Your Brain Really Likes to Groove With Other People

Based on some of the songs in their extensive catalogues, David Bowie and Billy Idol have different takes on dancing—specifically, who to do it with. Bowie invites us by just saying, you know, let's dance, suggesting an interaction of at least two people, while Billy sings about dancing with himself. There can be lots of reasons for either behavior, but does your brain even care?

Brains sneaking a peek across the dance floor

The Italian research team of Félix Bigand, Roberta Bianco, Sara F. Abalde, Trinh Nguyen, and Giacomo Novembre was interested in understanding brain and body coordination that occurs when people dance with someone else.

These folks recruited 80 participants (54 females; mean age, ~26 y) with no specialized dance training and who "formed 40 dyads (52% female–male, 41% female–female, and 7% male–male)." All participants were "familiar with each other and were informed about the social nature of the task." In fact, in the recruitment for the study, they were advised "to come with someone you know (friend, family member, colleague…) with whom you will dance while listening to music (almost) like in a disco!” In my research career, I never did get to post a recruitment advertisement that sounded quite so fun.

In this clever experiment, the researchers applied advanced statistical and modeling techniques to limb and body movement, muscle, and brain activity while people danced in pairs. This allowed them to extract information "associated with four processes: (I) auditory tracking of music, (II) control of self-generated movements, (III) visual monitoring of partner movements, and (IV) visual tracking of social coordination."

Do some disco in at least a duo

Of special interest were event-related EEG potentials triggered by sound events in the music, movement initiation, and observance of partner movement. They also revealed an additional and novel "neural marker of social coordination" related to the coordination in time and space between dancers. This marker emerges when dancers can see each other and largely arises from observing partner movement. Highlighting the importance of dancing to the beat was the observation that "vertical bounce movements best drive observers’ EEG activity."

The kind of work in this study is commendable in scope and application. It is very challenging to make such measures in free-form movement and to then extract reliable information with advanced data handling. Yet the effort to do so importantly reveals that "real-world brain function involves integrating multiple information streams simultaneously." This work was able "tease apart physiologically established neural processes associated with music perception, motor control, and observation of a partner's movement."

Music and moving as the soundtrack of animal life

The most important outcome for cognitive neuroscience is that this study reveals a lot about how the human brain "supports dynamic and interactive activities." It also generally highlights the importance of acoustic and visual sensory information for the expression of purposeful human movement. All animals really are sensorimotor transformers, and, likely, this work has implications for many other "partnered" activities, including martial arts.

Maybe at the end of the day, it could be fair to say that both Bowie and Billy are right. You can be dancing with yourself while you are just dancing with someone else, too. Regardless, getting in motion with music is good for your brain, body, and beyond.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2025)