When Gaming Is Good For You

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

When Gaming Is Good For You!

Video games can change a person’s brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better.

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second—four times faster than most people, other researchers found.

Scientists also found that women—who make up about 42% of computer and video game players were better able to mentally manipulate 3D objects, a skill at which men are generally more adept. Most studies looked at adults rather than children.

Electronic game play has its downside. Brain scans show that violent video games can alter brain function in healthy young men after just a week of play, depressing activity among regions associated with emotional control, researchers at Indiana University recently reported.

Other studies have found an association between compulsive gaming and being overweight, introverted and prone to depression. The studies didn’t compare the benefits of gaming with such downsides.

The violent action games that often worry parents most had the strongest beneficial effect on the brain. “These are not the games you would think are mind-enhancing,” said cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, who studies the effect of action games at Switzerland’s University of Geneva and the University of Rochester in New York.

In 2010, gaming companies sold 257 million video and computer games, according to figures compiled by the industry’s trade group, the Entertainment Software Association.

For scientists, the industry unintentionally launched a mass experiment in the neurobiology of learning. Millions of people have immersed themselves in the interactive reward conditioning of electronic game play, from Tetris, Angry Birds, and Farmville, to shooter games and multiplayer, role-playing fantasies such as League of Legend, which has been played 1 billion times or so in the two years since it was introduced.

“Video games change your brain,” said University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green, who studies how electronic games affect abilities.

So does learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating the streets of London, which have all been shown to change the brain’s physical structure. The powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine strengthen neural circuits in much the same the way that exercise builds muscles.

But “games definitely hit the reward system in a way that not all activities do,” he said.

“There has been a lot of attention wasted in figuring out whether these things turn us into killing machines,” said computational analyst Joshua Lewis at the University of California in San Diego, who studied 2,000 computer game players. “Not enough attention has been paid to the unique and interesting features that video games have outside of the violence.”

A three-year study of 491 middle school students found that the more children played computer games the higher their scores on a standardized test of creativity—regardless of race, gender, or the kind of game played. The researchers ranked students on a widely used measure called the Torrance Test of Creativity, which involves such tasks as drawing an “interesting and exciting” picture from a curved shape on a sheet of paper, giving the picture a title, and then writing a story about it.

The results were ranked by seven researchers for originality, length, and complexity on a standardized three-point scale for each factor, along with detailed questionnaires.  In contrast, using cellphones, the Internet, or computers for other purposes had no effect on creativity, they said.

P.S. Hey, my name is Amy Findley, and I just wanted share this with you.  I thought it was very interesting about the bit about kids doing better and higher test of creativity.  Let me know your thoughts by commenting below and if you liked this post make sure you hit the like button.

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