Why I Can’t Dance and What It Taught Me About the Brain

Deborah Kan is an award-winning journalist and founder of Being Patient. In this “Thought of the Week” column each Friday, she highlights one of the key stories shaping the future of brain science.

Dear readers,

I find learning choreographed dance routines about as difficult as learning a foreign language. Since I was a child, ballet, jazz, and any kind of dance routine defeated me. It wasn’t keeping up with the rhythm that was the problem. It was holding the sequence in my head while tracking the rhythm at the same time. The two things together were more than my brain could manage.

I used to think it was just coordination. The kind of thing you accept about yourself and move on. Then I started looking into the science, and I found out it has a name, a location in the brain, and an explanation that finally made sense of something I had carried since childhood.

The place in the brain that determines whether you can dance is a cluster of structures deep in the center called the basal ganglia. They are responsible for the timing and sequencing of movement. When you hear a beat in music, your basal ganglia don’t just register it the way your ears register a sound. They predict where the next beat will land before it arrives, and they begin preparing your motor system to move toward it. In people for whom this works well, music and movement are almost fused. In people for whom the connection is weaker, there is a gap. 

Dr. Jessica Grahn, a neuroscientist at Western University who has spent years studying the neural basis of rhythm, has shown through MRI research that the basal ganglia are more active when a person is listening to rhythms with a clear beat than when listening to irregular rhythms without one. What her work also shows is that people vary in how strongly this system activates, and that the connection between the basal ganglia and the motor cortex is stronger in trained musicians than in people without musical training. Some people come to the dance floor with a more naturally efficient auditory-motor loop. The rest of us are working against a slight lag that prohibits graceful movement.

I thought about the foreign-language comparison with how your brain responds when it encounters music with rhythm. People who grew up in households where music was constant, where they learned to clap or move before they could name what they were doing, tend to carry that wiring into adulthood. It isn’t that they have a fundamentally different brain. It’s that a particular circuit was used early and often enough to become automatic. This is why some people can hear a song for the first time and be on the beat within seconds, while others, like me, are still negotiating.

What makes this more than an interesting personal footnote is what happens when the basal ganglia are not just underactive but damaged. That is what Parkinson’s disease does. The dopamine-producing cells that feed the basal ganglia die off progressively, and one of the earliest consequences is a loss of the internal rhythm generator. Patients freeze mid-step. Their walking becomes erratic, their timing unreliable, their body unable to predict and prepare the way a healthy basal ganglia does automatically. 

When people with Parkinson’s dance, they are borrowing an external rhythm to replace the internal one their disease has disrupted. The music provides the cue their basal ganglia can no longer reliably generate on their own. Researchers have found that music and rhythmic auditory cues can temporarily restore more regular movement in Parkinson’s patients, improving gait, reducing freezing, and giving people back a quality of movement they thought the disease had taken from them.

Magda Kaczmarska, a researcher with dual training in neuropharmacology and dance who spoke to Being Patient, puts it another way. Dance, she argues, is a form of embodied creativity that reaches people in ways that standard exercise and cognitive training do not. She has seen it in her work with people living with dementia through her organization DanceStream Projects, where participants engage in co-creative movement even when language and other capacities have narrowed considerably.

So this is a long way of telling you readers that now I finally understand why I cannot dance. It is not something I can fix overnight, but there’s hope that maybe with enough practice, I can retrain my brain to harmonize two different neurological systems.

With hope,

Deborah