Dancing Together Is Chemically Different From Dancing Alone
Or how music sounds and feels better with you
I spoke recently with Ina Fischer – DJ, radio host and someone who has spent years thinking about what happens in rooms where music is playing.
Talking to her got me thinking about something we all know but perhaps haven’t stopped to examine: we feel music, it does something to us. But do we know what’s actually happening?
Music and pain relief
Here’s the first surprising one. Music doesn’t just distract you from pain – it physically reduces it.
A meta-analysis of 97 studies found that music interventions had statistically significant effects on pain, reducing scores by an average of 1.13 points on a 0-10 scale, decreasing emotional distress, and even reducing opioid intake in clinical settings. A single music therapy session can reduce pain by an average of 2 units on the same scale, alongside decreases in anxiety (2.80 units) and stress (3.48 units).
The mechanism isn’t just psychological. Sound induces analgesia through corticothalamic circuits – meaning loud music (even just slightly louder than background noise) can reduce pain sensitivity at a neurological level. The effects last well beyond the sound itself.
Well-calibrated soundsystems don’t just set a mood; they change how people feel in their bodies.
Dancing together is chemically different from dancing alone
Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, described something he called “collective effervescence” in 1912 – the heightened feeling of energy, euphoria, harmony, and unity that arises when people engage in group activities. He observed that collective dancing and music work people into a kind of ecstatic state that’s qualitatively different from anything you can experience alone.
Artists had been circling this idea for a while. Aldous Huxley, writing Brave New World in 1932, imagined Solidarity Services – engineered communal music and movement designed to dissolve individual identity into collective euphoria. Synthetic music, synchronised bodies, a room full of people temporarily free of themselves. He meant it as a warning about control and manufactured consent. But anyone who’s been on a good dance floor knows he was also just describing what happens when the music is right and the room is full.
The science eventually caught up with both of them. When we dance in synchrony with others, our brains release endorphins – the same chemicals involved in social bonding, laughter, and physical exercise. Research by Tarr, Launay, and Dunbar (2016) found that synchronised dancing elevates pain thresholds and increases feelings of social closeness – we become, briefly, one unit.
More recently, a 2024 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that collective effervescence at live music events leads to lasting positive outcomes – not just in the moment, but in how people feel about themselves and their connection to others days afterward.
I think this is partly what Ina was intuitively describing when she talked about music as community – metaphor and chemistry.
Music and identity
She talked about what it means to be a FLINTA artist in a space built around male schedules, male networks, male aesthetics. Music communities, like all communities, can replicate the exclusions of the wider world. But at their best, they don’t.
At their best, music communities do what Durkheim described: they create collective effervescence. They temporarily dissolve the things that separate us. The dance floor, as Ina described it, is one of the few spaces where who you are outside the room matters less than what you’re feeling inside it.
This is what the science is pointing at too. Music doesn’t just affect individuals. It affects how we relate to each other. It literally changes our neurochemistry in ways that make us more connected, more open, more ourselves.
Music and memory
Have you ever heard a song and been transported? Not just reminded of something, but actually there – the smell, the feeling, the specific quality of the light?
This happens because music encodes memories differently from other stimuli. The amygdala (emotional processing) and hippocampus (memory formation) are both heavily activated by music, meaning musical memories are stored with emotional intensity that other memories simply aren’t.
This is why the playlist linked at the end works in the way it does for me and hopefully you too! These aren’t just songs. They’re pockets of time. The late 90s euphoria of Fatboy Slim and New Radicals. The UK garage warmth of Artful Dodger and Sweet Female Attitude. The French house precision of Daft Punk and Stardust. Each pocket pulls you somewhere specific.
Affective encoding – the process by which emotionally significant events are stored more vividly – means that music you heard at formative moments in your life is neurologically harder to forget than almost anything else. It’s why your aunty still knows every word to songs from 1987 even if she can’t remember what she had for breakfast.
Music and performance
There’s a reason elite athletes use music. Not just to pump themselves up, but because music genuinely improves performance.
Research by Costas Karageorghis at Brunel University has shown that music reduces perceived exertion during exercise by up to 12%, increases endurance, improves mood, and synchronises movement to rhythm in ways that make effort feel easier.
The tempo matters. Higher BPM during cardio. More complex rhythms for skill-based work. But beyond tempo, the association matters too. A song that means something to you will outperform a perfectly calibrated BPM every time.
This is why the playlist is organised by vibes rather than (just) tempo. Inspired by Ina, I tried to build ebb and flow, to feel pumped, and provide space to breathe rather than (just) stack banger after banger after…
The playlist
Pockets of vibes rather than one speed, one tempo, one style. Late 80s through the 90s and 00s, with one track from 2022/23 that was huge for me personally.
Late 90s euphoria: Fatboy Slim, New Radicals, Cornershop, Stardust, Jamiroquai, CeCe Peniston, Daft Punk. French house and big beat dominated UK charts between 1997-2001. Fatboy Slim’s Praise You reached number one in the UK in January 1999 and the video – shot guerrilla-style in a Los Angeles shopping mall with a fictional dance troupe – became one of the most celebrated in music history. The genre was built in bedrooms and warehouses and somehow ended up everywhere.
UK garage and 2-step: Artful Dodger, Sweet Female Attitude, B15 Project, 3 Of A Kind, DJ Luck & MC Neat, Double 99, Shanks & Bigfoot. UK garage emerged from South London in the mid-90s as a distinctly British mutation of American house and R&B. At its peak between 1999-2002 it was the sound of a generation – Artful Dodger’s Re-Rewind spent 18 weeks in the UK top 40 and helped launch Craig David’s career. It’s been quietly influential on almost every genre that followed.
Drum & bass and UK dance: SHY FX, DJ Fresh, Shakedown, T2. T2’s Heartbroken (2007) reached number two in the UK charts and remains one of the most emotionally direct records the genre ever produced. SHY FX has been making music since 1992 and is still one of the most respected producers in British dance music.
Later and deeper: Kid Cudi (Crookers Remix), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (A-Trak Remix), Maniba – Hesitate. Hesitate by Maniba was a huge tune for me personally in 2023. Sometimes a track just arrives at exactly the right moment. This was one of those.
Set your cross-fader to seven seconds or more or even give the “mix” function on Spotify a go to get some incremental gains from your enjoyment!
Your turn: what are the songs that transport you? What’s in your pocket of vibes? Reply and let me know!
F&T podcast
F&T episodes go out weekly, this week’s is with Ina La Berlina of The Lawaii Collective. Here’s how to keep up:
Spotify and Apple Podcasts (audio only) on Wednesday evenings and
YouTube on Thursday mornings.
If you’ve enjoyed the show, do leave a like, comment or five star review.
If you can do this, I promise to keep doing my best to bring you the most thoughtful, silly, serious, and soul-searching conversations about what it means to feel fit and well in the world we live in.
And that’s it from me!
Much love and I’ll see yas in the next one
J x
References
Hole, J., et al. (2015). “Music as an aid for postoperative recovery in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” The Lancet, 386(10004), 1659-1671.
Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R.I.M. (2016). “Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness.” Evolution and Human Behavior, 37(5), 343-348.
Durkheim, É. (1912). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press.
Weinstein, D., et al. (2024). “Collective effervescence at live music events.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Karageorghis, C.I., & Priest, D.L. (2012). “Music in the exercise domain: a review and synthesis.” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 5(1), 44-66.
Peng, W., et al. (2020). “Regulation of sleep homeostasis mediator adenosine by basal forebrain glutamatergic neurons.” Science, 369(6508).