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Japanese Researcher Finds Gaming Stunts Brain
Bill Gates writes: "This story at the Guardian describes research done in Japan showing that playing video games in youth prevents development of the front lobe, leading to violent behavior." Turns out what at first appears to be arbitrary, mind-numbing violence may turn out to be just that. It seems this study might have returned different results, though, if it looked at the effects of video games which require lots of calculation instead.
"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we would all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetative electronic music."
Using the most sophisticated technology available, the level of brain activity was measured in hundreds of teenagers playing a Nintendo game and compared to the brain scans of other students doing a simple, repetitive arithmetical exercise. To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement.
In contrast, arithmetic stimulated brain activity in both the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe - the area of the brain most associated with learning, memory and emotion.
Ok, sounds fair enough. But what about compared to something like -television- that certainly many more children do for many more hours in their youth.
From the article, it sounds like they are saying video games prevent proper development, they don't cause damage. That would imply that something like TV would certainly do as much and more prevention than video games.
And television isn't mentioned at all, nor anything else. There are lots of things kids can do that don't involve any thinking...I don't know many kids that sit down and do math all day
What a great comparison they did... Let's compare playing a video game to "an exercise called the Kraepelin test, which involves adding single-digit numbers continuously for 30 minutes." Yeah, I'm sure that continuously adding numbers is quite a lot of fun for the researchers, but something tells me that the average kid won't think that this is a good time...
Seriously, this article practices once of the major fallacies of statistics. They do a basic study of some Nintendo video game (they don't mention which one) versus continuously adding numbers or reading aloud. Then they draw the conclusion that:
"But the other thing is to ask them to play outside with other children and interact and to communicate with others as much as possible. This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people."
Excuse me?!? The study had absolutely nothing to do with playing outside with other children. There's a chance that doing just that would be even worse for the childrens' frontal lobes. We don't know because the study said nothing about other behaviors, just playing a game & doing math.
If you ask me, this is nothing but inflammatory nonsense designed to generate a lot of press time and give people a good excuse to take away our fun.
Let me predict the arguments here regarding this article.
Funny-ha-ha's aside, what on earth did we expect? That spending 8 hours a day watching repetitive, unvaried images of violence and gore would create a race of uber kinder?
Don't get me wrong, I like games. I used to write them, and I enjoy playing them, including FPS'ers. I honestly feel that (partly because I used to write them) I'm smart enough to realise that playing them does actually makes me dumber and antisocial (and I'm pushing 30). I don't think they make me more violent, but my fragile little mind was well formed before I really started playing gore-o-ramas in earnest, plus I blow off a lot of steam playing physical sports, something that GenY is doing less and less.
No, it's not the collapse of civilisation as we know it, but if you're going to argue that environment doesn't shape behaviour, then we have no grounds for debate, and you mite ars wel kil me, cuz i am gay but monkie.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Have any of you ever heard that gaming causes violence apart from dubious research projects that started showing up after Columbine ?
In the 50's, there was a lot of media noise and "parent scare" about how comic books caused "juvenile delinquency". Some comics were even banned [1]. This whole violence-in-video-games thing is just history repeating itself.
[1] Pogo, by Walt Kelly, Volume 11, ISBN 1-56097-339-0. Choice quote .. "with comic book censorship now a fact in Hartford, I look forward to an immediate drop in the crime rate in that fair city" (William Gaines, founder of MAD).
(Hmm .. a /. post with actual references .. how unique)
Grrrr. Anyone making fun of my underdeveloped frontal lobe will find my foot up his overdeveloped ass! Most of my youth was spent playing Japanese RPGs. If doing repetitive math for 30 minutes is good for the development of the frontal lobe, I probably have the largest frontal lobe in the world.
And any of this assumes that the study was done correctly. In fact, there are serious questions about normalization: very high activity in the visual and motor areas might simply have caused "normal" frontal lobe activity to be normalized away.
Between playing video games and watching television, I think kids are a lot better off playing video games.
for a similar study on the effects of reading Slashdot 10 hours a day.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
"To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement."
Not surprising, on three counts!
First, obviously 'shoot em up'-games improve hand-eye coordination. ("Improve hand-eye coordination: that sounds better already, no?)
Leading me to point two: Japanese society generally disapproves of individualist pursuits such as gameplaying. The Japenese scientific establishment may well have the same biases. This conclusion will be popular. Back to 18-hour a day schooling, kids.
Third, The Guardian is a left-wing paper with a fairly strong anti-technology bias. So the fact it is reported here is suspicious too.
What I am trying to say is: interpret your news critically. This does not mean the article is untrue; it just means some extra work is needed before we all throw out our kids' Gameboys.
Michael
PS my two boys are playing a game as we speak. I have the impression it's a worthwhile pursuit. They are leadning to talk together, plan a course of action, and they are learning to use PCs. Oh and hand-eye coordination.
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Comparing to math is totally invalid. Most children do very little math, trying to avoid it as much as possible. It only exercises the whole mind because the mental exercise is novel. If doing simple arithmetic exercises made us better people mentally, then every cashier, who does tons of arithmetic exercises on the brain every day, should be a better person (mentally) than anyone else. The only other person who does more math (maybe not even) is a math professor.
In places like Russia, they have practically zero cases of attention deficit disorder
Interesting. You use the fact that ADD doesn't exist outside of the US as proof of US culture turning kids into mindless zombies (Which I don't necessarily disagree with).
I use this fact as proof that ADD is bullshit.
Case study: My girlfriend was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Ritalin because she had bad grades. As someone very close to her, I knew very well why she was getting bad grades. School was frankly, very boring. And not only was it boring, but she didn't care. The idea of doing menial drudge work instead of enjoying life wasn't very appealing.
Of course, you say "Well, all kids should love learning. If she finds it boring, she must have ADD!" Guess what? Public schools really are boring! Instead of say, making schools better, we're just prescribing more drugs.
I'm absolutely amazed by what I hear about kids learning in European public schools. If you ask most kids why they put up with such bullshit in the US, they say "Well, yeah, it's totally stupid. But I won't get into a good college if I don't go with it! And then where will I be?!"
We had a coworker come in from the UK (H1B Visa) who was a big South Park fan. We were discussing the episode where all of the kids started coming down with ADD. I mentioned that it was a big problem here. That shocked him. He thought that South Park had made ADD up. He had never heard of ADD until he visited the USA.
"For every kid who really needs Ritalin, you prescribe it to 500,000 kids who don't" -- Chef, South Park
As an aside, I'm suprised the pro-censorship movement is sticking to banning sex and smut and video games. Why don't they promise to eradicate NSYNC and Brittany Spears instead? If they pitched it the right way, I probably wouldn't even realize that I was supporting censorship. :)