Learning to Juggle Helps the Adult Brain

It’s a great party trick and useful for clowns, but scientists say that learning to juggle can cause changes in areas of the adult brain. Mastering the skill increases the amount of grey matter in areas of the brain that process and store visual information, proving what was not thought possible — that new stimuli can alter the brain’s structure. A comparison of brain-imaging scans of non-jugglers and other volunteers before they learned to juggle and three months later revealed an increase in grey matter in certain areas of the newly trained jugglers’ brains.