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Videogaming Keeps the Brain From Aging
Ant wrote to mention a Globe and Mail article stating that videogames keep the mind young and help in quick focusing on different tasks. "A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable."
You can prove it yourself just go on any counterstrike server even the adults act like thay are 12 years old
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
People who are capable of changing tasks quickly enjoy playing videogames.
Okay, so they surveyed 100 college students. Of gamers I know in college, a very large percentage tend to be engineers, and many of those tend to be Asian American...and speak a second language because of their heritage...and very likely came from families that really emphasized math and sciences. Most "mental tests" tend to lean in favor of that population.
Which as far as I can tell is due to 2 factors: most Europeans start learning a foreign language at a very young age; and there is an enormous amount of English language media out there.
I bet your charts are full of US and UK music in English, I bet your TV channels have English language shows with subtitles, and you are currently posting on an English language website.
Contrast my experience as a Briton learning French: there are no French songs in the charts, my only opportunity to see French language shows is TV5 without subtitles and there are no French language websites that really grab my interest although I'm still looking around.
Learning other languages you have it even more simple given that French, Spanish and Italian all have a lot in common, and Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian likewise.
If you could speak a language very different to your own with little to no exposure to the language outside lessons I'd be more impressed, as it is mainland Europeans have it very easy with regards to being multilingual and your arrogance is misplaced.