How to boost your brain’s functions ;o)

Thought the brain’s functions start slowing down and maybe even declining once adulthood is reached..? Think again )

Here is a statement from the article I read in Medical News Today (12.10.09). It refers to the research done:

“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.”

Great news huh? Well it is. As a matter of fact, the researchers used juggling as the new difficult skill that the volunteers had to learn…and came to the conclusion that “regions of the brain’s white matter that are linked with reaching, grasping and peripheral vision” experienced changes.

“At the end of the training period, the volunteers reached varying levels of juggling skill, but all those who trained and practised showed changes in white matter, suggesting it wasn’t skill attainment that mattered but the time spent training and practising.”

The researchers “hope the study will help develop new treatments for diseases such as MS where central nervous system pathways have become degraded.”

….

“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,” said Johansen-Berg.

But they also concluded that it need not be necessarily juggling what you need to learn in order to boost your brain’s activity = )