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Video Games Found To Decrease Brain Activity
Richard C writes "A Japanese researcher, Akio Mori, from the Nihon University's College of Humanities and Sciences, claims to have found a link between the playing of video games and the balance of activity in the brain. It is also claimed that this effect can cause behavioural changes, such as lack of concentration, difficulty with social association, and short temper. These effects are also thought to be, to some extent, nonreversible." I was gonna say something witty and insightful here, but
I can't think of anything. At least I can't make a windows machine stable
enough to run Neverwinter or my brain would be toast.
This is the second completely ludicrous science article I've read at this particular website in the last few weeks. It seems like they specialize in sensationalizing marginal psychological research results into weird moralistic conclusions. Cross reference this article about how fast food is turning japanese girls into sex maniacs:
p hs .html
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/0206/020619nym
These are EEG recordings. They placed scalp electrodes on the heads of these people while playing and not playing video games. The vast majority of these signals are close to 10 Hz, as was seen in the subjects.
The differences occur in the higher frequency range. These ranges are associated with strenuous attentional focus, and were highest in normals, near zero in heavy game players.
All this is restricted to prefrontal areas, which are the highest abstractest most creative planning areas.
WAY blown out of proportion.
Some background on brain waves from EEG
Also, this is being presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference, so it is quite possible VERY preliminary.
Despite what half of the comments here would like to argue against, the article makes NO negative claims about intelligence level. Rather they're claiming it effects the emotions of a person.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Yeah, except that there are differences among gamers and non-gamers at rest, too. And it's not very adaptive for your brain to have no beta activity when you're supposed to be awake.
As an aside, before everyone shouts "it's a correlational study blah blah" it's worth pointing out that this study combines a within-subjects experimental manipulation (compares brain activity at rest to activity during gaming) with a correlational variable (compares the effect of the experimental manipulation between gamers and non-gamers). The experimental effect of gaming is strongest in people who game regularly, but it's there for everybody except people who never game.
The biggest problem with this study is that people were not selected randomly into each group. Because of this some of the measured effect maby coming from the fact that same people game more than others for a reason. It may be that a brain that reacts in a sertain way get's more pleasure from gaming then others. (This could be compared to those studies that "proved" that living together before marrige causes increased risk of divorce.) Note that i don't claim that the conclusions of the study are wrong, just that the mechanism of choosing how a person ends up in what group can effect the results. And i don't see any method of preventing such bias in the study.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Haven't there been just as many studies showing the exact *opposite*?
Yes.
Study: Playing Computer Games Makes Kids Smarter
[News] Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun July 22, 02:52 PM
from the i-knew-super-mario-bros-made-me-smarter dept.
WaiWai is pretty much a tabloid. It doesn't seem to be quite as prone to pure fabrication as the usual American staples, but it's close enough.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.