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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 Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole? Or, really, any sort of two dimensional puzzles like the mazes on the back of tray mats at a restaurant? Or maybe even -- *gasp* -- any game portrayed on a 2D surface like a TV or computer screen?
The study, funded by Tetris' makers ...
I understand now.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous now would they?
Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Tetris 2 and The New Tetris. They both still have massive replay value and really spurred me to look into polyomino based puzzles which had increased fame in the mid 1960s until everyone realized that they had little real world application (but they still show up in papers). Still, it lead me to a book by Martin Gardner who wrote Scientific American columns on Mathematical Games. If you remember those, I recommend this book. So something good came out of studying tile theory and Tetris for me but there's no evidence yet it did anything more for me than say playing Gauntlet on the NES would have.
My work here is dung.
You mean if i keep playing a game i will get better at it?! This is madness...
Anybody remember Blockout? That was a lot more challenging with it being in 3D. :) Aww the days of yore..
Playing video games in general does this. All genres involve some form of problem solving...something television doesn't usually accommodate.
Indeed. This Science Experiment brought to you by Nintendo.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As interesting as this is I dread the assumptions that some will make of this. If Tetris can alter the brain then many will argue that violent video games also alter the brain, spurring their side of the debate. I would think that playing FPS games would alter the brain in a way that would make someone better at tasks that require quick reaction to visual stimuli.
Da Da-Da-Da Da Da Da, Da Da, Da Da, Da Da Da, Dah-Dah-Dah,
Duh,Duh,Duh, Da-Da-Da, Dah Dah, Dum Doo, Dee Dee, Dah Do De Doo.
Dahhh Dahh, Dahhhh Dahhh, Dahhh Dahhh, Dahhhhhh
Dahhh Dahh, Dooooo Dahhhh, Dum Do Deeee Dahhhhhhh,
Repeat!
...in masonry.
Me plays tetris like all the time for real. Love playing tetris soooo much! really, really smart me am.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole?
No, it's shoving the T-shaped block past other blocks into a T-shaped hole. Almost every Tetris game since Tetris Worlds (2001), including Tetris DS, has allowed for this strange move.
Tetris has music?
Quick, before it gets flagged.
Who knows, if you'd pointed out that Tetris was actually created in Russia you might have been moderated informative instead of offtopic...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Changes in synaptic connectivity are one way that learning occurs. It is interesting to see that even minor stimulation (in playing a game like tetris) can lead to observable changes, i.e., the hardware of the mind (aka the brain) can be re-modelled by the software being run (the 'program' or specific task being undertaken). One of the next questions is to begin to understand the rules governing how learning is represented. This will allow us to begin debugging the OS kernel that links brain and mind.
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
... me pack the car for vacation.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
This is simply how the brain works. You perform a task repeatedly and the neurons that are firing become more efficient and form a stronger connection, project more axons and dendrites, and generally do what they're supposed to.
... Great. More money being spend on useless research. We all already know the brain adapts and improves itself. How about a study on drugs to increase that improvement, say while I'm study for my Neuroanatomy gross lab.
Basically they did an MRI scan of girls before the study, then scanned them again after they had played Tetris for three months and their brain showed increased density rostral to the central sulcus, which is the region responsible for complex movements of the fingers and hands (based on the rough rendering at the top of TFA).
Where do I go to get funding to do stupid stuff like this? I have an MR machine, I have 3-months to kick back and travel the world giving 10 minute seminars while my research subjects regulate themselves. Please, someone tell me what I must do.
Next:
"Exercising Improves Your Body"
News at 11.
factor 966971: 966971
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
You have that backwards. The article is correct. Since they only tested Tetris, the only claim they can make is about Tetris.
Playing tetris causes your brain to pack its neurons together more tightly!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Most people are familar with the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and most in business are familiar with the other golden rule (He who has the gold makes the rules). I would just be cautious about any study that is funded by a game producer that concludes that games are good for you.
