Videogaming Keeps the Brain From Aging

Ant wrote to mention a Globe and Mail article stating that videogames keep the mind young and help in quick focusing on different tasks. "A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable."

It's True

[Lehk228]

You can prove it yourself just go on any counterstrike server even the adults act like thay are 12 years old

Or Maybe...

[slarrg]

People who are capable of changing tasks quickly enjoy playing videogames.

Correlation not Causation

[sallymander]

Okay, so they surveyed 100 college students. Of gamers I know in college, a very large percentage tend to be engineers, and many of those tend to be Asian American...and speak a second language because of their heritage...and very likely came from families that really emphasized math and sciences. Most "mental tests" tend to lean in favor of that population.

It's improved my memory

[DaNasty]

I've certainly noticed it's improved my memory and allowed me to become more adept at finding my way around new places. Expansive games like GTA: SA have allowed me to learn locations & glean directions with just a cusory glance at a map. Thanks videogames!

The trade-off

[slashdotmsiriv]

On the other hand. if you instead of spending your time playing VG's you spend it studying, working, reading an educational book, socializing with fun or interesing people, the benefits would far surpass the whatever skills these ppl claim you acquire.

(Not to mention the increased number of opportunities to meet chicks, unless of course you are this guy
http://media.putfile.com/PurePwnage-WoWisafeeling [putfile.com] ...)

Re:Europe vs US

[cyber-vandal]

Which as far as I can tell is due to 2 factors: most Europeans start learning a foreign language at a very young age; and there is an enormous amount of English language media out there.
I bet your charts are full of US and UK music in English, I bet your TV channels have English language shows with subtitles, and you are currently posting on an English language website.
Contrast my experience as a Briton learning French: there are no French songs in the charts, my only opportunity to see French language shows is TV5 without subtitles and there are no French language websites that really grab my interest although I'm still looking around.
Learning other languages you have it even more simple given that French, Spanish and Italian all have a lot in common, and Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian likewise.
If you could speak a language very different to your own with little to no exposure to the language outside lessons I'd be more impressed, as it is mainland Europeans have it very easy with regards to being multilingual and your arrogance is misplaced.

Re:Or Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely the point that my Psych. teacher tries to hammer into our brains:

coincidence != causality.

If only half of the studies out there realized this fact.

Re:Interesting, although gamers already know this.

[Aladrin]

It's at least as intuitive as a car's controls. You turn a wheel to make the car change direction? Which way is clockwise, left or right? You press a lever down to make it go forwards. You press an identical level to make it stop? And you press it the same way! You have to move a stick to different positions for different gears (it would appear as speeds) and it also handles reverse? But there's only 1 gear for that? If you'd never seen a car, it would be very unintuitive.

For the psx, there's just a stick that goes left or right to make the car go left or right. You press a button to go. You press a button to stop. (And most race games make this the reverse as well.) So you've got forwards and backwards as buttons. It changes gears for you and handles reverse automatically.

Nothing except a car teaches you how to drive a car. It's the same with video games. It's a different thought process to learn so that it becomes almost instinct for you.

This is so much the case that we are even now still exploring new control methods. Nintendo Revolution has created a 'new' method. (If you listen to Nintendo, they invented everything but the paddle and joystick.)

Exercize the mind, mind is healthy....

[Havenwar]

But what about the body? Sure, gaming is good for the brain... so is readin, drawing, studying, thinking, fantasizing, and pretty much anything else you do with your mind. How do I know... simple - if you stop you're dead.

But more importantly, as I said, what about the body? I'm pretty sure it isn't helped by those 48 hour MMORPG maratons. Really want to have the mind of a 12 year old in the body of a 75 year old... when you'r thirty, or maybe forty? Really?

I think I'll diversify a bit more myself. Maybe pick up another language... or I dunno... not game so much.

Just one more level.

Re:No camping!

[IdleTime]

One of the conditions of mastering a language is that you actually are thinking in that language you are about to use. The hardest part is to actually change the mind in order to think in a foreign language. I speak 7 languages but I really only think in 4 of them.

Re:Or Maybe...

[ScrewMaster]

I think they have it backwards. The GAME is the task, one that requires the ability concentrate, to focus on a single task. Multitasking has nothing to do with it: most good multitaskers I know absolutely SUCK at video games. Extreme singletasking is what is going on here. Personally, I'm a terrible multitasker ... as a software engineer I perfer to sit at my computer undisturbed for as long as necessary to solve whatever problem is at hand. Conversely, asking me to cook a complicated meal that requires keeping track of multiple processes absolutely pulls my cork. But I've been a gamer since the rise of coin-op in the late seventies and have been playing network games since MazeWars came out on the Mac twenty-odd years ago. When texture-mapped games were big, I played Duke Nukem, Blood, Shadow Warrior and Descent (and anything else network-aware that we could get our hands on) with a dozen friends on a LAN in my basement. I don't know where they get the idea that intense gaming requires multitasking skills. Gamers tend to be people that can shut out the world and keep one thing in their heads to the exclusion of all else. I've done that to the point of forgetting about food and drink and only leaving the game world when I notice a bladder overgauge alarm. One night we played until dawn, and still didn't notice the time until one guy's cell phone rang and it was his wife saying, "Dear, I don't know if you remember, but my car is in the shop and I have to be at work in an hour." Multitasking, my ass.

