The more varied your skills, the more varied the neural pathways in use. "They're kind of reservoirs in your consciousness that you can reach back into for insights you're applying to something totally dissimilar," says Pete Dawkins, vice chairman of Citigroup's global wealth management. "I think the broader, the more of these reservoirs you have available, the more likely you can see through the fog."
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.
Should you pour your energies into one single-minded pursuit? The short answer is no. The short explanation is plasticity. Leonardo da Vinci fit at least six careers into one lifetime. And there's a concert-level pianist named Condoleezza Rice who performs Brahms sonatas with Yo-Yo Ma when she's not busy with her side gig at the State Department.
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."
Source: FORTUNE, October 30, 2006