I don't doubt that such a positive correllation is possible. I just am leary of any study that finds in favor of the payor. It's like those periodic news stories you see where it is touted that businesses are moving back toward formal attire, that "the suit is back", or similar sentiments. The most common sources for those news items (if they are even worthy of being called "news") are PR firms associated with menswear retailers like The Men's Warehouse. All the statistics in the press releases seem well researched and are accepted as valid, but the conclusions are being made while the menswear retailer(s) hold(s) the purse strings.
The only reassuring thing about this particular study is the research entity, the Mind Research Network. They appear to be a legitimate non-profit corporation whose mission centers around understanding mental illness and cognitive processes. I couldn't find any serious criticisms of their other work. It will be interesting to see how this study fares as it is reviewed by peers and colleagues.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Apparently the key phrase here is "some parts of the brain."
Those parts didn't include the ones that were supposed to keep my roommate from failing out of college while he was playing Tetris.
I used to play the original tetris on a 386. It was incredibly relaxing: When you activated the turbo button while tetris started, it calibrated its delay loop for sizzling 40 MHz. Then push it again to clock it down to 4.77 MHz and enjoy. You could spend a whole day playing it and achieve miracle high scores, all the while doing things, like spending a couple of minutes in the bathroom, making coffee in the kitchen, doing homework etc.
How I miss the turbo button...
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
...you improve Tetris's brain.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
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.
And, as has been observed, the test subjects were a group of "adolescent girls", so that is quite likely what happened. But forget about all that. The important thing to remember is that Tetris does cause brain growth. Studies have shown it. All you Tetris-brain-growth-deniers may now be labeled as extremists with an agenda who stupidly ignore the findings of the scientific community. How can you be so so stupid? You need to play more Tetris.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) ). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003)).
I don't know whether it applies broadly or just to this particular game, but I can state that Tetris had a profound impact on my wife's quality of life. She was born with brain damage from a lack of oxygen due to pregnancy complications. This left her epileptic and with extremely poor muscle control/coordination. She used to get made fun of in school because kids thought she was mentally retarded because she moved slowly and awkwardly (just the opposite, really -- she was the first woman to ever get a scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, something she continued all the way through college. The parts of her brain that affect motor control are still damaged, but EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
It also raises a few more interesting questions... boys and girls tend to excel in different areas (math vs. language, for instance). Could these different strengths and weaknesses be a result of video game use, or could they be in part a cause of boys' higher inclination to play video games? Of course, it could also be completely unrelated (cue "correlation is not causation").
Obviously another study is required. Where do I sign up?!
Since the differences have been documented well before the advent of video games, they're definitely not causative.
However, there is a theory that the differences are NOT innate, but rather, a result of socialization that begins as soon as gender is known. We speak to boys and girls differently, even if they're newborns. We talk about them differently, play with them differently, and even perceive them differently. Now that most children's genders are known months before they are born, that gender socialization can begin in utero (and several experiments have documented that fetuses learn from repeated experiences before they're born, such as being read the same book or hearing the same piece of music).
It's a difficult theory to test. While there are children who are born with the wrong external genitalia, who don't learn their chromosomal gender until secondary sex characteristics begin developing at puberty, they're hardly a "normal" sample to test on (usually, they were exposed to high levels of androgens or estrogens in utero, causing the development of the "wrong" genitalia), nor are they a statistically significant sample. It's impossible to hide a baby's gender from EVERYONE; even if you could, you wouldn't get human subjects clearance on raising a cohort of girls as boys or boys as girls. But the fact that we can't test it doesn't mean we can *ignore* it, either, and there may still be ways to test... such as:
* Testing for differences in toddlers whose gender was known at the 20-week anatomy scan vs. those whose gender was unknown until birth
* Evaluating parents' attitudes toward gender based on self-reports and observational studies, and then evaluating their children's "gender-based" skills
These methods might detect a difference, in which case, it's more likely that the difference is primarily socialization... or they might not, in which case, you know practically nothing, because it may be that the slight delay in gender socialization or the attitudes of parents vs. the rest of society isn't enough to outweigh the onslaught of gender socialization children go through from day one. But it might be fun to see.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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.
As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, [..] EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
If you observe closely, there may be occasional giveaway signals to the way your wife's brain approaches hand/eye coordination...
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