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Polina Davidenko was born in the Russian city of Omsk, in Siberia, and moved to the United States with her parents and sister when she was two years old. In 2008, when she was a freshman in high school, her grandmother Nina, still living in Russia, was diagnosed with lymphoma. Neither Davidenko nor her mother could be with her, and the separation weighed on them both. Soon after the diagnosis, Davidenko’s school hosted the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life fundraiser, where community members would walk the track around the high school’s football field for twenty-four consecutive hours. As the American Cancer Society explains, “Cancer patients don’t stop because they’re tired, and for one night, neither do we.” Davidenko decided to participate.
She recalls that the weather that day was perfect, sunny with no wind or rain. During the day, everyone was full of energy and the event felt like a party. Local bands performed on a stage, and the football field was transformed into a campsite, complete with food, tents, and foldout chairs. Davidenko’s parents stopped by during the afternoon to walk a mile with her. After sunset, things got quieter. Walkers decorated white paper bags in tribute to survivors and loved ones lost to cancer, then lit candles in them to turn them into luminaries of hope. Davidenko made one for her grandmother and adorned it with flowers. As the walkers lapped the track in the darkness, they pointed out which luminaries they had made, and Davidenko got to share stories about her grandmother.
“Four A.M. is when the deeper conversations come out,” Davidenko remembers. “When you’re moving and talking, you feel more open to share than when sitting face-to-face. Your inhibitions are down, and you become more open to say things you otherwise wouldn’t. Afterward, you trust people because they saw you in such a vulnerable state.” Sometimes she walked in silence by herself, but even then, she says, “You still feel connected to something bigger than yourself. You’re not just in your own thoughts. You can see the community on the field, playing games, crying, talking. You’re a witness to all of that.” She stopped counting at fifty laps and estimates that she walked twelve miles in the dark. “You notice the fatigue less because of the purpose. I couldn’t walk fifty laps just for fun.”
In the morning, local firefighters cooked a pancake breakfast and served sausages, bagels, and orange juice. Everyone ate together as the organizers made closing comments and thanked the walkers and volunteers. When Davidenko left, her sneakers were coated with the red dust of the football track. She remembers feeling proud of those sneakers and not wanting to wipe the dust off.
Psychologist Bronwyn Tarr told me, “We need things that help us connect with one another, that give us opportunities to forge collectivity.” If we’re lucky, we experience many such moments in everyday life, but it also helps to have special events that draw on the power of moving together. Researchers have studied the effects of participating in charity athletic events like the Relay For Life, and participants routinely describe feeling a collective strength, hope, and optimism. Organizations that host such events could choose any method of fundraising, from rummage sales to auctions, but none have the popular draw of 5Ks, half marathons, and physical challenges like Hustle Chicago, in which thousands of people climb the iconic John Hancock Tower’s ninety-four stories to raise funds for the Respiratory Health Association. Threats on the scale of heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and social injustice can make us feel paralyzed, hopeless, or defeated. Athletic events that acknowledge these collective problems are opportunities to experience one of the antidotes to despair, we-agency. When we take our part in these collective endeavors, the physical movement uplifts us and the community inspires us. Winning the battle suddenly feels possible. It also reminds us that our struggles are shared by others. This was something Polina Davidenko told me. “When you’re suffering from something, you forget that you’re not alone in it. When you see people come together, it reminds you that you aren’t alone.”
Once a year, over a thousand people dance together on the deck of the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier docked in San Diego Harbor. Two hundred thousand sailors served on the USS Midway from 1945 to 1992, when it was deployed for both combat and humanitarian missions. Today the carrier hosts hundreds of military ceremonies and community events each year. One of these events is the annual Jazzercise Dance for Life fundraiser, which in one day raises over a hundred thousand dollars for breast cancer research and support. The event is advertised as a fight against breast cancer. Many of the dancers arrive in groups, wearing matching tank tops with slogans like “Strong alone. Unstoppable together.” Instructors lead participants through dance routines to popular music, a thousand feet simultaneously striking the ship deck with every step. Aerial shots show a swarm of hot-pink-clad bodies moving in unison, suggesting a superorganism rather than a group of individuals. Through their synchronized steps and desire to come together, the dancers have become the impenetrable herd, a swarm defending its own, a throng of selves merged into a powerful we.
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In March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake hit Iwanuma City hard. Half of the coastal city’s land was submerged under tsunami waters, and 180 residents lost their lives. In the aftermath, 15 percent of the population developed symptoms of depression. As part of the city’s recovery, public health officials developed programs to encourage residents to stay physically active. Those who increased their participation in group exercise were less likely to become depressed. Walking alone also had a protective effect, but the benefits of exercising in a group were stronger.
I thought about this in the fall of 2017, when I was in Houston to speak to the Texas Municipal League about resilience. The meeting, which brought together mayors, chiefs of police and fire chiefs, city council members and managers, and directors of public works, parks, and planning, took place on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, one of the worst natural disasters in Texas history. The George R. Brown Convention Center, where the event was taking place, had sheltered thousands of citizens whose homes had been damaged or destroyed by the hurricane.
