Scientific Shimmy: Why we Dance

Chances are, you’ve used the Internet today. Whether you’re at work, doing some on-line banking, checking social media, or indeed reading this text, you’re connected to the online world. But over half of everyone on the globe doesn’t have access to the internet. And the growth of people coming online has slowed down according to a new report, with affordability sighted as a major blockade to progress.

To learn more Izzie Clarke spoke to tech guru and Angel Investor Peter Cowley to find out about the spread of Internet accesss...

Peter - Yes. It’s spread, of course, as you’d expect, in the developed world more. To give you some idea of the numbers, something like 98 percent of people are online in Iceland, about 85 to 90 percent in Australia, South Africa, US, and 75 percent in Japan but only 1.2 percent in Eritrea. So the actual access in Sub-Saharan Africa is going to be low digits, and the Un expected that to get to 100 percent by 2020. At the moment it’s still under 50 percent.

The reason these reports came out and we’re talking about this is because it’s actually slowing down, so it’s only about 6 percent a year. So the chances of it getting to 100 percent inside 30 to 40 years is pretty impossible. Where internet access is actually classed as somebody having access once every three months so, compared with us, the people in this studio for instance and the people listening that’s a tiny fraction.

Izzie - Why is access important though?

Peter - I think we all know that, as listeners to this programme, there’s all kinds of things that you can’t really do nowadays without some sort of internet access. Whether that’s education - not all education of course, but payments, booking tickets, etc. There is a study that actually deduced that for every 10 percent increase in internet access it’s linked to a 1.35 increase in GDP, so turning developing countries into developed internet access obviously contributes a tremendous amount.

Izzie - Why isn’t everyone online?

Peter - There are social things, certainly in the Sub-Saharan in Africa which is being concentrated on this report because women are not allowed to spend money on that. There’s obviously is a completely different dynamic between men and women in those countries, so having an asset isn’t allowed. A lot of the technological, the biggest issue, of course, is affordability. The cost of putting a mobile infrastructure in place in order to give access over the wireless, because you can't have copper in the ground for these sort of countries, is that there isn’t enough income coming in from those users to provide that. So what’s happens about that, basically, it’s got to be done with some sort of aid from other countries, which then leads to issues with other countries having control over these developing countries and all the political effects of that.

Izzie - Well, that’s what I was going to ask. What can be done? Is something happening to change all of that?

Peter -  Yeah. There’s assistance with things like regulation, with providing funding for submarine cables to some of these countries, etc. But there are two interesting technical projects here: one is called the Google Project Loon, which is very thing balloons sitting above an area at this 20 kilometer point where they move around slowly but not too fast, and they transmit from the ground up to the balloons and back down again - that’s one project. And then, of course, Elon Musk is doing this with spaceX he’s doing something and he’s put up many thousands of moving satellites which would float around the world at about 700 miles, 1100 kilometres above Earth, all interconnected. These two projects, of course, are being funded at the moment by the big tech giants but, in time, will be taken over and that will make a massive difference because half the population, 3.8 billion people, are not yet connected.

Izzie - So how important is universal internet access then? Does everyone need to be online essentially?

Peter - Well no. In fact, one of my children lives in Geneva and he’s got a group of friends who refuse point blank to be online, so they have smartphones without any data access, they use just voice and text messages. If you think of what’s happening in terms of many things you actually need, if you want to book an airline ticket with one of the cheaper carriers you’ve got to have internet access. It helps with payments, particularly in developing countries, which then helps with trade. It helps with people moving vegetables and fruit around the place. There’s a huge number of reasons why internet access is actually beneficial.

It has downsides, of course, as well, like with fake news.

Izzie - And so I guess, very quickly, is internet access even affecting our behaviour? I know there have been things about negatively, but also positively. I would imagine, like you said, if you could improve something like agriculture then internet access would be incredibly important towards behaviour?

Peter - Yeah. Payments, transactions, media consumption if that matters. Social interaction for people in some places it makes a massive difference. News, education. The downsides are addiction, which does occur. Fake news, attention span being shortened. Physical human interaction becoming less important. Is that good for the globe? Not sure it is. And, of course, lack of trust, that’s the big one. People are not necessarily trusting things that they meet on the internet.

