PennNeuroKnow

Just dance, it’ll be okay!

September 15th, 2026

Written by Allison Fultz

Life experience shapes the brain

It is sometimes said that a single day can change everything. For the brain, this statement is scientific fact. You may walk through your day in a blurry haze and think that nothing remarkable occurred, but the brain remembers. The way your bed felt when you woke up in the morning. The sound of the birds chirping on your way to work and the conversations you had throughout the day. The movements you executed when going to the gym or playing a sport. The taste of your dinner and the movie you watched before bed. The brain is constantly keeping track of the things you learn and experience and is making little adjustments along the way. 

As we move through life, our experiences impact our brains by shaping the connections between neurons and the volumes of brain areas10. Imagine you are learning to throw a baseball. As you repeat the action, the involved brain areas, neuronal connections, and targeted muscles are recruited over and over again. This recruitment makes you a better pitcher by initiating physical changes (down to the molecular level) that influence the communication between these elements. Similar changes are occurring constantly as you learn and experience new things, and are also highly attractive to scientists who wish to utilize them to develop treatments and therapies for physical and mental health conditions.

Dance training as a vehicle of change

One activity that impacts the brain is dancing. While the brain handles the emotional aspects of dance9 and creates links to the body that allow for precise movement control, it is also shaped by repetitive dance performance. Both the emotional and physical facets of dance are typically handled by a collection of brain regions responsible for emotion, action, sensation, perception, and movement8. Like pitching a baseball, repetitive dance training involves the consistent recruitment and subsequent shaping of associated brain regions, neuronal connections, and muscle groups. Because of this, repetitive dance therapy has become particularly interesting to those aforementioned scientists aiming to use these changes to help treat disorder and disease.

Dance training impacts communication in the brain 

Dance training specifically affects a variety of brain regions that are also implicated in several physical and mental health conditions. Investigating the brains of professional female dancers, scientists have turned (or pirouetted) to functional connectivity, which measures the degree to which brain regions are working together during a task. They found greater collaboration between regions that relay information across the brain and deal with higher-level cognitive functions like memory, perception, and emotional processing3,4. In light of these findings, dance therapy could potentially improve communication across key brain regions in patients with memory disorders like dementia and mood disorders like depression. For example, just one dance class has been shown to improve self-reported anxiety symptoms in depressed individuals1. Future studies can help reveal how more consistent dance therapy changes the brains of these patients, and how these changes translate to symptom relief.

Scientists have also investigated functional connectivity with the action observation network (AON), which is a series of interconnected brain regions that becomes active when you observe someone else’s movements14. In expert female dancers, they found more communication between the AON and a brain region that functions in body image, sensory processing4,8, and emotional regulation. This region, called the inferior parietal lobule, is also dysfunctional in bipolar disorder6. Dance therapy could potentially be used to target the inferior parietal lobule with the aim of improving symptoms of bipolar disorder. While three months of dance therapy has led to improvements in emotional regulation in individuals with bipolar disorder7, whether dance therapy leads to translational changes in the inferior parietal lobule remains unknown. 

Other scientists have investigated changes in the brain after longer-term dance training spanning at least seven years. Again looking at functional connectivity, they found improvements in the cortico-basal ganglia loop, which deals with the integration of motor control12. The brain regions in this loop are also heavily implicated in Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by motor deficits. Improved functional connectivity within this network following dance therapy could help treat this disease. Promisingly, a seven-week dance therapy treatment led to improved balance in Parkinson’s patients2, but still more research is needed on how this treatment impacts the relevant brain regions.

Dance training matters (white and grey) to the brain

Communication between brain regions isn’t the only change that occurs with consistent dance training. Other unique changes have been found in the volume of what scientists call white matter. White matter contains the wires that connect and send signals between neurons. In professional female ballet dancers, the volume of white matter was found to be lower than average in key bundles responsible for voluntary muscle control and the relay of sensory and motor information11. This reduction may seem counterintuitive. Why would there be a decrease in the volume of the wires used for executing dance movements? Perhaps the wires are properly tuned for optimum performance or become more tightly packed over time, but more research is needed to make definitive conclusions. Regardless, changes in white matter volume could also be unique therapeutic targets for treating movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease13.

