Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that intensive study for the Law School Admission Test reinforces circuits in the brain and can bridge the gap between the right and left hemispheres, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The research team  - who reported its findings in online journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy - performed brain scans on 24 college students and recent graduates before and after they spent 100 hours studying over a three-month period.

Increased connectivity

The researchers also scanned 23 young adults who didn't study for the test. Those who studied displayed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain, as well as between the frontal and parietal lobes, which are parts of the brain associated with reasoning and thinking.

Those changes can improve reasoning ability and may increase a person's IQ score, the researchers said.

‘The fact that performance on the LSAT can be improved with practice is not new,’ commented lead researcher Allyson Mackey. ‘What we were interested in is whether and how the brain changes as a result of LSAT preparation—which we think is, fundamentally, reasoning training. We wanted to show that the ability to reason is malleable in adults.’