How does Juggling Affect the Brain?

Does juggling affects one's brain? Many people think of juggling as a mere fun thing to do during free time at home, or just something that can be seen in a circus. On the other hand scientists have found that there is more behind juggling than it being just a sport or act of fun. Juggling actually lets one's gray matter in the brain grow. It is more then just a fun thing to do because people's brain can get more developed through juggling. The growth of the brain does not only affect one in one's ability to juggle better, but it will also help one learn new things in school, in one's job or any other kind of activity that one attends to. I want to explore in this Research Essay how we can prove that the brain grows and increases in gray matter, therefore allowing intelligence to grow. In order to do so, one first must explore what juggling really is and what it is about. After that I will provide the scientific experiment that allows one to know that the gray matter really does grow. But since growth of gray matter alone does not prove the growth of intelligence, I will also apply different intelligences only in realation to juggling which will prove that one really can learn and be more intelligent after starting and more important continuing with juggling.
To explore the main topic on why the brain grows when learning how to juggle, one first needs to know what is juggling? What is it about? Without answering these important questions, answering the topic of discussion would be pointless.
Many people consider juggling as a clown’s act which is just done in order to entertain people in the circus and sometimes even on the streets, but is almost never viewed to be what it truly is, a real sport. I experienced a number of these situations when people find out that I can juggle. Most of the time ask me to do that in front of them. When I started juggling in front of an audience, they most of the time say that there is only a red nose needed and I would be a perfect juggling clown. In my opinion, this is an insult to me who works really hard to be able to do that kind of sport. There are actual juggling World Championships, the so called WJF, the World Juggling Federation Championships is held in Las Vegas Nevada ("World"). But not only this that juggling is more than just a little clown's act, but more important is the fact that juggling, if done well, can be a really hard and challenging workout. When one starts out with three balls it might not seem hard in terms of throwing the balls up, but as soon as one gets into four ball tricks and especially five ball juggling anyone will realize that juggling is a really difficult sport and to keep up with it one has to work out besides the normal juggling practice.
The first thing one needs in order to start juggling are the juggling props. There are three main types of props: rings, balls, and clubs. Rings are considered the easiest ones of all of the props because they are light, not too hard to throw in the air and allow more time until they come down again. After that come balls which are not as painful as rings and clubs and are quite easy to handle since pretty much everybody knows how to throw a ball from one hand to the other. Last come the clubs, since they have another dimension that they are thrown in, due to the extra spin because of their long end, they are considered harder than the other props. But this is not quite true. All juggling props can be made really difficult to handle depending on the amount of objects one has and especially the difficulty of the trick that the juggler tries to perform. With different possible tricks, even three ball juggling can be made just as hard and almost impossible to do as the three ring and the club juggling.
The second step to consider when juggling is strength. When somebody just starts out it might seem really easy and no strength seems to be involved, especially when juggling with rings or with balls. But when one starts out with clubs, or keeps on continuing to go to the higher numbers, or to some tricks with higher throws, strength will play a big role in juggling. My muscles have grown since I started juggling which was at the end of January, due to the practice with higher numbers of balls. As I mentioned, many individuals do not consider juggling a sport because it seems to be done with such ease. Since it looks just like a few balls are being thrown into the air, one may not understand that it is actually really hard and requires a lot of strength. A friend of mine started juggling and he told me that after he learned the basics juggling pattern, it became really difficult for him to do long runs in juggling, meaning to keep on going with the same pattern as long as one can. He lost his strength due to the difficulty of keeping the balls at the right height and his arms are became tired because it is not as easy as it seemed in the beginning.
The third one is the eye/hand coordination. Without it, juggling is pointless. Juggling consists of seeing the ball and then moving the hand to the right spot in order to catch it. The beginner's mistake is to try to watch where each ball goes, but an experienced juggler actually just watches the highest point of the pattern. In other words, there has to be high control over the hands movement in relation to vision and the ball.
