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Harnessing the Health Powers of Gaming
conq writes "BusinessWeek.com has a piece on how some new videogames are being designed with health-related applications in mind. From the article: 'A stopwatch and a tub of frigid ice water are the standard tools medical researchers use to test pain tolerance. How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game called Free Dive. The researchers found that their subjects — 60 children, ranging in age from 5 to 12 — were able to keep an arm submerged for about 19 seconds on average. If, however, they simultaneously played Free Dive on a PC with their dry hand, the kids could tolerate an average of 86 seconds in the icy liquid — an increase of more than 400%.'" Juan Rey also writes to mention a report from financial news group Bloomberg, saying that Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Training' has done with DS.
This proves my theory all along -- video games give me super-human powers! I must only use my powers for good... now, to find criminals using the dangerous properties of ice water to molest the populus... and show them just how well I can tolerate their weapon of choice!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
I recall hearing on a science podcast a while ago that a similar technique is being tested in dentistry. It was reported that patients who wore glasses that showed them a movie were able to withstand significantly more invasive and painful procedures for longer periods of time before anesthesia was required. Since pain is created in the brain, it makes good sense that "distracting" the brain would make it significantly easier to withstand greater amounts of pain. The many anecdotes of soldiers sustaining horrendous injuries but fighting on without knowing would seem to corroborate this.
I wonder if it would be possible to train someone to consciously ignore the pain centre of the brain in this manner?
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
It seems to me that subjecting yourself to dangerous or painful situations for longer periods of time is exactly the opposite of a health benefit.
Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.
This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.