In 2016 there was an unexpected and unprecedented mass bleaching of the coral reefs around the world due to rising sea temperatures leading to losing huge amounts of our coral reefs. Coincidentally, at this time, a team of researchers were in the process of studying butterfly fish who are sensitive to changes in the reef. The timing meant that they were able to determine the effect of coral bleaching on these reef inhabitants. Tamsin Bell spoke with Dr Sally Keith from Lancaster University who explores how aquatic species respond to environmental change by studying fishy behaviour in coral reefs. Sally, who led the research, started by explaining the process of coral bleaching...

Sally - The water gets too hot and the corals expel the algae that live inside them, and this is what makes them turn a white colour, so it’s called bleaching because the corals go white. And this doesn’t mean they’re dead at that point so sometimes they can recover if the temperatures are not high for too long but, unfortunately, sometimes it can also cause them to die. And this one in 2016 was the biggest one in recorded history and we had very high coral death after that event.

What we wanted to look at was specifically butterfly fishes. They’re very brightly coloured fish that eat corals so they’re very very dependent on the health of the reef, and we wanted to understand how their behaviour was changing in response to environmental change.

Tamsin - How have you been studying these fish?

Sally - I’ve spent a lot of time underwater for the last few years watching fish. About 600 hours across 17 different reefs in the central Indo-Pacific region. We’re generally on snorkel with a clipboard and a bit of waterproof paper and a pencil, and we watch a fish for five minutes and we record any other fish that are also butterfly fish that come within one metre of it. At that point we say that there’s been an encounter, and we got a total of 5,259 encounters recorded between individuals, and that was across 38 different species of fish.

Now that encounter can go one of two ways; either they don’t care that the other one’s there so it’s passive, there’s no response, or they can get very very angry and chase the other individual away and so that indicates aggression. And the reason they do that is because they’re defending their corals that they want to eat in their territory from this other individual.

Tamsin - I see. So from all this work you’ve done, what have you found?

Sally - Before bleaching happened, when we were watching these fish 15 percent of their interactions were aggressive, so fairly often they ended up chasing each other when they came into contact. But after the bleaching, we had a two thirds decrease in aggression, so it was only every 1 in 20 times they met each other that they chased. And what we think has happened is that because the most nutritious corals are gone first, they’ve gone past the point of being ‘hangry’ so, originally, when the resource starts to reduce they get more aggressive. They’ve gone past that point now, where there’s so little for them to eat that they just don’t have the energy to invest in fighting.

Tamsin - Oh wow! So they just can’t be bothered?

Sally - Exactly.

Tamsin - So what implications does this have?

Sally - It’s really demonstrating a sort of intermediate mechanism. So we know that after about 5 years or 7 years after bleaching we tend to have fewer fish individuals on a reef, but we don’t really know the process of how that happens, and so it seems like this change in behaviour might indicate to us what’s going on. And so, if they don’t have the energy to invest in fighting, and that’s because they’re eating a less nutritious diet, it means either they might end up starving over time because they’ve got enough food to keep going for a little while but not to keep surviving in the long term.

The other possibility is that, although they’ve got enough energy to survive themselves, they don’t have enough energy to produce the next generation of fish. And because these fish have quite a short lifespan that might explain why we have this time lag, so it’s really trying to get at the underlying mechanism that’s driving the ultimate reduction in fish numbers.

We know what looks good when we’re watching dancers, but why do we bother doing it in the first place? Where did it come from and how linked is it to music? Georgia Mills spoke to Ian Cross, Professor of Music at Cambridge University to learn about the evolution of dance...

Ian - Probably the same reason that language evolved: to enable us to engage with each other, and primarily to engage with each other socially.

Georgia - Do we know when it came?

Ian - No, we really don’t. It’s unlikely to have happened before we became particularly bipedals, so it’s going to be post-australopithecine.

Georgia - I do like the idea of apes in trees sort of jigging around.

Ian - Well, interesting you should say that. Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t really believe any of the evidence that suggested that chimpanzees could keep in time with each other until I saw some material from the Kyoto Primate Lab in Japan, which showed pretty unambiguously that chimps can tap along in time with each other. In other words, chimps could do something like dance with each other but, only if they’re good mates or they’re related.

Georgia - Right. They don’t want to dance with strangers then?

