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Playing Action Video Games May Be Bad For Your Brain, Study Finds (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader shares a report:Playing first-person shooter video games causes some users to lose grey matter in a part of their brain associated with the memory of past events and experiences, a new study by two Montreal researchers concludes. Gregory West, an associate professor of psychology at the Universite de Montreal, says the neuroimaging study, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to find conclusive evidence of grey matter loss in a key part of the brain as a direct result of computer interaction. "A few studies have been published that show video games could have a positive impact on the brain, namely positive associations between action video games, first-person shooter games, and visual attention and motor control skills," West told CBC News. To date, no one has shown that human-computer interactions could have negative impacts on the brain -- in this case the hippocampal memory system." The four-year study by West and Veronique Bohbot, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University, looked at the impact of action video games on the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a critical role in spatial memory and the ability to recollect past events and experiences.
Grey matter loss seems bad, but at the same time I wonder if we're just detecting humans adapting to technology - maybe it's not so much a net loss in brain functionality but more a manifestation of tradeoffs being made.
For example, growing up there was a lot of emphasis on memorizing information (memorize all the countries of the world, memorize all US states and their capitals, memorize these dates in history, memorize these mathematical equations, etc.). These days that seems far less useful.
So, if we offload to technology the storage and recall of trivia, it wouldn't be surprising to find that some part of our brains are less used compared with those of people 50 years ago. But maybe we'd also see that the brains of people today are better at being exposed to more data without being overwhelmed, or better at quickly sifting through mounds of information to find something in particular, or better at distilling lots of info down to its essence.
The study is more nuanced than that. It says that Response learners (people who count right and left turns) lose grey matter when playing FPS games for extended periods of time. But Spacial learners (those who use landmarks) seem not to be affected. I use spacial cues in FPS games because there is no way that I could remember left/right turns in games like Skyrim.
The study also found that playing 3D platformers (i.e. Mario Brothers) reversed the grey matter loss.
Actual study (open access): http://www.nature.com/mp/journ...
The actual study looks at the navigation strategies used in games and separates both the type of games and the type of players; i.e., players of the same game using different navigation strategies develop their brains differently.
The finding is that if you play first person shooters and just wander around and shoot things, the hippocampus doesn't develop (and decreases in mass). By contrast, if you learn to navigate based on references in the game (or, by dying repeatedly by navigating incorrectly, as is common in the Mario game control group they used) your brain develops.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between Call of Duty pub players and competitive Counter-Strike players. The former just "shoot everything that moves". The latter are highly coordinated like SWAT teams. The present findings seem to suggest that the latter--in the same game--would develop their brain matter, whereas the former would not.