14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study has demonstrated that people engaging in complex tasks experience a significant increase in brain power, as well as a reshaping of some of the circuitry at work in the cortex. The science team, based at the Oxford University, reported the find in the latest issue of the respected journal Nature Neuroscience, the BBC News informs.
The investigation revealed that people undertaking complex tasks exhibited a white-matter increase of up to five percent, over a period of just six weeks. The type of nerve cells making up white matter is usually involved in the “wiring” part of the brain, which is to say that it plays a crucial role in supporting neurons and synapses. In order to rule out any possibility for error, the scientists took brain scans of all participants before and after the study began.
This is among the first researches to demonstrate increases in white matter. Previous studies have shown that gray matter, the headquarters of the brain's cognitive powers, can, indeed, increase in volume, but this was never accurately proven available for white matter. In their investigation, scientists from the Oxford Department of Clinical Neurology used an imaging technique known as diffusion MRI, in order to assess the movements of water molecules in the brain's cells.
“MRI is an indirect way to measure brain structure and so we cannot be sure exactly what is changing when these people learn. Future work should test whether these results reflect changes in the shape or number of nerve fibers, or growth of the insulating myelin sheath surrounding the fibers. Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone should go out and start juggling to improve their brains. We chose juggling purely as a complex new skill for people to learn,” team leader Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg explains.
“It's extremely exciting to see evidence that training changes human white matter connections. This compliments other work showing gray matter changes with training and motivates further work to understand the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects,” Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging expert, Professor Cathy Price says.