Dance and the pursuit of happiness

Michael Argyle, who died a few years ago, was one of the great figures in social psychology. His special research interest was the psychology of happiness. In a BBC TV series a few years ago, he proposed some life strategies for the pursuit of happiness. One of them was dancing. He took his own advice and was a member of a Scottish country dancing club in Oxford.

­Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago suggests that 'flow states' are key ingredients both of happiness and creativity. I believe he has written about how ballet dancers in flow states can push their abilities to their limits and beyond.

I'm very aware of my flow states in ballet class - and sometimes my lack of them. If I'm fortunate, I'm 'in the zone'. But sometimes I know almost as soon as I make my first deep plie that my body won't take me to 'the zone' that day - and that willing it won't make it so.

An academic at Imperial College is working on a project intended to help professional dancers improve their performances. Several years ago Dr Tobias Egner discovered that music students could improve their performances by an average of up to 17 per cent, using a process known as neurofeedback, first piloted with sufferers from attention deficit disorder and epilepsy. Apparently the music students were helped first to monitor their own brainwaves and then to control them.

While I've forgotten the details, but I think the dance phase of the research was being conducted with a company based in Vienna. I must try and find out more.

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