Complex tasks such as juggling produce significant changes to the structure of the brain and could, in the long term, aid treatments for certain neurological diseases, according to scientists at Oxford University in the UK.
The team from Oxford’s Department of Clinical Neurology says it saw a 5 percent increase in white matter - the cabling network of the brain - on people who had been trained to juggle for six weeks, with brain scans before and after. Changes in grey matter, where the processing and computation in the brain happens, have been shown before, but enhancements in the white matter have not previously been demonstrated.
Professor Cathy Price, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, said: "It’s extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections. This complements other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects."
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