At the recent Olympic games opening ceremony, a troupe of 80 Moulin Rouge dancers performed with verve and vigor the iconic French can-can. The crowd went wild. They loved it. And who wouldn’t?

I wonder why people have since time immemorial taken to dancing. There is no culture in the world that does not have some form of music, dance, and singing. They are inseparable. Music is assumed to have originated concurrently with language, around 150,000 years ago.

There is evidence now that the impulse to dance may have existed already in early primates before they evolved into humans, as demonstrated by Prof. Yuko Hattori, at Kyoto University. Hattori played a repetitive piano note attempting to teach a chimpanzee in her lab to keep a beat. The chimp would try to tap out the rhythm on a small electronic keyboard in hopes of receiving a reward. This went as planned. However, to every one’s surprise, in the next room, another chimpanzee heard the beat and began to sway his body back and forth, almost as if he were dancing. "I was shocked," Hattori says. "I did not expect that without any training or reward, a chimpanzee would spontaneously engage with the sound by dancing".

What is it about music that makes us want to move in response to the beat, and what happens in our brains when we do so? Music stimulates the brain’s reward centers, while dance activates its sensory and motor circuits. Concurrently the limbic system which is involved in emotion processing triggers the release of feel-good hormones, such as endorphin, oxytocin and dopamine, while the cerebellum integrates input from the........

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