Juggling Your Priorities, Expanding Your Brain...

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Apparently juggling may in fact increase your brainpower, or at least expand the size of your brain. Medical News Today reports:

A new study published in the journal Nature finds that learning to juggle may cause certain areas of your brain to grow.

The finding challenges conventional wisdom the structure of the brain cannot change except through aging and disease. Previous studies have shown learning can result in changes in brain activity. But this latest study demonstrates an anatomical change as a result of learning — that is, the brain size actually expands.

Discoveries like this have an important secondary purpose, reminding both the scientific community and the general public that the adult human brain is not immutable-save-for-its-inevitable-decline, and that dramatic enhancement of at least some of its functions may be possible using remarkably simple, even prosaic, means. This point is key to encouraging more researchers to look seriously at methods for increasing human abilities -- not merely through the more controversial means of cybernetics, genetic engineering, nootropic drugs and other biotech tools, but through accelerated learning, discipline and/or "enriching new experiences" such as learning to juggle.

The article continues:

German researchers divided 24 non-jugglers into two groups and assigned one group to practice juggling for three months. The scientists performed brain scans on the volunteers using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, before and after they learned to juggle.

The type of MRI scans the researchers used allowed them to focus on structural changes rather than changes in brain activity. Using a sophisticated analysis technique called voxel-based morphology, the researchers were then able to investigate changes in brain gray matter, the area of the brain that consists mostly of the cell bodies of neurons rather than the connective fibers.

The study found that volunteers who did not train to juggle showed no difference in their brain scans over the three-month period. However, those who now acquired the skill demonstrated an increase in gray matter in two areas of the brain involved in visual and motor activity, the mid-temporal area and the posterior intraparietal sulcus.

The study defined increases as growth in volume and greater density of gray matter in those areas, but the nature of the increase is not clear, nor did scientists examine whether neural interconnections had changed in any way. The study also noted that after 3 months of no practice, the original group of jugglers had lost their increased brain size. One question of interest is whether continuing the practice of juggling for a longer period would make the changes permanent.


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