Re:Europe vs US

[tony1343]

The fact that Americans don't speak multiple languages also stems from the geopolitical reality of the nation. I can drive thousands of miles in any direction, and the language never changes. You cannot say the same thing about Europe. It is necessary to learn multiple languages in Europe. In America it is just not so. Now, this will hopefully change in the future. Spanish is becoming quite prevalent. Also, with the fact that travel across the globe is so easy, hopefully Americans will become more and more bilingual. Hopefully, American schools will start to teach a second language at an early age, as this will largely wipe out the discrepancy.

Re:Correlation not Causation

[Matt Edd]

I think the most important part of that statement is this

they surveyed 100 college students.

100 is a very small sample size. The correlation my not even be there.

Re:the study i s ryte

[Valdoran]

The guy who modded you as troll is a fool or dense !

Or types like that.

Actually, here's another idea

[Moraelin]

The fact is, games started with a simple interface, if only by virtue of not having CPU or RAM for more complex stuff. Pong only had two directions: up and down. Pacman had four. At this point we're not even talking about a fire button yet: just the directions. Then games got a fire button. Then two. Then gradually... well, have you looked at a console controller lately? A PS2 one sports no less than 12 buttons, including the thumbsticks which can _also_ act as buttons, in addition to their normal function. And then there are PC games which put even that to shame: using two dozen buttons or more is the norm in some genres, like flight sims.

Then we've had to learn other stuff. There are all sorts of concepts and reflexes which got added one by one. And we gamers learned them one by one, over the course of two decades or more. We already had the previous concept, and the time to get thoroughly used to it, before we got the next one dumped upon us.

Another poster a while ago compared it to a "game grammar". (In the same kind of way as an XML Schema is called a "grammar".) It tells you what goes where, and what kind of thing is expected in which sequence. Quite often cotrary to any RL rules or experience.

E.g., you already know that if it's a RPG, you're supposed to walk up to every single person in a major capital and talk to them. (IRL that's not what it's expected.) Or that it's just normal to try all conflicting option in a dialogue until something happens. (What would happen IRL if you said the exact opposites within 5 minutes in the same conversation, is left as an exercise.) Or you're supposed to already know distinctions like between "named NPC" and "generic NPC". (IRL everyone is named. Other than in medieval Japan, noone was ever simply called "a rice farmer".) And about a thousand other little things like "quest", "random drop" (e.g., that you don't get wool by shearing a sheep or meat by slaughtering a pig, but both might -- or might not -- "drop" when you kill one. Or that when asked to bring 4 zebra hooves, that doesn't mean one zebra.), etc, etc, etc.

Or here's some more anecdotal evidence that a co-worker randomly provided in a conversation: he said that his old father, in spite of otherwise being an intelligent man, has trouble understanding that the same button can perform several different and unrelated functions, depending on the "mode" the game/device/etc is in or on what other buttons are pressed at the same time. The guy has a lifetime of experience telling him that, say, in a car, the windshield wiper button does only one thing: start/stop the wipers. And if you need a different function, like accelerate, it will be a different button or pedal, not switching modes and using the windshield wiper button to accelerate. Now look at the gamepad use in many games, and you can surely see how its use is based on the exact opposite assumption.

There are all these things that you're supposed to already _know_. And even when the game gives you a tutorial, it's usually just the fine points, not the basics you're supposed to already know. (If it were a RL language's grammar, imagine your very first tutorial being "how to use the Ablative mode in the Less-Than-Perfect tense", but no explanation wth is the Ablative and wth of a tense is that to start with, or how do you form either from a normal word. That's game tutorials for a first time gamer.)

That's the problem with first time gamers, especially if they're adults who can't spend 16 hours a day for 8 years just learning all that the hard way. They're expected to already know some two dozen years of game concepts evolution, and they just don't. It's not that we gamers are smarter or have a bigger, more flexible brain. We just know that "game grammar" already. We do ok with just some advanced tutorial to refresh that grammar, or the fine points used in that game, but a first timer simply lacks the basic notions he's expected to already have.

And to get back on topic, I expect it's the same phenomenon that they're s