Balancing Your Juggling Act

You may not realize it, but juggling all this newspaper’s different sections and subjects with your hands, even the plethora of grocery coupons and Laker stories, may actually make you smarter. Or at least make your brain fuller. Maybe better. According to a recent study detailed in the journal Nature, juggling -- as in learning to toss and catch three or more balls, batons or hats with but two hands -- actually causes physical changes in the adult brain.

German researchers at the University of Regensburg took brain image scans of non-juggling volunteers, presumably normal. Then researchers taught the volunteers how to juggle. Stand back, that would have been fun to watch. Three months later they scanned the brains again.

Lo and behold, they discovered in those volunteer heads new gray matter, tightly packed nerve cells, in areas associated with advanced mental functions. No one scanned the researchers’ brains to see why they were doing this. But Arne May, the research chief, found the data exciting. “Results challenge our view of the human central nervous system,” he said. “Human brains probably must be viewed as dynamic, changing with development and normal learning.” Isn’t this what most parents instinctively dream of without a formal study? Or else they’d end up selling every kid at age 13.

Could it help on future SATs if you start your 7-year-old juggling dishes every morning before school? That’d be too simple. Also expensive replacing dishes for years. But wait! If simply tossing bowling pins up and catching them makes you noticeably smarter on brain scans, what do you suppose are the effects of juggling other things?

We all do that. How much larger are the brains of working couples juggling job and family every hour of every weekday? We juggle friendships and work demands. We juggle income and outgo. Are moms and dads becoming measurably smarter racing from one child’s soccer game across town to the other child’s recital? Do the smarts outweigh the extra production of anxious stomach juices? Could baseball managers juggling lineups finally figure out why their clubs pay 2-8 pitchers so much? And what about all these studies on eating healthy? Can we get smarter at juggling doughnuts and celery?