Readers who have been wondering what researchers at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) are up to, need wonder no more: they are juggling. In a bit of science funded by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Oxford neuroscientists took two groups of 24 young people, none of whom could juggle, and gave one group weekly training sessions in juggling and
asked them to practice 30 minutes every day. They other group was not asked to juggle. After six weeks, the brains of people in both groups were scanned with an MRI. A University of Oxford press release reports that the researchers saw changes (in regions of the brain involved
in reaching and grasping in the periphery of vision) in the white
matter of the group that juggled, but not in the brains of those who received no
training. Wait, there's more: After the training, while there was a great variation in the ability of the
volunteers to juggle, changes in white matter were seen in all jugglers, regardless of skill level, suggesting that they are the result of time spent training and practicing rather than the level of
skill attained.
Read more from the University of Oxford.