Neuroplasticity exercises

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change with what you ask of it. Some of that change is in how the brain works, and some is in its structure, which a scanner can measure. Two words for that structure come up in almost every study below. Grey matter is the tissue that holds the bodies of nerve cells, and white matter is the wiring that connects them.

For a long time, the structure of the adult brain was thought to be fixed. A short paper in the journal Nature helped change that view (Draganski and colleagues, 2004). A research group in Germany scanned the brains of volunteers who learned to juggle a three-ball cascade, the basic pattern in which each ball crosses from one hand to the other. The new jugglers showed a structural change in areas that process and store complex visual motion. The authors called the change transient, meaning it did not last.

Even so, the authors wrote that their result contradicted the traditional view, in which the adult brain can change in how it works and not in its anatomy. For a sense of scale, the same group later described that first study as 12 volunteers and three months of training (Driemeyer and colleagues, 2008).

Two cautions belong here, before any list. The studies on this page compare groups of healthy adults on a scan, so they cannot tell you what one person will feel or notice. And a change in one brain area after learning one skill is not proof that you become sharper at everything. Everything on this page is about learning and practice, not about medicine.

The five activities that showed change share three things, and none of them is a special technique. Each one was new to the person doing it. Each one was hard enough that they could fail at it. And each one was repeated across weeks, not tried once.

Newness seems to matter more than polish. In the second juggling study, neither how well people juggled nor how long they practiced each day predicted the change on the scan. The authors suggest that learning a new task matters more to the brain than drilling a task it has already learned. So once an exercise turns easy, make it harder or pick the next one.

Hours matter too, and the taxi drivers show it. A later study followed 79 trainees from the start of their training (Woollett and Maguire, 2011). The 39 who qualified showed more grey matter in the hippocampus afterwards. Those who gave up or failed showed no change, and neither did 31 people who never trained.

The trainees who qualified and those who did not had been at it for about the same length of time. What separated them was the week: those who qualified trained about 34.6 hours a week, against about 16.7 for those who did not. That is a full-time load, and nobody needs it to learn the guitar. The point is a narrower one: weekly hours were the difference the researchers could measure.

The gain also had a price. After training, the qualified drivers did worse than the untrained group at recalling a complex drawing after a delay. The brain did not get better in general. It got better at London.

Brain games are the exercise most people think of first, and the claim behind them ended up in front of a regulator. Lumosity, a program of 40 games, advertised that training for 10 to 15 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week, could help users reach their “full potential in every aspect of life.”

The US Federal Trade Commission charged the company with deceptive advertising, and the company agreed to pay $2 million to settle (the FTC). The agency’s consumer protection director said the company “simply did not have the science to back up its ads.” A larger judgment of $50 million was suspended because of the company’s finances.

By then, scientists had argued about the games for years. In 2014, more than 70 of them signed a letter saying brain games lack a scientific basis, and 133 signed a reply defending them. A team then reviewed the studies the companies themselves cited (Simons and colleagues, 2016).

The review found extensive evidence that training improves the trained tasks, less evidence for closely related tasks, and little evidence that it improves everyday thinking. The large online trial from the list above shows how small the carry-over can be. At the rate memory for digits improved, its authors wrote, it would take almost 4 years of training to remember one extra digit.

None of this means that practice fails. Practice works on the thing you practice. So choose the skill you want for its own sake, a language you will speak or music you will play, and practice that.

You cannot scan your own brain, and how sharp you feel changes with the day. The part you can check is whether the practice happened.

A good way to run this test counts your practice hours from what you already write or say about your day. No timer to start and stop. Most journaling apps stop at how the practice felt. They keep the mood of the session, but not the hours behind it.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your practice, by what you called it, sleep, work, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. You can set a weekly target for your practice and see it against your real hours.

Write my first day

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Or scan with your phone's camera.

For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The second half of the test matters as much as the first. If the exercise feels the same in week four as it did in week one, you have stopped learning something new. Add a ball, a harder piece, a longer conversation.

Here are four weeks from the example person above. They began with a few minutes on a phone app and built up from there.

Week one came to 1h 10m. Week four came to 4h 55m, with practice on 7 days. Nothing in those weeks was heroic. The sessions got a place in the day, and then the days added up.

Every figure on this page links to one of these sources, each read on the date shown or in the paper itself.

1. Scholz, J., Klein, M. C., Behrens, T. E. J. and Johansen-Berg, H. (2009). Training induces changes in white-matter architecture. Nature Neuroscience, 12(11), 1370 to 1371.
2. Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G., Bogdahn, U. and May, A. (2004). Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427(6972), 311 to 312.
3. Driemeyer, J., Boyke, J., Gaser, C., Büchel, C. and May, A. (2008). Changes in gray matter induced by learning, revisited. PLoS ONE, 3(7), e2669.
4. Mårtensson, J., Eriksson, J., Bodammer, N. C., Lindgren, M., Johansson, M., Nyberg, L. and Lövdén, M. (2012). Growth of language-related brain areas after foreign language learning. NeuroImage, 63(1), 240 to 244.
5. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute (read October 1, 2026). Foreign Language Training.
6. Lappe, C., Herholz, S. C., Trainor, L. J. and Pantev, C. (2008). Cortical plasticity induced by short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(39), 9632 to 9639.
7. Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J. and Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398 to 4403.
8. Maguire, E. A., Woollett, K. and Spiers, H. J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091 to 1101.
9. Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Kempermann, G., Kuhn, H. G., Winkler, J., Büchel, C. and May, A. (2006). Temporal and spatial dynamics of brain structure changes during extensive learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(23), 6314 to 6317.
10. Owen, A. M., Hampshire, A., Grahn, J. A., Stenton, R., Dajani, S., Burns, A. S., Howard, R. J. and Ballard, C. G. (2010). Putting brain training to the test. Nature, 465(7299), 775 to 778.
11. Woollett, K. and Maguire, E. A. (2011). Acquiring “the Knowledge” of London’s layout drives structural brain changes. Current Biology, 21(24), 2109 to 2114.
12. U.S. Federal Trade Commission (read October 4, 2026). Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its “Brain Training” Program.
13. Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z. and Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103 to 186.