Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis Williams

Have you ever had the experience of dancing or doing yoga or simply moving your body and afterwards feeling a lot better? If so, have you ever wondered why that is and what's going on inside your brain during these activities, whether it be on your own or even with a group?

Well as a person who sees physical activity and my own mental well-being as very much connected, I'm extremely curious as to what happens during these moments. And thankfully Virginia Tech's Julia Basso has an expertise in this very topic and was kind enough to answer my questions. Julia is an assistant professor of human nutrition, foods, and exercise in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She's also the director of the Embodied Brain Lab and her research investigates the effects of exercise on brain function and physiology, as well as the neurobiological underpinnings of exercise motivation. Julia and I talked a little about what the body-mind movement connection actually is and how she goes about studying it. She also explained to how dance is an ideal activity for studying these things, not only because you can study what's happening within an individual, but you can study what's happening between different individuals that are dancing together.

We talked about some of our findings in this area, include enhancing people's moods and perhaps even their immune systems, as well as what some of the social impacts are when people move together. And, spoiler alert, it may be possible that a lot of our world's problems could be solved if we just spent a little more time dancing together. I'm Travis Williams, this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

Well, I know that when you and I have talked in the past, we've talked a little bit about this mind-body movement kind of intersection and connection. So I thought that might just be a really great place to start. What does that mean?

Julia Basso

Yeah, mind-body movement. I think it's a complicated, complex term that integrates a lot of different things. So mind-body movement practices for me consist of anything from aerobic exercise, physical activity in general, to practices like dance and yoga. Let's take yoga for example, where actually the word yoga means yoke or union, right, of the mind, body, and spirit.

And so when we're practicing that, kind of in its physical form, we're bringing together movement and breath practices, or the asanas and the pranayama practices together. And so along with kind of an intentionality or focus of the mind, so mind-body movement practices. But, you know, even if someone is practicing meditation, for example,

It's this idea of using the mind to alter things in the body, to alter things in the brain. So there's really this mind-body connection. And then through dance, it's a practice, a somatic practice that's very heavily focused on intentional practices of cultivating thoughts and cultivating conscious experiences. So it's really this deep connection between mind and body or brain and body. And really, how can we use either the mind or the body.

Travis

Yeah, and what are you exploring at that intersection? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of things, but kind of an umbrella idea of what you're exploring.

Julia

Yeah, so I always say that the embodied brain lab studies the effects of mind-body movement practices on brain function and physiology. So that means, you know, how do we think? How do we feel, right? Can we use some of these practices to cultivate better mood states, improved mood states, or focus, attention, heightened states of awareness and things like that? And then we look at how that manifests in the brain. So the physiological outputs of the brain. The brain is an electrical organ, so we can measure its electrical activity through a process called electroencephalography. And we can do that in one or more people, so we can scan two, three, or four brains simultaneously and look at how they're interacting in some of these movement experiences, especially dance.

Travis

How did you get interested in this intersection? What led you to this unique space?

Julia

Yeah, so, well, I've been dancing ever since I was a little girl, probably three or four. So I always had a movement practice on board. And then I grew up in a medical family. My dad was an ER doc, mom was an ER nurse. So science and medicine were kind of always at the forefront. And I knew I wanted to explore some things science related eighth grade, wanted to be a virologist, and then it developed from there. in college, neuroscience was a new major. In fact, was the first year neuroscience was offered as a major, so I thought that was really cool. And I was also, I hopped immediately into the dance classes there. And so I was on the dance floor learning about the body and its connection to the brain. It was on the dance floor that I first learned about, for example, interoception, proprioception, exteroception, all these things that are related to the brain and how the body influences the brain. And then there was this new major and it was all very exciting. So really I was studying the body, I was studying the brain, and I was studying them simultaneously. So in college it was like this perfect union of things. I would be in the dance studio and then hop to the science lab and back and forth. And then after that, decided to get my PhD in behavioral and neural science from Rutgers University and then went on to do my postdoc at New York University with Dr. Wendy Suzuki who studied the effects of exercise on the brain and that's really where I started to integrate these things. We were focused primarily on aerobic exercise and then you know as I traveled further I to have the wonderful experience of being a senior research associate with Dr. Warren Bickel. who recently passed. He was a wonderful mentor over at the Freeland Biomedical Research Institute. And then when I started my lab in August of 2021, it was just a natural thing. I said, okay, you know, I've been studying exercise in kind of a preclinical rodent model and then in humans. And now I want to study dance and dance as this what I consider a multimodal form of physical activity. And so I started to partner with the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology. Of course, I'm in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise. So the department as a whole has a love for physical activity and then ICAT has this love for arts and dance kind of being both a physical activity and an art form, which is really a fun space. So now I consider myself in this space of what's called NeuroArts.

