Tommy, your tween, is blasting video game bad guys. Five-year-old Theresa stares rapturously at an episode of Annoying Orange , a YouTube video on the gleaming screen. You sit down. Take a deep breath. To relax, you scroll through Facebook and catch up on your email.
Meekly, you join the other mesmerized zombies…. Today, kids spend seven hours a day , on average, on some sort of electronic device, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and 97 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 play digital games. Or not? If tech toys are mentally malevolent, why are our kids so happy? But if we take the e-companions away, our kids go crazy… like addicts!
Video games come in many beguiling forms, but only a few subgenres have been examined closely in terms of their effects on the brain. In a study, for example, researchers found that FPS game participants showed a more flexible mindset and faster reaction time than non-gamers. But wait: are these types of visual-spatial skills useful to anyone other than future assassins?
Many bloodless vocations — including engineering, mathematics, natural sciences, economic forecasting, architecture, art, and design — require the eye-hand intelligence that video games develop.
Medical surgery gut-soaked, but ethically so , for example, requires visual-spatial adeptness. That executive control center is essential for weighing risks and rewards and for putting the brakes on the pursuit of immediate rewards like gaming in favor of more adaptive longer-term goals like next week's chemistry test.
This region of the brain doesn't reach maximum capacity until age 25 or 30, which may explain why young people are more likely to engage in hours of play while ignoring basic needs like food, sleep, and hygiene.
Without mature frontal lobes to draw on, adolescents and teens are less able to weigh negative consequences and curb potentially harmful behavior like excessive video gaming, which also impacts frontal lobe development.
Violent video games are of concern to many experts. In a study of 45 adolescents, playing violent video games for only 30 minutes immediately lowered activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain compared to those who participated in a non-violent game.
Previous research showed that just 10—20 minutes of violent gaming increased activity in the brain regions associated with arousal, anxiety, and emotional reaction, while simultaneously reducing activity in the frontal lobes associated with emotion regulation and executive control. The dopamine release that comes from gaming is so powerful, say researchers, it can almost shut the prefrontal regions down.
That's one reason why gamers like Rosner can play for 18 hours straight. And for kids like Rosner, who feel like social outcasts, excelling in the world of gaming can provide a sense of mastery and confidence missing from their actual lives. It was the complete opposite of what I had in real life. Practicing anything repetitively physically changes the brain. With time and effort, you get better at the specific task you're practicing, whether it's shooting at the enemy in a video game or hitting a baseball.
Those repetitive actions and thoughts stimulate connections between brain cells, creating neural pathways between different parts of your brain. The more you practice a certain activity, the stronger that neural pathway becomes. That's the structural basis of learning. Neural pathways that are not used eventually get pruned. In the early s, most research suggested that perceptual and cognitive training was very specific to the task at hand. That's one of the problems with many brain training tools: it's easy for people to improve on the individual mini-tasks they're given—say, arranging a list in alphabetical order or completing a crossword puzzle—but those tasks don't always translate into better thinking in general.
Video games seem to differ from other kinds of brain training. Shawn Green, Ph. Studies show, for example, playing action video games enhances visual capabilities, such as tracking multiple objects, mentally rotating objects, and storing and manipulating them in the memory centers of the brain. That holds true even for the most maligned action-entertainment games.
In subsequent studies, Kawashima established that arithmetic exercises also stimulate more brain activity than listening to music or listening to reading. Reading out loud was also found to be a very effective activity for activating the frontal lobe. Kawashima, visiting the UK to speak at this weekend's annual conference of the private learning programme Kumon Educational UK, said the message to parents was clear. This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people.
Computer games stunt teen brains. Hi-tech maps of the mind show that computer games are damaging brain development and could lead to children being unable to control violent behaviour. The researchers are particularly concerned that by spending many hours playing games some children will not develop their frontal lobes, which play a crucial role in controlling behavior and in developing memory, emotion and learning. In contrast, tasks such as arithmetic stimulate brain activity in the frontal lobe, which is thought to continue developing until adulthood.
Professor Ryuta Kawashima, who led the team that carried out the research, told The Observer that the discovery is highly important.
Kawashima asserts that children must be encouraged to practice basic mathematics, reading and writing to boost the development of the frontal lobe.
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