A recent study done by The Conversation has drawn the same conclusion that music lovers have known for years: Dancing with others is good for your health. People are drawn to music for many different reasons. Whether it be spiritual, emotional, physical, or cultural, music has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. The innate desire to move to a beat is a quality that we are all born with. Seriously, even babies do it.
While dancing can be taught and practiced to perfection, every single human has a natural ability to synchronize to a beat. It is one of the building blocks of humanity that continues to evolve just as humans do. As The Conversation notes in their study, “it turns out that when you synchronise even a small movement, like the tapping of your finger in time with someone else, you feel closer and more trusting of that person than if you had tapped out of time.”
The rave community is well-versed in this simple scientific fact. People love good music and love a good show, but what really makes the EDM genre truly powerful is the community that accepts everyone and anyone. When you dance with others, whether it be moving to the same beat or dancing in synchronicity, the individual merges into a collective whole. “When we watch someone else do the same thing at the same time as us, our brain ends up with a merged sense of us and them. It feels like we ‘become one,” the study concludes.
The Conversation took things one step further to test additional benefits of dancing in synchronicity with others. The study took place in Brazil, where 264 young people participated in various dancing activities that were synchronized versus non synchronized and high-exertion versus low-exertion. The study measured pain tolerance and feelings of closeness before, during, and after the dancing activities.
“Not surprisingly, those who did full-bodied exertive dancing had higher pain thresholds compared to those…in the low-exertion groups….we also found that synchronisation led to higher pain thresholds, even if the synchronised movements were not exertive. So long as people saw that others were doing the same movement at the same time, their pain thresholds went up.”
So basically, dancing in any synchronization with others increases your pain tolerance and helps you to connect with others. Music literally is group therapy – a concept that EDM champions Above & Beyond is quite familiar with. Moral of the story? Tap into those primal desires and dance!
It’s good for you.
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