It's a difficult thing to understand I think. My mother sent me a clipping about a study done in Germany years ago, they did brain scans of a bunch of volunteers, half of them were given juggling equipment and instructions on how to do it and their assignment was to try to learn how to juggle, 30 minutes at least every day. Whether they got good at it or not, wasn't so much the issue it was the regular effort to do so. The other half, with the placebo group did nothing of course.

After several months, they did the brain scan again, the part of the brain that processes visual information in the group that tried to juggle had grown in size. This was a sort of breakthrough revelation because it was believed up till that point that brains did not continue to grow in adulthood.

It made perfect sense to me. I learned know how to juggle when I was about 22. There was a John Denver special on TV and he did singing and dancing and goofing around. At the end he said "OK you guys are probably thinking he can sing sort of, he can kind of dance, he can maybe play the guitar but the real question on your mind is can (catches ball thrown from off stage) he (catches another ball) juggle! (catches third ball and starts to juggle)

I'm not even sure why I watched the show, I'm not that big of a fan of his, but after I saw that, I thought "if John Denver can juggle, I can juggle." I found a book at the library about juggling and practiced for weeks with tennis balls, finally I started to get it down.

I still do it off and on. But I noticed after I got halfway good that if I dropped something it was amazing how often I could catch it before it hit the ground. Something had improved in my brain to eyesight connection, not sure what.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K