Clubbing is good for your health, according to neuroscientists

Can hav­ing a rager actu­al­ly be good for you? It might be hard to com­pre­hend while strug­gling through the Tues­day after with lim­it­ed sero­tonin, but accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists, hit­ting the club and danc­ing all night to music while sur­round­ed by oth­ers can have a pos­i­tive impact on our wellbeing.

The impact that dance music has on the human mind is the sub­ject of We Become One – a new 60-minute doc­u­men­tary from Alpha­Theta, which has been released today, April 2.

The film is led by Lon­don-born, now Berlin-based DJ Kikelo­mo, who speaks to neu­ro­sci­en­tists and experts about the effects that lis­ten­ing to dance music can have on the human brain.

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In the film, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Levin explains to her that dance music can help the brain reach a dif­fer­ent state – a flow state – that can be dif­fi­cult to reach in dai­ly life.

He asks: ​“Why are they send­ing out elec­tric­i­ty? They’re try­ing to spur the pro­duc­tion and release of dif­fer­ent chem­i­cals. These dif­fer­ent brain states char­ac­terise dif­fer­ent states of consciousness.”

“There’s this thing called the flow state, and it’s char­ac­terised by focused atten­tion, a loss of a sense of self, a loss of a sense of time, and, real­ly, the focused atten­tion is a spe­cial kind where you’re not real­ly aware of your­self or what you’re doing,” he continues.

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“You’re out­side your­self, and elec­tron­ic music is real­ly great at induc­ing it, which is why so many raves and so many par­ties and even ther­a­peu­tic uses of music involve the repet­i­tive­ness. That rep­e­ti­tion allows you to enter a med­i­ta­tive state, and you can close off the inner chat­ter of your brain and the inner dia­logue and just be, and when you can relax into that state of here and now, that’s when the trance can come.”

It’s a sen­ti­ment echoed by Dr Julia C. Bas­so, neu­ro­sci­en­tist and direc­tor of the Embod­ied Brain Lab, who explains that when peo­ple dance with oth­ers, it cre­ates a feel­ing of uni­ty among those shar­ing a dance­floor. ​“That whole social net­work of brain areas is light­ing up, fir­ing togeth­er, so there’s a lot of inter-brain syn­chrony that’s happening.”

Apart from sci­en­tists, We Become One also sees Kikelo­mo speak to long­time DJs and pro­duc­ers includ­ing Detroit leg­ends Moody­mann and Seth Trox­ler, explor­ing how music has the pow­er to bring peo­ple from far-flung places and back­grounds together.

Watch We Become One via Alpha­Theta and Pio­neer DJ’s YouTube channel.

Zahra Onsori is a free­lance jour­nal­ist. Fol­low her on Insta­gram.

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