The afternoon I arrived, I took a walk through downtown toward City Hall, where streets had flooded during the storm. As I walked back to my hotel, I heard music. I followed the sound to Discovery Green Park, where a free Zumba class was taking place across from the convention center. Dozens of dancers clapped and marched on stone tiles, led by a local instructor, Oscar Sajche, who demonstrated the moves from the bandstand. It was hot and humid, and I was already drenched with sweat from my walk. I had a bag full of groceries that needed to be refrigerated, but I hesitated only a moment before dropping my bag on a park chair and joining in.
We danced to all the usual rhythms of a Zumba class: salsa, reggaeton, cumbia, merengue, Pitbull. Some of the participants wore official Zumba tanks and tees, but many looked like me—inappropriately dressed for a workout, but unable to resist a dance party. Strangers smiled at me. People looked happy to be there. As we shimmied and stomped, it occurred to me that the very fact that we were dancing on this spot, so soon after a major natural disaster, was a sign of the city’s resilience. Or maybe the dance party was something else: not so much proof of resilience as a source of resilience. Jacob Devaney, who rebuilt homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, remembers working from sunrise to late into the evenings, each day bringing more reminders and stories of what had been lost. Instead of going home to rest at the end of his shifts, Devaney went dancing in the New Orleans clubs. He attributes his ability to survive that period, without burning out or getting sick, to those early morning hours of collective joy.
When I tracked down the instructor of the outdoor Zumba class on Facebook, I discovered that Sajche had been teaching free community classes in Houston for over a decade. During the initial recovery from Hurricane Harvey, he had posted this message on Facebook: “Enjoy an awesome outdoor class with hundreds of Zumba warriors. We are Houston Strong and getting back on our feet.
” It struck me that offering that class was as much a model of civic engagement as the Municipal League event that had brought me to Houston. When I spoke to the public servants and officials the next day, I talked about purpose and social connection. I acknowledged the service project attendees had participated in the day before, sorting donations for a local food bank. And at the back of my mind, I thought, Maybe I should have scrapped the speech and brought a great playlist.
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HUMAN BEINGS SYNCHRONIZE NATURALLY. Not just our movements, but every aspect of our physiology. When we feel connected to another person, our heartbeats, breathing, and even brain activity fall into step. Groups will often synchronize their movements and breathing even without explicit instructions to do so. People also synchronize with greater accuracy to another person’s slightly irregular beat than to a perfect rhythm generated by a computer. It is as if our biology is tuned to recognize and respond to common humanity. For some people, reducing self-transcendence to a neurological quirk can be deflating. Yet I find myself captivated by the brain’s eagerness to become part of something bigger. We are equipped with a perceptual system ready to abandon the tight confines of our usual sense of self. We were born with brains able to craft a sense of connection to others that is as visceral as the feedback coming from your own heart, lungs, and muscles. That is an astonishing thing, that humans can go about most of our lives, sensing and feeling ourselves as separate, but through one small action—coming together in movement—we dissolve the boundaries that divide us.
Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi uses the word nature-harnessing to describe any cultural invention that can “harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose.” Such inventions become widely popular because they tap into our core instincts. One of my motivations for exploring the research on collective joy was to better understand my love of group exercise. Now, as I reflect on what takes place in those classes, nature-harnessing seems exactly right. Any human who has ever danced around a fire or stomped their feet in some pre-battle ritual would know what to do in an aerobics class. Psychologist Bronwyn Tarr herself has said that if you’re looking to experience collective joy, the most effective way would be “a massive Zumba class.” Group exercise has managed to capitalize on many of the conditions that intensify the benefits of synchronized movement. For example, the more you get your heart rate up, the closer you feel to the people you move in unison with. Adding music has the same enhancing effect. Whether by design or accident, many exercise classes also take advantage of the “close clustering” phenomenon. Maintaining less personal space amplifies the social cohesion felt while moving in synchrony, perhaps because physical closeness further blurs the boundary between self and other. When we’re close enough to smell one another, emotions become more contagious. Did you know that happy sweat has a different odor than ordinary sweat, and that when you smell someone else’s happy sweat, it can elevate your mood, too? The scent of joy released through our pores appears to be culturally universal. Even when you don’t speak the same language—such as when Bronwyn Tarr found herself dancing the carimbó on the island of Marajó—it is possible to be carried away by a collective happiness that you can literally breathe in.
The repetition of simple movements in popular group exercise formats further contributes to collective joy. Analyzing the dance rituals of the Andaman Islanders, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown could discern no obvious artistic value in the steps. “Their function seems to be to bring into activity as many of the muscles of the body as possible,” he wrote. The uniformity and simplicity of movement ensured that the dancers experienced “a pleasure of self-surrender.” Modern aerobics adopts the same strategy to produce a similarly ecstatic experience. When group exercise goes wrong, it’s almost always because the movements are so complicated that the synchrony collapses and the individual falls out of step with the group.
