JUGGLING boosts connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of “white matter” – a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.
White matter in the brain contains mostly axons – 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…