This leads to the next important step in juggling which is the catching and throwing of the balls. This is not considered the hardest part of juggling, but proves still to be one of the most difficult. One has to be able to catch the balls that come down in certain patterns out of great height. This might seem easy, although it is not since one has to throw the ball immediately up again to the same height into the right direction. Accurate throws are even more important than the catches. If the balls are not thrown right, they will fly either in all directions, or will just crash into each other which will make the pattern fall down, and therefore stop the juggling. When throwing, the juggler has to consider the height at which the balls are thrown, so that each hand does not throw at a different height. One also has to throw the balls at the right angle.
The most difficult and last step of juggling is the envisioning of the juggling pattern. How shall the figure of my juggling look? Where do I have to throw each of the balls? At what angle do they have to be thrown, and in what direction? Will the ball be thrown straight up, stay in the same hand, or will it be thrown over to the other hand? Which hand throws higher, which one lower, or do both throw at the same height? All these things have to be taken into consideration when starting to juggle and envisioning the pattern that the juggler wants to make. So together, it might seem easy to the viewer, but in reality it is all a highly difficult skill and needs a lot of practice.
Now that it is clear on what is important for juggling, I will explain the scientific effects that has been found about juggling on the growth of gray matter in the brain and also how scientists tested their theory. Scientists from the University of Regensburg in Germany are the people who discovered that the grey matter in people's brains increases through juggling (Reuters) . Gray matter is considered to be the tightly packed nuclei cells in our brain which can be found in the outer layers of the cerebrum (Reuters). The grey matter is there in order to process the advanced mental functions and also the visual information in our brain (Reuters). To prove this theory about the development of the brain, the scientists chose people who never had any previous experience with juggling and let them test the theory. Twenty-four individuals where used for this study (May et al.). Twenty-one of these where women and the rest of them were men (May et al.). All of these together were grown adults and were of an average age of twenty-two years. None of these had experience with juggling before not even in their childhood. Half of this group had to learn how to juggle in a month. At the end of the testing period, each of them was able to juggle continuously for at least a minute or more. In comparison to the other half of the group, the new jugglers showed that their grey matter increased during the time of the experiment. The result was proven by comparing brain scans of the non-juggling group to the experimental group. After these scans, the experimental group was told not to juggle for the next month and further results have then shown that after the second time period expired, the grey matter that had developed earlier had been lost again during the time of inactivity. This proves that one gains grey matter in the processes of learning how to juggle and during juggling, but looses this gain when the practice is stopped (Reuters; May et al.).
I want to take now a different approach on how it can also be proven that the brain will grow from practicing juggling by applying juggling to Howard Gardner’s "Theory about Multiple Intelligences" (Gardner 519). An intelligence in the view of Gardner is considered to be “a general ability that is found in varying degrees in all individuals. It is the key to success in solving problems.” (qtd Gardner 519). In other words it is an ability that can be manipulated by each person themselves by doing an activity that applies to the certain intelligence. Juggling can be applied to three main intelligences which would influence the growth of the brain. This does not include the natural ability, meaning that one has a natural ability to juggle from the beginning without really learning it. The natural talent is, as one would say, already in the persons blood and therefore does not have to be learned as intentively as most other people would have to do (Benzon).
Also there is the so called bodily/kinesthetic intelligence. A person who starts learning to juggle will with practice improve his strength, endurance, and body movements (Gardner 524). Juggling is a smooth thing; one has to find the right rhythm for the different juggling patterns in order to keep them up. The brain will make this improvement and strengthen daily thoughts after a while when an individual continues with juggling. As I mentioned in the beginning, juggling is not an easy sport even if it might seem that way sometimes. After one starts with higher numbers of objects or even just with three clubs, the improvement in strength can be felt soon. So the first growth in the brain will be due to the bodily/kinesthetic intelligence which is one of the main parts of improvement (Gardner 524).