Travis

It sounds like that you've just found the perfect space for your interests where they collide and it happens to also be this great, really interesting space.

Julia

Exactly. Yeah, because my lab space, it's a half dance floor. So we have a sprung dance floor and performance space in there. And then all outfitted all around is the neuroscience suite.

Travis

So even your lab is this collision of these two things. That's really cool. What is it that is special, maybe, or maybe a better question is, is there anything special about dance that lends itself to these types of studies?

Julia

That's right, yeah. Sure. So dance, as I said, I consider it this multimodal form of physical activity. when we look at dance as a practice, of course, we have those sensory and motor components, just like with any form of physical activity. Let's take running or cycling, for example, right? But then we have this additional aspect of cognition. So cognitive functioning. We're often choreographing. We're learning and remembering movements. It stresses areas like the hippocampus, our learning and memory centers.

We have aspects of creativity. So you're either creating new movements if you're improvising or when you're choreographing, for example. And then it has these important components of the social and emotional factors. You're often doing it in groups. It's a social experience. And it's a thing that often tends to evoke emotion, whether you're watching dance or kind of engaging in dance yourself. So that's why I consider it multimodal jumping into all these different brain regions. And we have this idea and we're starting to explore this idea that dance can actually help the connection between these different brain regions, sensory motors, social areas, emotional areas, and that it can actually enhance the flow of information. Something called either functional connectivity or intra-brain synchrony.

Travis

As you all have been studying this, what have you learned so far?

Julia

Mm-hmm. So one of the things we learned, and I'm a behavioral neuroscientist by training, so I really study behavior at its core. And we find that dance and some of these mind-body movement practices not only increases our positive states of being, happiness, self-esteem, positive affect, as it's called, it also decreases our negative affective states, like depression, like anxiety. So it's doing both of these things to cultivate this really enhanced mood state, or kind of a sense of wellbeing for one. And it also is enhancing our social connection. So when we're kind of practicing these things in groups and we even found this online during the pandemic, that we see an increase in social connection and that these mood state improvements are connected to the increases in social connection. And so when then we started to kind of realize, okay, it's doing all of these different things to improve what we call socio-emotional health we started to look into the brain and see what's going on. And so we're starting to changes, these shifts in different neural states, for example. One of the things we're showing in one of our most recent papers is this increase in theta brain waves during dance, improvisational and choreographed dance. And so some of these neural states are more slow, kind of oscillatory.

actions of the brain that help to calm us down, right? Where parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, our rest and digest states. And so that's one of the things we're finding. And the second thing, as I mentioned, is that it's increasing the connectivity between, left and right hemispheres or kind of frontal, these social regions of the brain, the frontal regions, temporal parietal regions regions of the brain that promote social behavior. So we're finding that within the individual, which is really exciting. But we're also finding this connection between brains. And this is called interbrain synchrony. So when we dance and partner in these practices, we see increases in these neural oscillation patterns coming together. And if you have ever heard somebody say, I'm on the same brain wave, right, brain length as that person that it really is happening in that way. So when you're moving together, when you're co-creating, that you're starting to experience similar brain states, and this ultimately helps us to feel connected to other people, to understand others. And I think it's really cool because dance in essence is a form of non-verbal communication, but then it's kind of helping us to engage in verbal communication and conversation and just feel more connected with one another.

Travis

That is so interesting. What's the benefit of having that interconnection with someone else once you leave the dance floor? Does that benefit that relationship when say you pick up the phone to call the person? Like, well, how does that play out?

Julia

Yeah, that's well, and that's exactly what the research is all about. You know, the dance floor is one exciting space, of course, for us. But really most important, and for example, we have our new study supported by the National Endowment of the Arts is on mother-child dance for moms with depression. And we're showing similar things there that engaging in these dyadic dance practices can actually help decrease depression levels for mom and increase the social connection to have their parent-child relationship, which is really important. And we get reports that when they go out of that dance space and go home and maybe the child is having a tantrum, right, something happens in that space, that mom is better able to connect with the child, help ground, use some of the tools that they've learned when they've come into these dance programs and bring them into that space to help regulate at home.

So, and that's idea of co-regulation, you know, which we're really kind of excited about from that space and especially as a mom myself. And so, yeah, I mean, it's all about bringing the work off the dance floor and into other social spaces.

Travis

Yeah, so perhaps some of the divides we experience in our world, people just need to get together and dance more.

Julia

I actually, one of the last grants I wrote was all about that, in the socio-political sphere that we're living in, right, in all these divides, kind of using dance as a practice to bring people together. Didn't get funded, unfortunately.

Travis

I feel like you could take that to DC and that should be something that you should least try, right?

Julia

I was trying, yeah.

Travis

Well, has there been anything that you have encountered that has surprised you while you've been doing these studies?