Ian - No.

Georgia - Just like most of us.

Ian - And that’s probably the difference between them and us that we can dance with strangers. There’s some very interesting ethnographic evidence; for instance when the first fleet landed in Botany Bay in Australia in 1788 - sorry, invaded Australia - more or less the first thing that happened was that some of the sailors danced with some of the indigenous peoples.

Georgia - You mentioned we think that dance evolved because of a social thing, is there anything else it might be good for and has anyone done these studies into this?

Ian - We did a study about three or four years ago where we looked at people dancing together and the effect that that had on memory. We used silent disco technology to enable us to have two groups of people dancing in the same space but to different pieces of music. Silent disco technology, for those who don’t know - wireless headphones with a base station. The base station can broadcast the music, and you’ve usually got two or three or maybe half a dozen different channels on the base station. We used two different channels, two different pieces of music, so half the people were dancing to one piece and half were dancing to a different piece at a different tempo, different speed.

Georgia - And what effect did that have on people's memory did you say?

Ian - Well, what we did is control the ways in which they could interact with each other. So everyone spent as much time in proximity to people dancing at the same tempo as dancing at the different tempo. People were wearing different coloured sashes and half of them were wearing badges. What we found was that people remembered the colour of the sashes that people dancing to the same tempo were wearing, and remembered whether or not people dancing to the same tempo were wearing badges. But didn’t remember nearly so well when they were dancing to a different tempo.

Georgia - So dancing might actually help us remember things about the people we're dancing with? Why would that be a good thing evolutionary speaking?

Ian - Well, what you are remembering are incidental features; features that are not focally attended to. It’s pretty good just to check up, “can I cope with this person? Can I engage with this person? Will I be able to communicate with this person?”. And if you add another layer to it then, of course, the whole sex thing comes into it. But we’re talking about a level here way below that which is just general sociality.

Georgia - I see. So you’re having a nice dance with someone, maybe had a bit to drink and you dance really well with them. But then, who were they? And then you remember what colour sash they had on.

Ian - That could be one aspect. Some other research has shown we’re more likely to like people we have been in time with than people we’ve been out of time with.

Georgia - I guess that’s similar to how they make people do marching together for armies and things. It’s very important, isn’t it?

Ian - Yeah. It is a process of bonding. At that level, to distinguish between music and dance becomes a bit silly because in most world cultures they are the same thing.

Georgia - I was going to ask about that because music is another thing that’s very linked with dancing, and you say that they’re sort of the same in many cultures?

Ian - Yeah, absolutely. And in many respects the same in this culture. In Nigeria, for instance, in Igbo what we might think of as music is “nkwa”, which is music, singing, dancing and having a good time.

Georgia - Right. So they’re all one word?

Ian - Yeah.

Georgia - That’s a lovely word.

Ian - It is. And it’s a much more sensible word than music, which kind of partitions out an area of human experience, or dance which again partitions our another area, which are closely linked.

Georgia - Do we know what happens in a brain when a great tune comes on, and your foot starts tapping away and you just want to have a boogy? What’s going on inside our minds to cause this reaction?

Ian - One of the interesting things that happens when we hear music is that the bit of the brain that’s involved for planning for action, the supplementary motor area, there’s activation. The supplementary motor area; there’s activation. A meter analysis of all the studies that have looked at people just listening to music in a scanner showed that one area that was consistently activated was the supplementary motor area. So you could say that a response to listening to music is to prepare to move.

Dance can be a great help to many people, including the elderly. But what do programmes like this look like, and what kind of help do they offer. At Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, the Dance for Health Programme does just that. Debra Quartermaine is the Falls Prevention Co-ordinator and the Coordinator for the Dance for Health Program in Addenbrooke’s joined Georgia Mills and took her through how the programme started.

Debra - I am a dancer by background as well as a nurse, and in 2013 I had a conversation with our Arts Department,to see whether we could bring dance into the hospital for patients. There’s a lot in the community but not within a hospital setting. So our Charitable Trust funded us a pilot program, which was incredibly successful and it’s carried on from there. And back in 2017, we were lucky enough to get two years funding from the Dunhill Medical Trust, and part of that was to do research on the program as well. So we’re nearing the end of that but it’s gone down very well and has had some very positive results.

