Do video games rot your brain?

Effect of video games on our brain?

When we say video games most of the people think about children. It's true 90% of children do play video games. But let's be frank, that the according to statics average age of a gamer is 33 years old not 8 years old and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults. 

Video games have an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider this statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game "Call of Duty: Black Ops", it had been played for a time of 68000 years world wide. You would be thinking that this is worse instead of playing video games one could do any productive work or read books. I would tell you that action packed games have quite powerful effect and positive effects on many different aspects of your behavior.

 Many Brain scientist had done research in it. What they do is in the lab actually measure directly in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain. So, I am going to take a few examples from our work. One is the saying that you must have heard, is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse. That's a statement about vision.

 

The scientist have also tested this in lab that action gamers vision is better than non-action gamers vision. This happens because of two ways, the first way is that they are actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter, and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using a magnifying glass but only with their eyesight. The other way they are better is being actually being able to resolve different levels of gray. 

 Imagine yourself driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident. So we are leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low visions and to have an impact for retraining their brain to see better. Clearly when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse.

Another saying is that, Games leads to attention problems and greater distractibility, I am sure that you also have heard this. Okay we know how to measure attention in the lab. Brain scientist have done research on how action gamer's brain have attention. So, they discovered that, it is not true that video games leads to attention problem or greater distractibility. 

Actually, those action video games player have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world. This is something we use all the time. When we are driving, you are tracking, keeping track of the cars around you. You are also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving.

The effects of video games on people behavior, Brain scientist can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain and Brain scientist do find many changes, but he main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is the Parietal Cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention. The other one is the Frontal Lobe, which controls how we sustain attention and another one is Anterior Cingulate  which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict.

When Brain scientist do brain imaging they found out that all the three networks are actually much more efficient in people that plau action games. 

All these facts doesn't mean that it is good to play video games whole day no it is not. If you will play in limit it is good.