| Volume 38 #5 | March/April 2022 | |
Dancing is my health care plan. My model for a long life is to keep moving and have low stress.
Dancing – moving to music – provides effortless motivation and accomplishes both factors.
I have frequently Scottish danced the
Donut Run
playlist of 22 dances traveling 5500 pedometer steps in one hour for continuous movement to a recording of beautiful Scottish dance music. Movement at 90 steps/minute is more aerobic compared with an average 40 steps/minute for a typical Scottish dance class. The learned dances are danced without a brief and require memorizing
the
dance list and choreography.
I solo dance three-couple dances in a four-couple set as
1st couple, 1st couple, 3rd couple, 2nd couple, playing music four times each dance. I dance the Man or Woman role each session for variety. With practice I am able to minimize choreography memory lapses.
I initially followed a printed 22-dance list as a reminder. I viewed an online memory recall course and learned the
Sun List association method to memorize the dance list. According to the course and the metalearning book
Limitless by Jim Kwik,
association is the key to memory and to all of learning. In order to learn any new piece of information,
it must be associated with something you already know. The more you know, the easier it is to make associations.
We first learn the Sun List words related to numbers from 1 thru 21 that stimulate forming mental images with the emotional side of the brain. The table displays the Dance List of 22 titles, the Sun List words, and my personal
Memory Associations of the Dance List and Sun List items as examples. The Memory Associations relate to my personal knowledge of some of the dances; another person would imagine their own set of Memory Associations.
The Harvey Mudd College Alumni Association hosted a Virtual Donut Run event during April 2021 with the goal to complete 8.5 miles, the distance from Harvey Mudd College to The Donut Man bakery – one way. I explored the goal to dance the distance in our dining room with three folk dance forms and I Scottish danced over 2.5 miles in one hour.
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