Mental push-ups, anyone?

• Author: Harmon, Amy
• Position: Science - Brief Article

If you pump iron with regularity, your arms may took a little more muscular. The right kind of training, it now appears, can do the same for the brain, though the enlargement can be shown off only to observers with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. In a recent study by scientists in Germany, people who spent three months learning to juggle showed enlargement of part of the cerebral, cortex, the sheet of nerve cells on the brain's surface where most higher thought processes seem to be handled. They were then asked to quit juggling, and the same areas of the cortex started to shrink. The finding is similar...