Practicing a task like juggling that requires you to focus your vision and your movement actually increases the amount of white matter in your noggin.

This is the result of research from the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, UK. They used a technique known as diffusion MRI to test for changes in the brain before and after a group of 24 young people learned to juggle over six weeks, and the paper is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Changes in grey matter of the brain had already been seen in similar studies, but the white matter is the stuff that matters – it passes the information between bits of grey matter. Increases in white matter are a previously unobserved phenomena, the authors claim. In their study, white matter increased by 5% after the juggling novices had mastered their task.

Juggling isn’t important other than to illustrate the point Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, tells the BBC, the changes they see might apply to any other task that needs to be learned. The AFP suggest the work proves that juggling rewires the brain and the excitement has spread to the British tabloids, (Daily Mirror) which are advocating juggling to increase brain power, which isn’t necessarily the message to take from the study, rather that white matter changes were spotted.

Anyway, I’m off to join the circus.

Image: Photo by dpadua via Flickr under creative commons.