Coincidence

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. [...] Human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by this sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual. [...] Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1982, by Milan Kundera

Juggling ‘can boost brain power’

Learning to juggle can cause changes in the brain, scientists have found. Using brain scans, the researchers from the University of Regensburg, Germany, showed that in 12 people who had learnt to juggle, certain brain areas had grown. But three months later, during which time people stopped juggling, the brain had gone back to its normal size.

The team studied 24 people who had no juggling ability. They were scanned using voxel-based morphometry, a technique which measures concentrations of brain tissue. Half were then asked to teach themselves to juggle for at least 60 seconds using the traditional three-ball cascade routine, and given three months to practise.

All 24 were then scanned again. There was no change in the brains of the non-juggling group. But brain scans of those who had learnt to juggle showed two areas had increased in size. Jugglers had more grey matter – which consists largely of the nerve cells – in the mid-temporal area and the left posterior intraparietal sulcus, which both process visual motion information.

But after a further three months, in the people who had stopped juggling, the increase in grey matter had reduced. The scientists, led by Dr Arne May, said the changes could have been caused by an increase in cell production or by changes in the connections between cells.

Dr Vanessa Sluming, a senior lecturer in medical imaging at the University of Liverpool, UK, has previously studied musicians and found they retain more brain cells than non-players. She said the juggling research was interesting because it had been carried out amongst adults learning a new skill, rather than looking at people who had learnt a skill as a child.

- BBC News