JUGGLING boosts connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of 鈥渨hite matter鈥� 鈥� a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.
White matter in the brain contains mostly axons 鈥� outgrowths of nerve cells that connect different cells. You might expect that learning a new, complex task such as juggling would strengthen these connections, but previous work had only studied increases in grey matter. When Jan Scholz and his colleagues at the University of Oxford looked at brain scans of new jugglers they found that the 24 young men and women had grown more white matter after six weeks of juggling training. The changes occurred in the parietal lobe 鈥� an area involved in connecting what we see to how we move (Nature Neuroscience, ).
After four more weeks without juggling, the extra white matter remained, suggesting that the change is permanent. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like riding a bike,鈥� Scholz says. 鈥淚t takes training to learn, but once it clicks, you don鈥檛 forget it.鈥�
Advertisement
Learning itself seemed to matter more than the skill attained, because white matter increased similarly in good and bad jugglers. Arne May of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany finds this result 鈥渇ascinating鈥�. 鈥淚t suggests that the brain wants to be puzzled and learn something new,鈥� he says.