I used to join aerobics class before but as I reached 40s, I have turned to line dance. What is line dance? Wikipedia did a good job in describing it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_dance
When I was in Beijing, I saw a group of senior citizens line-danced under the flyover! Besides the benefit to our body, studies found that it can also make us smarter...please read below:
A study done a few years ago, funded by the National Institute on Aging, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, set out to determine if there were specific activities, physical and/or mental, that would halt the loss of our "mental acuity" - mental sharpness - and/or possibly improve it.
They studied a variety of physical and mental activities and, of all the physical activities they included in their study, they found that the only one that helped reduce the risk of losing our mental sharpness was frequent dancing. Playing golf, riding a bicycle, running, jogging - none of these made the cut (are you kidding!). But frequent dancing reduced the risk of deteriorating mental sharpness by a whopping 76% (wow!). It does this, in part, by rewiring the neural pathways in our brains that we have lost over time. (wonder how many rewiring I need...)
But what's important to us, and addresses the question above, is that studies since then have shown that, not only does dancing reverse the loss of these neural pathways, it actually creates new pathways. So, even if you're young and haven't begin to have "brain fade", you will benefit by getting more connections in your brain, which will not only give you reserves for later, but make you smarter now. (so not for old people only.....)
But there's more to improving your mental sharpness by line dancing than just getting out on the dance floor and mindlessly repeating the same old steps over and over. Further studies indicated that we must THINK. Thinking, problem solving, and split-second decision-making are some of the brain activities you need to do to improve, and/or repair, your brain.
So, to answer the question, "Can Line Dancing Make Us Smarter?"
The answer is definitely "YES" as long as you engage your mind in your line dancing as well as your body!
