Great looking headline at BBC News -- “Juggling Increases Brain Power“, about a forthcoming study in Nature Neuroscience, where results indicated a 5% increase in white matter -- the ‘cabling network of the brain’.
The scientists studied a group of 24 healthy young adults, none of whom could juggle. They divided them into two groups.
One of the groups was given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and was asked to practice 30 minutes every day the other 12 continued as normal. After training, the 12 jugglers could perform at least two continuous cycles of the classic three ball cascade…
…At the six week point, a 5% increase in white matter was shown in a rear section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus for the jugglers… The Oxford team said this must be down to the time spent training and practising rather than the level of skill attained.
The famous juggling skills of Michael Moschen is probably not what the average person is going to attain, I must point out!
Naturally, work is still being done on the validity of the study:
Dr Johansen-Berg said there were clinical applications for this work but there were a long way off.
She said: “Knowing that pathways in the brain can be enhanced may be significant in the long run in coming up with new treatments for neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, where these pathways become degraded.” 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 compliments other work showing grey matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects.”
Last year I was asking around if anyone had heard about further research on this topic. In particular, any correlation between juggling and mathematical ability. This was because my Calculus teacher taught us how to juggle in Year 11, saying that it ‘would help us to understand the subject better’.
No idea what gave him that notion, but there’s certainly a lot of mathematics and science involved in juggling, with a few science fairs and lectures, some research (also see the end of this blog entry!), websites on ‘the science of juggling‘ and even books which expand on the applications of juggling:
“There are detailed descriptions of jugglable and attractive juggling sequences, easy zero-gravity juggling, robot juggling, as well as fun juggling of words, anti-balls, and irrational numbers. The book also includes novel, or at least not very well known connections with topics such as bell ringing, knot theory, and the many body problem. In fact, the chapter on mathematical bell ringing has been expanded into the most comprehensive survey in the literature of the mathematics used by bell ringers.”
Oh, the ‘robot juggling’ bit? The late, great ‘father of the information age’ -- Claude Shannon:
When poking about, I discovered this study: ‘Effect of juggling therapy on anxiety disorders in female patients‘ (Nakahara, T., Nakahara, K., Uehara, M., Koyama, K., et al, 2007):
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of juggling therapy for anxiety disorder patients… Depression, anger-hostility scores of POMS were improved more than non-jugglers. In the juggling group, activity scores on the vigor subscale of POMS and FAI score were significantly higher than those in the non juggling group (p < 0.01). Other mood scores of POMS did not differ between the two groups… These findings suggest that juggling therapy may be effective for the treatment of anxiety disorders.
Next I’ll be heading down to the UWA Juggling club and asking if they’d mind helping out with my pool of subjects for a follow up study! I did find that the ‘juggling’ element stemmed from an earlier paper that I remembered seeing in the news -- ‘Changes in gray matter induced by training’ (Dragansky, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G. et al, 2004):
Here we use whole-brain magnetic-resonance imaging to visualize learning-induced plasticity in the brains of volunteers who have learned to juggle. We find that these individuals show a transient and selective structural change in brain areas that are associated with the processing and storage of complex visual motion. This discovery of a stimulus-dependent alteration in the brain’s macroscopic structure contradicts the traditionally held view that cortical plasticity is associated with functional rather than anatomical changes.
Better than a bowling ball in the face, at least. Yet I have found questions about the longevity of any beneficial effects of juggling too, in that same study:
Interestingly, increase in brain size does not last. After three months of no practice, the group that learned to juggle lost their gained brain power and the enhanced brain regions decreased in size.
‘The brain is like a muscle, we need to exercise it,’ says May. While the effects appear to only be transient, the study provides an example of how activity may have growth benefits on the brain.
References:
Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage before 1642. Louis B. Wright Modern Philology, Vol. 24, No. 3. (Feb., 1927), pp. 269-284.
Juggling Drops and Descents Joe Buhler, David Eisenbud, Ron Graham, Colin Wright. The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 101, No. 6 (Jun. -- Jul., 1994), pp. 507-519
Nakahara, T., Nakahara, K., Uehara, M., Koyama, K., Li, K., Harada, T., Yasuhara, D., Taguchi, H., Kojima, S., Sagiyama, K., & Inui, A. (2007). Effect of juggling therapy on anxiety disorders in female patients BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 1 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1751-0759-1-10
Draganski B, Gaser C, Kempermann G, Kuhn HG, Winkler J, Büchel C, & May A (2006). Temporal and spatial dynamics of brain structure changes during extensive learning. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 26 (23), 6314-7 PMID: 16763039
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I remember reading of a study a number of years ago where, if memory serves, they observed a similar thing in musicians. The hypothesis was that this was due to the independent arm/hand/finger movement and co-ordination required to play instruments and get the best out of them.
If my memory is serving me correctly, I feel this study may be along similar lines but with a different subject matter.
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