It’s easy to think of the brain as a ‘magical box’ where your thoughts, memories and emotions are kept, but when it comes down to it, the brain is a part of your body just like the heart and your muscles. As such, ‘exercising’ your brain in specific ways – whether that’s learning a new skill such as a musical instrument or a new language, or simply learning new things from a book – produces physical changes in its structure. Thanks to modern imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), scientists are actually able to visualise these changes before and after ‘learning’ takes place, and have found not only significant increases in activity (measured by blood flow) in specific areas of the brain associated with those activities, but long-lasting structural changes in terms of white and grey matter. The picture to the left demonstrates these changes in the case of video games, but experiments have shown this in a huge variety of endeavours such as taxi drivers learning new navigation routes and (especially) during childhood.