‘With dance, you learn new sequences for the brain’
ARTISTIC director of Dance Theatre of Ireland, Loretta Yurick, trained as a dancer in the US and has toured internationally. Not surprisingly, for Loretta, dance is the secret to a healthy brain. “The physical and social connection that I have, focusing on movement and breath and other people, I find all of these things mean it’s not possible to hold onto your problems. You have to let go, and it puts your mind completely on what you’re doing in the moment. I find dancing to be a great stress reliever in that sense.”
Along with her fellow artistic director, Robert Connor, Loretta has developed a programme called Well-Dance for Seniors, a programme of contemporary dance for people of 55 years and older. “It’s a creative process as much as a physical one,” explains Loretta. “We’re not just repeating movement, we’re creating as well.”
Dance for Loretta is a form of mindfulness. “As you become acquainted more deeply with your own body, dance incorporates a mindfulness technique: awareness and sensitivity to your own body in stillness and in movement. Within that there is a great release — you have to suspend all other thoughts and you learn to focus.”
Learning new moves is essential for brain health, she believes. “With dance, you learn new sequences for the brain, new co-ordinations, new motor memories, new cognitive skills. You have to make quick decisions. In Well-Dance you create [new moves] and while doing this, you’re also using and developing your memory and your muscle memory. Those two things support brain plasticity.”
Loretta also teaches classes for those with Parkinson’s disease and their carers, in conjunction with Move 4 Parkinson’s.
“The cerebral cortex is remarkably plastic, and it can rewire itself,” she says. “So our brains are constantly rewiring their neural pathways as needed. If our brain doesn’t need to do this, then it won’t; the saying ‘use it or you lose it’ applies to the body as well as the mind.”
Loretta cites an analogy she came across from a Stanford scientific study, which found that dancing makes you smarter. “That analogy was, the more stepping stones there are to cross a creek, the easier it is to cross in your own style. For you to find as many alternative paths as possible is a parallel and creative process; you’re doing more than one thing at a time. But as we age, parallel processing becomes more critical. Now it’s no longer a matter of style, it’s a matter of survival. Getting across the creek at all. So randomly dying brain cells are like stepping stones being removed one by one.”
If you are constantly developing only one well-worn path of stones, that path will eventually be blocked when the stones (or your brain cells) are removed. Those who constantly try different routes will still have several paths left. “Studies show people who remain active and keep generating new pathways maintain the complexity of our neural connection.” Liadan Hynes