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Study Finds Frequent Gaming Changes Your Brain
Coolhand2120 writes "Gamers always felt they had more grey matter. The LA Times reports there is now proof: 'Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards center of the brain than peers who didn't play video games as much — suggesting that gaming may be correlated to changes in the brain much as addictions are. European scientists reported the discovery Tuesday in the journal Translational Psychiatry. Psychologist Simone Kuhn of Ghent University in Belgium and colleagues recruited 154 healthy 14-year-olds in Berlin and divided them into two groups. Twenty-four girls and 52 boys were frequent gamers who played at least nine hours of video games each week. Fifty-eight girls and 20 boys were infrequent gamers, who played less than nine hours a week. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed differences in the test subjects' brains. Frequent gamers had more gray matter in a portion of the brain known as the left ventral striatum, which affects the interplay of emotions and behavior. Previous research identified striatal function as a 'core candidate promoting addictive behavior.'"
Slashdot Headline: Study Finds Frequent Gaming Changes Your Brain
FTA: They couldn't determine if the frequent gamers' brains grew larger as a result of playing video games or if those kids were attracted to gaming because that part of their brain was enlarged in the first place
At least the submitter could have read the article.
Any type of learning changes the way your brain works.
They're all pretty young, the sample appears pretty small and the sample would seem unbalanced.
Isn't the brain already undergoing radical changes at that age? I am not doubting there being an effect, but how does that effect pan out over time? Will a difference remain a decade later?
How does frequent gaming affect people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.?
The study did NOT find that gaming changes your brain.
Slashdot editors - please RTFA when you get sent a submission!
It found a correlation between certain brain physiology and gaming but they state fairly carefully:
"Whether the volumetric differences in ventral striatum between frequent and moderate video game players are preconditions that lead to a vulnerability for preoccupation with gaming or whether they are a consequence of long-lasting activation during gaming can not be determined with a cross-sectional study."
They're not claiming causality here. They're claiming a correlation in their findings. Not ruling it out, but they're definitely not saying they found one causes the other. So the headline is completely wrong.
I was playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption when that came out a while back. One day during that time, I was driving to work and stopped for petrol on the way. Two young, shabby-looking foreign tourists approached me and asked for a lift. I wasn't going where they wanted to go, so that didn't work out. But I also noticed they weren't planning their trip very well because I saw them using an awful crappy small map, which didn't include the required detail to really plan a decent route to begin with. So I went into the shop to pay for my petrol and I bought a decent map of the area along with it, which included both the current location and the place they told me they were looking to go to. Before returning to my vehicle, I handed the hitchhikers the map, which I hoped would help them out a little bit. Now you have to understand, I am not the kind of person who would do such a thing regularly. I don't think I'm a mean person or anything, but I'm no saint for sure. I don't help out random strangers on a regular basis, if at all. But after handing over the map, I was thinking to myself: "This will really boost my honor!", which is one of the primary game mechanics in RDR, rewarding the player for decent behaviour in the game world. After realizing my frequent playing of the game might have actually manipulated me into doing some good in real life, I came to the conclusion that maybe frequent gaming isn't such a bad thing per se.
This is a true story, I swear.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
i wish i can grep, less, awk, search in real life.
How timely, I just read a blog post about brain plasticity. Basically, the list of activities that do not alter the brain is probably much shorter than the list of activities that do. The human brain is constantly rewiring itself. Here's an article about a study that shows brain plasticity may be even more radical than we thought, possibly even reprogramming the genomes of individual neurons: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/11/genome.html
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Heart medication causes heart attacks.
A study finds that people on heart medication are 3 times more likely to suffer a sudden heart attack, than other people. The conclusion is obvious.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
When I was taking driving lessions, we had some training for slippery roads. Which involved driving an obstacle course on an oiled road.. The obstacles were some human-like dolls that was hanging from some crane-like system.
In that period, I was also playing Carmageddon 2 a lot. It had fun open-world'ish levels, and pretty good car physics for that time. And it was fun :) I've also played OutRun a lot earlier, and some Need for Speed too.
So, I was driving down the track, and the obstacles were moved in via remote control. The car started to slip, and .. the best way to describe it is that it felt like some switch flipped over in my mind, and my thinking went something like this : "Obstacle 1 and 2, mapped out in a 3d overview of that part of the track. Distances, car's speed, road grip, size & weight estimated.. *calculating* .. Route found, execute.." and I flew through them perfectly, at high speed.
The driving instructor just sat there, mouth agape. When he managed to cloe it again, the first words were "Where the hell did you learn to drive like that?" -- which is when I realized that my mind had gone into "gaming mode" more or less. And that it seemed to do rather well in the real world, too, in that occasion. When I think about how inaccurate it is (how many times do you miscalculate in games?), how the goals are skewed there (hitting something at high speed is a minor slowdown, not instant death. And speed is king), it's not a comfortable thought..
Still, it have popped up a few times, and on some of those occations it has saved my bacon. So it's not really as bad as I feared. It mostly happen when the normal brain goes "Oh shit! PANIC TIME" - and at those times it's welcome with something that can dispassionately gather and process data at high speed, and come up with solutions. Of course, sometimes those solutions are not exactly sane.. ("Shoot a rocket at the fucker", or "hitting him in that part of the car will make him skid out of the road") .. So it needs an extra sanity check before it can be used.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."