Georgia - Can you talk me through what a typical session might look like then?

Debra - There is never really a typical session. To bear with, we are actually dealing with very sick patients here so it’s very patient led. We have a skeletal structure which is a warm up, and then improvisation, and then a relaxation session at the end of it. But it very much depends on the patients that come in, what their abilities are, and what they would like to do.

Georgia - I see. So are there any sort of moves that you could teach us now in the studio.

Debra - We do start off with trying to ground people by making sure they’ve got their feet both on the floor if they can. And just put your hands on your thighs and just literally very slowly moving your hands up and down your thighs.

Georgia - Okay. I feel like Vic Reeves here.

Debra - I know that sounds very strange but we’re looking at people’s proprioception, so do they know where their hands are, do they know where their legs are?

Georgia - Right. And is that a good indicator of their wellbeing?

Debra - Well, it’s an indicator that they know where the position of their body is. So if I was to blindfold you, you would know where your hands are. You’d know whether they were above your head, or hanging down by the side. Some people, if they have a neurological disorder don’t know that so we’re trying to judge what we need to work with with those patients.

Georgia - I see. And is it also an advantage some people being less mobile so you don’t need to do a conga line, you can do it from a seating position?

Debra - Yes. A lot of ours are seated. We can stand up, but sometimes we are working with getting patients to stand and that will often take two of us to do that, and then getting them to dance while they’re standing up. There is never one session the same. It’s incredibly interesting to walk in. And the one thing we do always say is we don’t want to know what the diagnosis of the patient is, we are purely working from looking at their body and listening to them.

Georgia - And why dance instead of just the regular physio?

Debra - Physio is very prescriptive. So, you know, you need to bend this arm ten times and it’s quite boring. How many of us really like to go to the gym?

Georgia - Not me! I’ll say straight away.

Debra - And obviously, at the moment, we’re dealing with the elderly so it’s an age group that are very used to dancing. They often met their partners at dance halls, spent Saturday nights at dance halls. They don’t see it as a form of exercise, they see it as a form of enjoyment.

Georgia - And you mentioned you’re researching the effectiveness, so what have you found so far? How effective has it been?

Debra - Part of the research that’s been going on is looking at wellbeing. And the preliminary results from that is showing that over 70 percent of the patients who attend the sessions have an improvement of their wellbeing from the beginning to the end of the sessions.

Georgia - Right. So that’s quite positive. Individually, have people been reporting they’ve found benefits?

Debra - We have. We’ve had a very interesting case not long ago where we’d had a gentleman who’d been in the hospital for quite a number of months who’d basically given up. He wouldn’t engage in physiotherapy; he wasn’t getting out of bed; he wasn’t eating very well, and he was heading towards a nursing home, which would have split him up from his wife. We managed to get him into the session; he started to engage. After a couple of weeks he was bringing in his playlist of music that he wanted. He was then starting to ask when his physiotherapy sessions were. And we kept working with him, together with the physiotherapists doing their bits as well, and we got him home.

Georgia - Wow, that’s fantastic! The power of dance. So are people, in general, when they hear they’re going to be dancing around, are they excited are or they a bit skeptical at first?

Debra - We’ve had to sort of use the word ‘movement’ rather than dance with a lot of people because they have a vision of Strictly. Getting up and having to learn steps.

Georgia - Wearing a sequined suit.

Debra - Yep. and that’s definitely not what it’s about. It’s things like we had a gentleman and his wife was in visiting and they used to ballroom dance, but they hadn’t been able to dance for six months because he could no longer stand. We managed to get him up and put a piece of lovely waltz music on and allow him to dance with his wife. Two of us supported him while he held his wife and danced with her, and I think that was worth a million pounds to see that.

Georgia - That’s beautiful. Are there any other programs like this?

Debra - No, this is unique. There are dance programs where performers go into hospitals and do performances. But our program is not around that so it’s a very unique program. There’s no other hospital in the UK doing it. We don’t think there’s any other hospital in the world doing it.

Georgia - Right. And so what is next then? Spread the good word, I guess.

Debra - Well, we’re now looking for more funding. We’d like to extend the program; we’d like to continue with what we’re doing but extend it. We’d like to work with different groups of patients so orthopedics, transplant, all of those sorts of things.