Tetris Improves Your Brain 145
An anonymous reader writes "Playing Tetris increases the density of the cortex and improves the efficiency of some parts of the brain, according to researchers investigating video games and other complex spatial tasks." Unfortunately, storing a half million copies of the song negates any practical functional gains beyond loading your trunk very efficiently.
I is real clever!!! (Score:3, Informative)
They do.. (Score:4, Informative)
Playing lots of FPS or "action video games" do have significant, measurable effects on cognition including speeding reaction time, decreasing attentional blink, improving multi-element tracking, improving spatial resolution for both vision and attention, etc etc.. A lot of interesting research on the subject is being done at the Bavelier Lab [rochester.edu]. Review papers can be found here [rochester.edu] and here [rochester.edu] [PDF warning].
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real (Score:4, Informative)
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous [slashdot.org] now would they?
You do realize that not all fMRI research uses the methodology in the paper referred to by the slashdot article you linked to, right? Not even most of it, actually. The article you referred to only discusses the case where the regions of interest for correlations between behavioral and fMRI measures are selected by the size of the correlation itself. Much of that bad stuff happens in the field of social neuroscience. Although I haven't read the paper in question because it evidently won't be out until Thursday, there's no reason to believe based on the blurb that they had any reason to use that (horribly flawed) methodology.
Re:Only teenage girls were used in this study (Score:3, Informative)
It also raises a few more interesting questions... boys and girls tend to excel in different areas (math vs. language, for instance). Could these different strengths and weaknesses be a result of video game use, or could they be in part a cause of boys' higher inclination to play video games? Of course, it could also be completely unrelated (cue "correlation is not causation").
Obviously another study is required. Where do I sign up?!
Since the differences have been documented well before the advent of video games, they're definitely not causative.
However, there is a theory that the differences are NOT innate, but rather, a result of socialization that begins as soon as gender is known. We speak to boys and girls differently, even if they're newborns. We talk about them differently, play with them differently, and even perceive them differently. Now that most children's genders are known months before they are born, that gender socialization can begin in utero (and several experiments have documented that fetuses learn from repeated experiences before they're born, such as being read the same book or hearing the same piece of music).
It's a difficult theory to test. While there are children who are born with the wrong external genitalia, who don't learn their chromosomal gender until secondary sex characteristics begin developing at puberty, they're hardly a "normal" sample to test on (usually, they were exposed to high levels of androgens or estrogens in utero, causing the development of the "wrong" genitalia), nor are they a statistically significant sample. It's impossible to hide a baby's gender from EVERYONE; even if you could, you wouldn't get human subjects clearance on raising a cohort of girls as boys or boys as girls. But the fact that we can't test it doesn't mean we can *ignore* it, either, and there may still be ways to test... such as:
* Testing for differences in toddlers whose gender was known at the 20-week anatomy scan vs. those whose gender was unknown until birth
* Evaluating parents' attitudes toward gender based on self-reports and observational studies, and then evaluating their children's "gender-based" skills
These methods might detect a difference, in which case, it's more likely that the difference is primarily socialization... or they might not, in which case, you know practically nothing, because it may be that the slight delay in gender socialization or the attitudes of parents vs. the rest of society isn't enough to outweigh the onslaught of gender socialization children go through from day one. But it might be fun to see.
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real (Score:4, Informative)
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf [biomedcentral.com] . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.