National Public Radio has released a story that actually speaks very highly of video games and their ability to make people smarter — sort of.
The story titled, "Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills," consulted Daphne Bavelier, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, brain researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Jay Pratt, and neuroscientist Lauren Sergio of York University in Toronto.
Bavelier’s research provided all kinds of positive effects that video games can have on the brain. Gamers, for example, have stronger contrast sensitivity, which means they are better at differentiating between shades of gray, a very useful skill when doing something like driving in the fog.
Bavelier also said that gamers are more focused, and more difficult to distract, which is a welcome contradiction to the stereotype that gamers all have ADD. Gamers are better at switching quickly between tasks making them better multi-taskers, and are better at acquiring and integrating new information faster as well, according to Bavelier.
Pratt’s research looks into the difference between men and women and their skills in spatial cognition, which is the ability to visualize and manipulate 3D objects in your mind. Men are typically much better at this skill, but women who play games, or had been trained to play games, scored just as well as men in Pratt’s tests. This is an important skill in mathematics and geometry.
Sergio likened gamers to musicians saying, "If you look at professional piano players, professional musicians, you see this phenomena where they don’t activate as much of their brain to do very complicated things with their hands that the rest of us need to do. And we found that the gamers did this as well."
While all of these researchers spoke highly of the effects gaming can have on the brain, they still expressed hope that video games would become less violent, and said that moderation is the key.
Click the link below to read the story, and to link it to your parents as quickly ask possible so they can finally understand how important video gaming is for your brain. You can also listen to the story at NPR’s website, as well. They are a radio organization after all.
You can also click here, to see why the above image relates to this story, to some degree at least.
[NPR]
