't know too much about the physics of it all
or anything like that, but I do know that before I started dancing, I thought that I was very stupid.
I honestly thought I was stupid. As soon as I started dancing, I knew that I was an intelligent being.
And that was amazing for me. And it was a totally different connection to life.
I felt like, as a mover, I'm absolutely in life and because I'm connected, I'm intelligent.
It's really wild. Where there is any kind of disconnected approach to life in any kind of way,
I'm like, I can't find my place.
But, every time I move, it helps me me make sense of what it is to be here.
Dancers really are involved in many of these four factors that we know engender brain health
and cognitive health. It is very social. It certainly involves a lot of intellectual challenge.
I'm not sure most people realize how hard it is to memorize all of the dance moves, the facial expressions,
the limb movements and so forth. It's very cognitively challenging. It's certainly very
aggressive exercise. If you sit close to dancers or stand close to dancers, you get to hear
how tired they are. And dancers tend to be careful of what they eat because their body
is their instrument as people say. So I think dancing has really got a lot of plusses on
each of these four factors that engender cognitive health and brain health.
To me, that's a fantastic focus because you're not focusing on the patterns that you have, because
all of us have pattern in moving, if you just focus on that, you get stuck. But if you focus on the flow of
energy within the body, you can forget about all of that. And like you said, 'discover.'
Literall every time, anew, you discover what it is to move. So it's not an end-gaming thing of
trying to look a particular way. To me it's about the very thing of discovering in the
moment, what anything is. That's what it means to be alive, as far as I m concerned.
So when I teach, I'm really trying to focus on getting people to, you know what I mean, to keep it new.
To keep it ever new. Not by doing new things all the time necessarily, but to keep surprising,
to keep people waking up. That kind of thing.
From the animal studies, we know that there are
increases in neurotransmitters that will allow neurons to communicate like, dopamine, acetylcholine,
increases in nerve growth factors that are neuro-protective and engender a number of
structural changes, like the birth of new neurons from progenitor cells or adult stem cells.
In some regions of the brain, especially the hippocampus, which is a region that helps
us to encode new memories, especially episodic or relational memories, we also found from
animal research, that, to the extent that animals are exercised, usually in a running wheel or a treadmill,
they have additional synaptic connections. That is connections among neurons that allow
the encoding of new information: learning.
And then finally, exercise engenders new vascular structures, the creation of new capillaries to
support and increase neuronal firing, learning, and so-forth.
And from the human studies, we found that both children and older adults
and everything in between tend to have larger hippocampi, again, which leads to better memory.
They have larger regions of the basal ganglia, which has a lot to do with learning, and they
tend to learn more efficiently. And they tend to have better connected neural networks.
And we know this from analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging data that is associated with
better memory and decision-making and so-forth. So there is a nice synergy between the animal
research and the human research, of course using different techniques. The advantage
of the animals, of course, are that you can really delve down into the molecular and cellular
mechanisms. The advantage of the humans are that you can ask much more involved question
and get sophisticated answers.
But in both cases, there are dramatic changes in memory and decision-making and all of the
supporting structure and function that underlies them.
I mean, I don't know about other people's experiences, but when I first started to
move, I was like, "this is what we're supposed to do." As children, of course you move, that's
how we learn. As children, we learn by moving. And then all of a sudden, you are put in schools
where you are told not to move anymore. So to actually get in that studio and be able to
start moving again, it was like, yes of course, this is me. This is us. I mean it was me, but
it was us, that we are moving animals. And the fact that we are stopped from moving, it is like,
in my mind, it is terrible. It is a transgression that shouldn't happen. I mean I know some people may be
more inclined to moving than others, but I think we are all movers.