Much has been said about how listening to classical music is believed to help children develop their memory and pattern recognition skills. I realize that the research is inconclusive and often contradictory; however, there have been at least some studies which suggest that certain types of music can help improve aspects of intelligence.
What about dance, though? Mind you, I’m not talking about simple wild freestyling, as an untrained dancer might do. Rather, I’m talking about whether there’s reason to believe that disciplined, organized styles of dancing – ballroom, swing, hip hop, whatever – can have some positive effect on developing intelligence.
Now, I know that some people would point out that there’s a field called “kinesthetic intelligence” – that is, “intelligence” in controlling one’s movements, the way an athlete or dancer would. This is a controversial topic though, as it’s not the type of skill that most people would associate with intelligence. I’m wondering more about traditionally recognized aspects of intellience such as memory, pattern recognition, mathematical skill, critical thinking, and so forth.
‘Kinesthetic intelligence’ sounds like a measure of procedural learning, to me. If it is possible to improve your ability to carry out procedural learning, and if dance is a good way of doing this, then I would imagine that dance would be a good way of improving your procedural learning ability. I don’t see how it would directly help with improving declarative learning, though. That’s handled by different physical structures in the brain.
No cite, but the process of dancing to choreography (as opposed to moving freely) would seem likely to get both sides of the brain working and communicating better. It involves listening to words, “translating” those into movements, counting and moving both sides of the body. Often it involves watching a demonstration and “flipping it” in your head - if your choreographer is doing a move facing you, you have to learn how it goes from the other side. I know I feel more mentally alert simply when doing paradiddles to warm up before drumming - getting both hands, dominant and non, moving in coordinated effort. Whether or not that translates to “developing intelligence”, I have no idea.
My daughter (9 1/2 years old) has been taking dance since she was 4, the last two years competitively. This involves a lot of practice learning routines: group routines, duets, solos, etc.
I really cannot see any improvement in learning or intelligence since the competitive dance kicked in. Her marks are pretty much the same as always, Bs and Cs with the occasional A.
What I have noticed though is that she is very coordinated. She picks up on sports very easily and will now be playing competitive soccer this summer. I plan on teaching her some golf this summer. I bet she’s a natural.
During his childhood and adolescence, Hawking was quite athletic. Building intelligence by mastering complex procedural tasks is likely to have its greatest effect, if any, during the initial developmental sensitive periods in childhood and at the latest, adolescence. So, yeah, Stephen Hawking might actually be a good person to ask in this case.
Do you think that his intelligence is due to his adolescent athelitcism?
I don’t, I think it’s all genes. But I have no cite…
Is there a danger of him getting stupider because of his current physical infirmities?
I do not think so, but I have no cites…
I agree that the brain is learning at it’s fastest rate during those years.
However, I feel that learning dance is merely training the brain in how to work it’s carrying case (and thinking in three dimensions) in more exacting requirments than required for, say, walking. It can bring it’s own sense of self assuredness and such. (Maybe some similar benefits to that of meditating, as well, if your mind is elsewhere while the body works.) It brings health benefits on it’s own.
But does it actually make you smarter? A better problem solver? Surely, there are plenty of examples of people who have “mastered complex procedural tasks”, like Baseball players, who would not be judged by those on this board as smart.
Alas, I have no idea if it is possible to measure how much dumber Tiger Woods would be if he had not mastered the three dimensional mechanics he needs to put a little ball into a hole 250 yards distant with an oddly shaped club.
I have doubts that it will, because while the formation of declarative memories (reasoning, factual recall) seems to be mediated by the hippocampus, the formation of procedural memories (skill at a task, ‘muscle memory’) seems to be mediated by the basal ganglia and cerebellum. Different brain structures, different types of memories, different tasks.
Children who have the opportunity to ‘engage’ with the world and solve complex problems (declarative tasks) do tend to do better in school that children who do not. I would imagine children that did serious procedural learning during early developmental sensitive periods would likewise have an easier time developing additional procedural skills later (for example, someone who learned to play the violin in childhood learning to touch-type for the first time in adulthood). However, I have no cites for this - most of the papers I’ve seen are about how the two types of learning are distinct, but few did these studies in children, comparing declarative versus procedural enrichment in childhood versus the ability to learn new tasks later.