Juggling Boosts Brain Connections

Researchers the UK found that learning to juggle boosts brain connections by making structural changes in the white matter of the brain. They hope the study will help develop new treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis where central nervous system pathways have become degraded.

The study was led by Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford and was published online ahead of print on 11 October in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Johansen-Berg told the media that:

"We tend to think of the brain as being static, or even beginning to degenerate, once we reach adulthood."

"In fact we find the structure of the brain is ripe for change. We've shown that it is possible for the brain to condition its own wiring system to operate more efficiently," she added.

Our brains' white matter contains bundles of long fibres that carry electrical impulses from nerve cell to nerve cell. It is a massive and dense network of lines and junctions. In contrast our brains' grey matter comprises mostly nerve cell bodies and busies itself with processing and computation.

Full story: here