Slashdot Mirror
Tetris Improves Your Brain
An anonymous reader writes "Playing Tetris increases the density of the cortex and improves the efficiency of some parts of the brain, according to researchers investigating video games and other complex spatial tasks." Unfortunately, storing a half million copies of the song negates any practical functional gains beyond loading your trunk very efficiently.
Playing lots of FPS or "action video games" do have significant, measurable effects on cognition including speeding reaction time, decreasing attentional blink, improving multi-element tracking, improving spatial resolution for both vision and attention, etc etc.. A lot of interesting research on the subject is being done at the Bavelier Lab . Review papers can be found here and here [PDF warning].
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous now would they?
You do realize that not all fMRI research uses the methodology in the paper referred to by the slashdot article you linked to, right? Not even most of it, actually. The article you referred to only discusses the case where the regions of interest for correlations between behavioral and fMRI measures are selected by the size of the correlation itself. Much of that bad stuff happens in the field of social neuroscience. Although I haven't read the paper in question because it evidently won't be out until Thursday, there's no reason to believe based on the blurb that they had any reason to use that (horribly flawed) methodology.
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.