Every decade, the fitness industry reinvents itself. But while the moves and music may change, and new tools—a step, weighted bars, stationary bikes—get added, those of us with decades of step-touches under our leotard belts can tell you that the core experience is the same. Whenever a new group exercise program takes off, it’s often because it added synchrony to a typically unsynchronized physical activity, like boxing (Tae Bo), weight lifting (BodyPump), or cycling (SoulCycle). Remove the trappings of any fitness program at its cultural apex, and you’ll find the same ingredients, the same collective joy. As long as our DNA compels us to connect with others, we will continue to seek out places where we can move and sweat together.
While most people find pleasure in synchronized movement, some people seem especially drawn to move in unison with others. One possible reason has to do with the link between collective joy and cooperation. It turns out that people who have a prosocial orientation to life—that is, they enjoy witnessing other people’s happiness and are motivated to help others who are struggling—synchronize more easily with others. Something in their mindset or biology makes it easier to merge in collective action and lose themselves in the movement. Perhaps this is the final instinct group exercise harnesses: the desire to step outside oneself and to be of some use in the world. That this desire should express itself through synchronized step-touches, squats, and tap-backs may seem strange. Outsiders cannot understand the appeal; this is a joy for which spectatorship falls short. Like any nature-harnessing phenomenon, it doesn’t make sense until you’re in the middle of it. Then suddenly, endorphins flowing and heart pounding, you find it the most reasonable thing in the world. As historian William H. McNeill writes, “Euphoric response to keeping together in time is too deeply implanted in our genes to be exorcized for long. It remains the most powerful way to create and sustain a community that we have at our command.”
Chapter 4
LET YOURSELF BE MOVED
A couple of years ago, I was backstage in a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco, waiting to give the keynote at a conference for technology designers. The opening ceremony before my talk featured a group of Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery. The monks would be building a sand mandala, an intricate, labor-intensive art installation made from colored sands, in the hotel lobby over the three-day event. They were waiting with me backstage, lined up in their red robes, their arms resting under ceremonial gold wraps, hands clasped. As we waited, the sound system blasted music to draw attendees into the ballroom. When the Saint Motel song “Move” came on, I found myself nodding my head, captured by the infectious beat. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a brown leather slip-on loafer tapping the floor to the beat. The monk wearing the loafer caught me watching him and smiled.
In that moment, we were both driven by a powerful instinct: to move when we hear music. Musicologists call this urge groove. For most people, the impulse to synchronize our bodies to a beat is so strong, it takes effort to suppress it. It’s an instinct that shows up early in life. Newborns out of the womb for only forty-eight hours can detect a regular beat. Infants rock their feet to the 4⁄4 meter of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and smile while doing so. That these behaviors emerge before language, walking, or even crawling suggests that the ability to move to music—and enjoy it—is as innate a human capacity as you can find.
Indeed, the brain seems to be hardwired to hear music as an invitation to move. If you listen to music while lying motionless in a brain scanner, scientists will see your motor system light up. Music activates the so-called motor loop of the brain, including the supplementary motor area, which plans movement, the basal ganglia and the putamen, which coordinate movement, and the cerebellum, which controls the timing of movements. The stronger the musical beat or the more you like what you hear, the more feverishly these regions consume fuel. All of this happens even though you remain absolutely still. It’s as if your brain can’t hear music without recruiting the rest of the body. As neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “When listening to
music, we listen with our muscles.” One of the greatest pleasures in life is to give in to this impulse: to sing, to dance, to clap and stomp; to celebrate how notes and chords and lyrics reach inside you; and to surrender to their one command, Let yourself be moved.
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On July 1, 1863, Private Robert Goldthwaite Carter, of Company H of the 22nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, was marching under the hot Pennsylvania sun. That day’s twenty-mile trek would take Carter and his fellow soldiers on a path littered with dead horses, reminders of the Union cavalrymen killed in a battle the previous day. As Carter described in letters, many men suffered heatstroke, and as the afternoon sun peaked, “hundreds were falling exhausted by the roadside.” Just when the regiment was on the verge of being defeated by fatigue, Carter heard bugles and drums in the distance. An unseen regiment marching on a parallel road had begun to play music.
Every weary and footsore soldier, the halt, lame and chafed patriot, played out, exhausted and about to deposit his weary bones by the wayside, gathered inspiration from the sound, took the step, and with renewed courage plodded into camp. . . . Such was the power of music upon the drooping spirits of the rough, bronzed veterans of the gallant old Army of the Potomac.
Many endurance athletes have a similar story of being brought back to life by a well-timed song. Seventy-six-year-old Tucker Andersen, who has run the New York City Marathon almost every year since 1976, told The New York Times about a memorable race when music helped carry him to the finish line. He had just passed the twenty-mile mark, when many runners hit the wall. In the New York City Marathon, that “wall” coincides with crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx, where the throngs of cheering fans thin out. One year, as Andersen entered the Bronx, a teenager leaned out of an apartment window and, as if solely to give Andersen strength, held out a stereo blasting the theme song from Rocky.
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