Some really interesting and exciting research has been done to show the positive effect of juggling and the brain’s growth.
Now the brain and the way it works is still a complex mystery to scientists, and even harder to understand in simple terms, but we’ll do our best, because this is really cool stuff.
The white matter consists of long fibers that carry electrical impulses from cell to cell and make up a massive network of lines and junctions. White matter actually looks white, hence the name. Grey matter is the greyish area of the brain that is made up of nerve cells and acts as a conduit for all your sensory and motor stimulus to your interneurons. This means that the grey matter of your brain does all of the processing and computation.
Picture it like this: white matter is like the roadways and railroad tracks that allow vehicles and trains full of information (electrical impulses) to travel around the brain. The grey matter is sort of like the warehouse that takes the information and organizes and makes sense of it all.
And juggling has been shown to increase both grey and white matter in the brain!
Juggling in San Diego, California
Part of this research on juggling and the brain was done by German researchers. They took 24 people who had never juggled and split them into two groups. One group didn’t do any juggling, but the second group practiced juggling for three months.
Each person from each group was given an MRI (a brain scan) before and after juggling. The non-juggling group showed no difference, as expected, but the jugglers showed bigger volume and higher density of grey matter in the brain.
In a second study done in the UK on juggling and the brain, 48 volunteers practiced juggling for 30 minutes a day for 6 weeks, including a juggling lesson each week. Despite whether they mastered juggling in the 6 weeks or how well they were doing by the end of the 6 weeks, each volunteer showed an increase in white matter in several areas of the brain, as well.
All of this means juggling can increase your physical reflexes, as well as your mental reflexes, getting you to think and act quicker. It heightens your peripheral vision, improves coordination and decreases clumsiness, and helps you to think ahead and anticipate cause-and-effect.
According to the study on juggling and the brain, “This provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence for training-related changes in white-matter structure in the healthy human adult brain.”
Since children’s brains are even more malleable, are still forming pathways, taking in information and growing more connections than adults, this might just mean all you young jugglers out there will not only learn faster, but grow your brain’s even bigger than those adults in the studies!
And if juggling can increase the size and density of your brain and helps all these areas of our mind in just 6 weeks, think what it will do as you continue to master the skill over 6 months or several years!
