[ExI] video games impact on grey matter

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Mon Aug 14 21:00:04 UTC 2017


9,
> ​​
> Christian Saucier <csaucier at sovacs.com> wrote:
> > Thinking is good for the brain!
>

​Well, I do believe that, barring delusions, manias, obsessions, etc..  In
what circumstances hippocampal activity​ is good is probably just not
known.  Also not know is whether growth or decline goes on on a continuous
basis.  Did my brain add or subtract anything today?

​
If you use your
> hippocampus, it will grow grey matter

Not playing some games, according to the article.

bill k wrote
​
That might mean that brain improvements in one area could cause worse
performance in other areas.

>From my background in learning theory I'd say that it's hard to tell if
learning one thing helps or hurts learning another.  It's an empirical
question.  When I switched from tennis to racketball I found some positive
and some negative transfer.

Taxi drivers:  use it or lose it seems to sum that up.  Why don't those
morons just assign drivers to certain areas, not the whole city?  Have they
heard of GPS?

bill w



> > The difference between a "first-person shooting game" and "3D-platform
> > games" used in this study seem very narrow to me.  I would be interested
> to
> > know the specific games that were used.
> >
> > Maybe another way to view this conclusion is simply this:
> ​​
> If you use your
> > hippocampus, it will grow grey matter; if you do not use your
> hippocampus,
> > it will lose grey matter.  This should apply not only to the playing of
> > video games, but to practically any other types of human action.
> >
> > This is the summary of that study from nature.com: "The hippocampus is
> > critical to healthy cognition, yet results in the current study show that
> > action video game players have reduced grey matter within the
> hippocampus. A
> > subsequent randomised longitudinal training experiment demonstrated that
> > first-person shooting games reduce grey matter within the hippocampus in
> > participants using non-spatial memory strategies. Conversely,
> participants
> > who use hippocampus-dependent spatial strategies showed increased grey
> > matter in the hippocampus after training. A control group that trained on
> > 3D-platform games displayed growth in either the hippocampus or the
> > functionally connected entorhinal cortex. A third study replicated the
> > effect of action video game training on grey matter in the hippocampus.
> > These results show that video games can be beneficial or detrimental to
> the
> > hippocampal system depending on the navigation strategy that a person
> > employs and the genre of the game." --
> > http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2017155a.html
> >
>
>
> They have already found this with studies of London taxi drivers that
> had to spend 3 or 4 years memorising the London street map and
> planning routes.
> (Uber and GPS may end this exercise).
>
> <http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/12/08/
> acquiring-the-knowledge-changes-the-brains-of-london-cab-drivers/>
>
> This task did increase the size of the hippocampus.
> Quote:
> She showed that a driver’s hippocampus is most active when they first
> plan a route. She found that the hippocampus shrinks back to a normal
> size once drivers retire. And she found that acquiring The Knowledge
> comes at a cost – taxi drivers find it more difficult to integrate new
> routes into their existing maps, and other aspects of their memory
> seemed to suffer.
> -------
>
> ​​
> That might mean that brain improvements in one area could cause worse
> performance in other areas.
>
>
> BillK
>
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