By: Jia Lynn Yang and Jerry Useem, Fortune
Thursday, October 26, 2006

Assistant Professor Rachael Seidler's research in Fortune magazine

October 26, 2006

From the article:

Brain chemistry

Your brain, it turns out, isn't a fixed mass that shapes your behavior. Your behavior also shapes your brain. If a gardener takes up a serious interest in engineering, for instance, her neurons form new pathways between previously isolated regions.

"It may well be a mistake to do just one thing," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "If you practice multiple things you actually get better at any one of those things." In other words the benefits of practicing one skill are not limited to that skill alone; they can be transferred.

Scientists are beginning to confirm this in research on how we learn motor skills. In a study published in 2004 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Rachael Seidler at the University of Michigan cast doubt on the traditional thinking that any motor skill we learn is limited to a particular context and task. She found instead that after having subjects learn five different motor skills using joysticks, "subjects exposed to a variety of motor learning paradigms may be able to acquire general, transferable knowledge about skill learning processes."

Science is showing evidence for what some have long felt are the benefits of cross-training your brain. Ask Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, why his undergraduate training in nuclear propulsion systems remains indispensable. "I'm not applying those exact skills every day, but it taught me ways to think through problems - visualizing, conceptualizing - that I do use every day," he told Fortune last year. "Your mind touches on these resources and you're not even conscious of it."

To strengthen those neural pathways, however, we have to repeatedly do something. "It's sort of like walking on the beach," says Pascual-Leone. "Every time you do it, you change the sand. But unless you keep stepping on the same piece of sand, you won't leave a permanent mark." Leafing through a how-to book on nuclear propulsion systems won't do it.

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To read the entire article, go to http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391729/index.htm.