While white matter contains the actual wires that neurons use to communicate, the cell bodies themselves make up their own tissue type called grey matter. Grey matter volume also changes with dance training. Looking at the brains of male and female ballet dancers, grey matter volume was higher than average in the hippocampus, which is responsible for visual memory and spatial navigation5. The hippocampus has already been a target of dance therapies for memory conditions. In one particular study, scientists were looking to prevent the slow decline characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. They found that three months of aerobic dance therapy in older adults with mild cognitive impairment resulted in an increase in hippocampal volume and cognitive function15. In the future, scientists can look for a causal link between these two findings to confirm dance therapy as a useful treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Our malleable brains

Think of the brain like clay. It may come with the right equipment, but you shape it over the course of your life as you encounter new experiences and learn new skills. In other words, the connections our neurons make and the regions they occupy are impacted by the repetitive actions we execute and the stories we live to tell. The repetition of specific activities like dancing shapes the brain in unique ways, and these specific changes reveal a natural plasticity that can be leveraged for therapeutic treatments. While it comes as no surprise that dancing alone in your bedroom can make you feel better temporarily, this collection of research reveals that repetitive dancing can affect underlying brain structure and function and help improve the symptoms of a variety of mental and physical health conditions.

References

  1. Barnstaple, R., & DeSouza, J. F. (n.d.). Dance and Neurorehabilitation—Mixed-Methods Research Models. Functional Neurology, Rehabilitation, and Ergonomics, 7(1), 12–17.
  2. Batson, G., Migliarese, S. J., Soriano, C., H. Burdette, J., & Laurienti, P. J. (2014). Effects of Improvisational Dance on Balance in Parkinson’s Disease: A Two-Phase fMRI Case Study. Physical & Occupational Therapy In Geriatrics, 32(3), 188–197. https://doi.org/10.3109/02703181.2014.927946
  3. Bludau, S., Eickhoff, S. B., Mohlberg, H., Caspers, S., Laird, A. R., Fox, P. T., Schleicher, A., Zilles, K., & Amunts, K. (2014). Cytoarchitecture, probability maps and functions of the human frontal pole. NeuroImage, 93, 260–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.052
  4. Burzynska, A. Z., Finc, K., Taylor, B. K., Knecht, A. M., & Kramer, A. F. (2017). The Dancing Brain: Structural and Functional Signatures of Expert Dance Training. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00566
  5. Dordevic, M., Schrader, R., Taubert, M., Müller, P., Hökelmann, A., & Müller, N. G. (2018). Vestibulo-Hippocampal Function Is Enhanced and Brain Structure Altered in Professional Ballet Dancers. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2018.00050
  6. Ellard, K. K., Zheng, J., Lenza, B., Sidelinger, L., Carr, C., Makhoul, W., & Sheline, Y. I. (2026). The role of inferior parietal lobule in emotion dysregulation in bipolar disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 191, 106939. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106939
  7. Feng, C. (2026). The effect of group music and dance therapy in enhancing the psychological resilience of patients with bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 52(Supplement_1), S89. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbag003.130
  8. Foster Vander Elst, O., Foster, N. H. D., Vuust, P., Keller, P. E., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2023). The Neuroscience of Dance: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 150, 105197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105197
  9. Foster Vander Elst, O., Vuust, P., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2021). Sweet anticipation and positive emotions in music, groove, and dance. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 39, 79–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.02.016
  10. Fuchs, E., & Flügge, G. (2014). Adult Neuroplasticity: More Than 40 Years of Research. Neural Plasticity, 2014(1), 541870. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/541870
  11. Hänggi, J., Koeneke, S., Bezzola, L., & Jäncke, L. (2010). Structural neuroplasticity in the sensorimotor network of professional female ballet dancers. Human Brain Mapping, 31(8), 1196–1206. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.20928
  12. Li, G., He, H., Huang, M., Zhang, X., Lu, J., Lai, Y., Luo, C., & Yao, D. (2015). Identifying enhanced cortico-basal ganglia loops associated with prolonged dance training. Scientific Reports, 5(1), 10271. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep10271
  13. Xu, D., Ding, Q., & Wang, H. (2020). Corticospinal Tract Impairment of Patients With Parkinson’s Disease: Triple Stimulation Technique Findings. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 12, 588085. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2020.588085
  14. Zhou, X., Stehr, D. A., Pyles, J., & Grossman, E. D. (2023). Configuration of the action observation network depends on the goals of the observer. Neuropsychologia, 191, 108704. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108704
  15. Zhu, Y., Gao, Y., Guo, C., Qi, M., Xiao, M., Wu, H., Ma, J., Zhong, Q., Ding, H., Zhou, Q., Ali, N., Zhou, L., Zhang, Q., Wu, T., Wang, W., Sun, C., Thabane, L., Zhang, L., & Wang, T. (2022). Effect of 3-Month Aerobic Dance on Hippocampal Volume and Cognition in Elderly People With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2022.771413

No AI was used.

Cover photo by AlemCoksa from Pixabay.