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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."
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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 tas--
Yeah, whatever. Dude!! Check out this score! w00t!
Now.. what were you saying?
Plenty of complaints about immature guys have been heard over the years.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
I'm bilingual (2 1/4 to be correct) gamer, so $subj :-)
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
I knew I should keep playing video games all night instead of studying...I'm keeping myself alive longer, so I can study more!
Well OK, games are often about solving problems and getting around situations which try to trick you.
I think real world exercises would be of equal benefit, assuming that the exposure is broad enough, but this at least confirms that simulations are a good way of training people, which has been understood in aerospace since the 1960's.
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weird. i'm bilingual, and i play videogames pretty often, but i have a lot of difficulty filtering out distractions.
i playd vidoe games all way thru hi scooll, and i faled a lota clases, and my parents kiked me out of home, but now even in my old age of 32 i feel yung @ haeart. so... i think they r ryte.. i thank vid. games for ervrything i have.. my gf i met on hallo xbox online, my dog (but ive been layuing lots of vid. games lately and i dont know hwhere he is), and my fun job @ teh bowling allie.
long liv vid. gamnes!@ keeping us yung 4 ever!
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To stay young, play:
Halo: El Combate Ha Evolucionado
Prof. Bialystok first noticed bilingual children were proficient in blocking out irrelevant information about 20 years ago. When asked to identify a grammatically correct sentence, for example, both bilinguals and monolinguals are, by age 5, able to choose, "Apples grow on trees," over "Apple trees on grow" as the correct one. But when it came to asking "Apples grow on noses" versus "Apples nose on grow," only the bilingual children were able to choose the right answer. Although the first sentence is grammatically correct, monolingual children could not get over its silliness. "That's crazy," they'd shout, "You can't say that!"
Maybe this is good, maybe not. If this is training people to move on and solve the problem, even though they understand that there is a problem with the validity of the sentence, then it is a good thing. On the other hand, if they are able to do better because don't even notice the problem, then maybe it's not so good. I've seen plenty of times where everyone's so focused on solving a problem that they don't realize they're solving the wrong problem.
I personally play a ton of video games still in my mid-thirties and support this wholeheartedly. The thing about video games, to me, is that they constantly challenge your mind.
I remember a gentlemene that was in his seventies telling me once that he kept mentally spry simply by reading, doing puzzles, and the like. He said that most adults are effectively senile early on because they quit reading and generally idle in front of TV. TV bores me; it doesn't challenge you to do much of anything except look, so I'd imagine that ANYONE who plays any kind of games requiring use of their brain would be a step up on people who don't.
Anyway ... I play to be playing games until I can't see and hear them anymore. Hopefully in my old age we'll have decent VR and can simply "plug in" ;)
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.
If this is true than this generation should prove to be more mentally healthy than previous generations into old age. Video games didn't exist for the Boomer's childhood and didn't hit mainstream till adolecence for Gen X. But Gen Y and later have had the availabilty of this sort of therapy since they were old enough to hold a joystick. This increased time should (in my theory at least) mean greater mental ability into old age than the pervious two generations.
I wonder if the type of game or level of difficulty have any effect either. I find today's games are a lot more complex than when I was young. Yet you still see young people able to master them. Perhaps this will enhance the effect due to the additional hand-eye coordination and problem solving skills needed to navigate in a modern first person shooter (where vertical/rotational perspective has to be tracked independently of actual character movement) vs. the simple side scrollers we started on (like Super Mario Bros).
Like the idea long ago that 65 years was very old age one would be lucky to make it to, perhaps someday the idea of the mentally feeble old man will be tossed as people stay sharp in mind far into their twilight years.
Watch any older adult try to pick up a game controller and play a videogame. *IF* they manage to get the hang of using the controller, they typically are overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the modern videogame and the number of things they must simultaneously (and QUICKLY) keep track of. This has always been, IMHO, at least anecdotal evidence that videogames clearly develop a certain set of mental skills that very few other activities develop so effectively.
I've certainly noticed it's improved my memory and allowed me to become more adept at finding my way around new places. Expansive games like GTA: SA have allowed me to learn locations & glean directions with just a cusory glance at a map. Thanks videogames!
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
most Europeans speak 2 or 3 languages... and yes, they consider Americans stupid.
This exact point is covered in the extremely excellent "Everything Bad Is Good For You" which I'm sure Slashdot has reviewed...let's see. Yep.
It's an excellent book and well worth the time and money. Covers a huge range of topics from watching TV to playing Grand Theft Auto, and it does so in a well informed and enlightening way.
I think you misunderstand. The complexity doesn't come from the interface.
Take my father, for example. He's been driving since he was in high-school, so I'm pretty sure he's caught onto that. He's got an IQ of like 140 or so, so he's no idiot.
Now, place a Playstation 1 controller in his hand and let him play a racing game. Pick an easy one with just the analog stick, brake and gas. (Yes, I've done this.)
The result is pathetic. He actively WANTS to play it. He asked for it. He repeatedly runs into the walls, forgets which controls are which (There's only 2!) and generally just fails at the game. He played for a few hours with the same results. He asked me like 3 or 4 times over the first hour or so what the controls were. (Admittedly, the last time was a confirmation, not a question.)
This is something any kid I can name would be able to do quite easily. He did not grow up with video games of any sort, and does not touch-type.
He's an amazing industrial engineer, but the simplest of video games eludes him. It's not the complicated UI, it's a thought-pattern he never developed. Maybe if he spent enough time at it, he could pick it up, but he never will. He's got too many things to do that are actually fun for him.
I think the study fails to recognize that there are thought-patterns associated with being a good gamer, but gamers definitely tend towards more agile thinking and better motor skills, at least for the hands.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
When I turned 60, I didn't turn myself in for euthanasia, either. Star Ocean is lots more fun, and I've learned to appreciate those annoying AI bugs.
On a serious note, I apparently had a minor strokelet a couple years ago that left me unable to understand the color red in the context of traffic lights, stop signs, tail lights, etc. Red means stop, of course, bear with me here. When I see red in any more or less urgent context involving driving a car, red is simply invisible.
I have to TELL myself, in words, what it means. I've got the tickets to show for this weirdly anecdotal condition, and I've learned to love my 2000 Honda Civic's ABS and V-Tek engine in consequence. That was then.
These days, several months after the worst of these episodes (it was never life-threatening, fortunately), my "red reflex" has rewired itself almost back to normal -- and the only major change in my lifestyle has been videogaming. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that jazz, Doc, but I think there's something to it.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I have ADD, I have a terrible time focusing my attention, but when I do, it locks on harder than a bell hop at a bunny club. In any case, I tend to play games for the exact reason that they give me something to focus on. Gaming really helps me to relax at the end of the day and gives me a bit of a break from the maelstrom of conflicting signals we encounter throughout our day to day lives. I'm guessing that I'm not the only one, and that many people with concentration issues are drawn to gaming as a kind of self-medication.
Gaming did wonders for me back in college, by the way. I was struggling to get by because of lack of focus—I couldn't pull myself together to get my work in on time—yet, the semester I finally started gaming (plodded my way through the Final Fantasy series, if anyone's interested), my work habbits shot up, my grades improved, and I started getting back on track. There were other reasons too, but I think I owe quite a lot of my improvement to daily gaming.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.