I talked in the beginning also about how the juggler has to view the pattern that he wants to juggle in front of his eyes. One cannot just juggle as one feels like but actually has to try to see the desired pattern and know how the throws are to be performed to achieve it. The juggler needs to know how does the trick or pattern looks like that he wants to learn. All these play a big part in the spatial intelligence. I started out juggling with no clue on how to do it and I also had no help from anyone to teach me. So, I really had to visualize the pattern that I wanted to juggle in front of my eyes before I could actually start juggling. Now that I know that there are a lot of videos from other jugglers on the internet, it is a little bit easier since I can watch the tricks of someone juggling and then try learning them myself. But still, nobody can juggle and watch the video at the same time if it comes to harder tricks. I don’t consider most 3 ball tricks to be hard, although those starting at 4 and up I do consider hard. This means that one still has to picture the pattern that someone wants to learn, or maybe create a new own pattern in front of the eyes before starting juggling. This is another point that will let a person's brain grow, and later on help one to envision things that might only be on a sheet of paper, or just being told by a friend (Gardner 527).
In the logical/mathematical intelligence, the growth of the brain is the least noticeable one. Individuals might wonder how does math fit with juggling, but it does fit very well with juggling. There are two places where this can be seen. First would be the actual juggling. One has to see that the balls are thrown in a nice arch, not too narrow, not too wide. Also one has to consider the angle that the balls are thrown in, the higher the throws the smaller the angle become, otherwise the arms are not be long enough to catch the balls. The second thing that every juggler would know about is that there are juggling patterns that don’t have names assigned to them but numbers ("For"). These are so called siteswaps. "Siteswap is a notation system that assigns a numerical value to the height and destination of every object thrown in a juggling pattern in relation to the hands and the other objects." (qtd "For"). Each numbers stands for a certain throw. For example if one writes the numbers 333, only the basic three ball cascade pattern is juggled, meaning each ball is crossing always over to the other hand. If one writes a 4 than it one juggles the four ball fountain pattern, meaning two balls in both hands, which are staying in the same hand and so on. Through this system many new complicated patterns can be found that are described in numbers. For example (8x,6)(4,6x)(6,8x)(6x,4) is a really complicated pattern where each number stands for the height and the x for where the balls are suppose to cross. As one can see now math can be applied to juggling and it definitely needs a lot of logical thinking in order to figure out the right pattern to juggle to these numbers (Gardner 525).
All these intelligences that are used in juggling are proof for the growth of the brain itself. Most people do not have those intelligences greatly developed and through juggling one could. The research that scientists in Europe did about how the juggling affects the brain certainly had a great impact on the jugglers themselves since they did not know about this. But this is not all. Since through juggling the different intelligences develop more, the success and learning skills in other area’s, like school subjects, or work improve, tremendously. All this is even more proof for the development of the brain.
By just starting a new sport that not many people think about being more than just a little fun, one can actually increase one’s grey matter in the brain. This theory is not only proven by scientists who made various tests with different people, but when one looks closer and applies the different intelligences that are in each of us, one can see that some of these certainly develop tremendously after picking up some juggling props. This will have not only a small impact on one’s thought about this sport or the fun that is involved with this, but more importantly it will have great positive impact on one’s life, if one remains persistent with this great sport, juggling.

Works Cited

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Gardner, Howard. “Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence.” A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee A Jacobus.
Boston: Bedford/St.Martins, 2006. 524-525.

Gardner, Howard. “Spatial Intelligence.” A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee A Jacobus. Boston:
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Gardner, Howard. “Logical-Mathematical Intelligence.” A World of Ideas. Ed. Lee A Jacobus.
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May, Arne, et al. “Juggling is Mind-Altering Experience.” Medicine Online. 30 Jan. 2004. 3 Nov. 2006. .

Reuters. “Juggling good for the brain, study shows.” CNN. 22 Jan. 2004. 3 Nov. 2006.
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"World Juggling Federation." WJF. 19 Nov. 2006. .