Julia

Yeah, mean, you know, one is really exciting to see these effects. One of the things that's really surprised me, so when we look at that mother-child dance program, so when we think about depression and some of these other psychiatric illnesses, there are the first line of defense there, right, is psychotropic medication or, you know, like antidepressants, anti-anxiolytics, anti-anxiety medications.

And so when you look at the literature and look at the effect size of these things, and effect size kind of means how effective they are, right? They, statistically speaking, have a small to moderate effect size. They're helping, you know, it's definitely clinically significant, but it's small to moderate, right? Well, when we looked at our dance program, we actually saw a large effect size in the decrease in depression. And so that was really exciting. Like it's a really powerful thing. And not only that, but we were partnering with Dr. Georgia Hodes of the School of Neuroscience, who is an amazing scientist, and she specializes in neuroimmune health, so looks at the relationship of the immune function to the brain and behavior. And we partnered with her to show that this dance program also helped to improve the immune function of the mothers, because the data is showing that individuals with depression, with stress, with anxiety, their immune systems are dysregulated and they show increased inflammation. And when we think about inflammation in the body, that can lead to inflammation in the brain and then problems with how we think, how we feel, all of this. And so our dancing bodies actually help to improve that immune function and kind of decrease all the inflammation in the body.

That was really exciting to us. And these things were all linked. The more that was happening, the more decreased in depression we saw. And then, of course, the level of the brain and the interconnections there. So the body and brain is connected, as we know. But to see it in data form, for me, is really exciting.

Travis

Yeah, that's super exciting. Well, what are some of the things that are maybe on the horizon that you're

looking forward to maybe studying or want to study?

Julia

Yes, so one of the newest projects that is ongoing right now. if you're interested, come on down. But we were funded by the Renee Fleming NeuroArts Investigator Award and also Alpha Theta, which is previously Pioneer DJ. So we're partnering with both of those foundations. And we're doing a study on DJing actually where you get to learn to DJ for young adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So We we've been working with young adults with ADHD especially because you know, it's this time when people are coming into college They might have new stressors for example new social stressors new stressors just with the workload, right? It's tremendous college and academia and the stress you face and so are there any interventions these kind of non-pharmacological interventions that we could offer to help young adults with ADHD. So one of the new projects we're running is on DJing, and we're partnering with Virginia Tech Digging in the Crates. So these participants will actually get to be taught lessons by Craig Arthur from Virginia Tech Digging in the Crates, and it's going to be a really exciting program. it's just starting right now running participants in the lab in the Center for the Arts. If you're interested, you can email us at embodied brain lab at gmail.com and we'll get you enrolled.

Travis

That sounds so is the is the ideal with that you want to see if DJing can help curve some of the ADHD maybe affects the young people are experiencing?

Julia

Exactly, help with again mood state, how people are thinking, attention, focus, regulation of emotions. And then we're also of course looking at the brain. This is actually the first time we're looking at the brain and the heart. So we're looking at both brain and body physiology to see how the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system are interacting. So yeah, and you know, you can get to see images of your own brain and heart. So that's pretty exciting.

Travis

It sounds like there's a lot of benefits to that and no real drawback. Cause at the end of the day, you're going to at least learn how to DJ.

Julia

Right, exactly.

Travis

For somebody like me, maybe just the average person, like I told you before, I'm not necessarily a dancer. I don't know how to DJ. But what are some implications you think of these studies, maybe some broad implications for just everybody?

Julia

Yeah, so, you I think that we have the power in our own minds and bodies to help improve our health, both at the physical level and at the mental level. We can seek out, you know, programs in the community, mother-child dance classes, kind of see what music programs are going on, and that integrating these into our lives, maybe once or twice a month, say, even, you know, it'll really help benefit you're feeling, how you're thinking, your social connection with others. if you can, we always talk about this in yoga class, you know, I'm a yoga teacher and I've been practicing for a while, it's like if you can use these tools to regulate yourself, then you can bring it to your partner, your small family circle, and then out into your community and ultimately, right, it expands out into the world and so forth. So know, these practices can be really powerful. We're showing it in the data with these effect sizes. And yeah, it's just, I think, a beautiful way to add to the community and add to your life and wellbeing.

Travis

Yeah, it sounds like we should just get involved in some stuff. Yeah, okay. I mean, just to boil it down to that, go move more, dance more, do things with more people.

Julia

Yeah, move. And it's, I think movement can be really powerful. Yeah.

Travis

What is your favorite dance?

Julia

Well, I'm mostly a contemporary dancer. So, but I, you know, I love to throw myself into all kinds of dances. I'll try hip hop, you know, I've done ballet and jazz and tap and all that. But yeah, if you have me improvise, I definitely will be doing contemporary. Yeah, postmodern.

Travis

Thanks to Julia for helping us better understand mind-body movement. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.