And mushrooms with clown shoes waddling in your direction. You run around them, picking up large gold coins. This is not a dream. This is Super Mario 64. And while you play, your brain is changing.
Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin studied adults playing the popular first-person video game and found remarkable changes in gamers’ cerebellum, right prefrontal cortex, and right hippocampus. These are areas typically associated with executive function, spatial orientation, and memory formation.
We have long known about our brain’s plasticity, the way it literal reshapes itself as we learn. But these findings are particularly intriguing, as they show a direct, causal relationship between playing and brain growth. And according to the research team: “The presented video game training could therefore be used to counteract known risk factors for mental disease such as smaller hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume in, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disease.”
Even more intriguing is an additional data point: gamers who looked forward to playing showed even more change than those who merely played as requested, “evidence suggesting a predictive role of desire in volume change.”
We’ve discussed this sort of thin before, the idea that people have more control over their brain growth that science used to think: in a study (reported on by Scientific American) on permanent changes to working memory: “[Researchers] found that people who have a growth mindset about intelligence… showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence.”
In other words—if you think you can get smarter, and you want to, and you want to have fun doing it, then playing games will definitely help.
Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin studied adults playing the popular first-person video game and found remarkable changes in gamers’ cerebellum, right prefrontal cortex, and right hippocampus. These are areas typically associated with executive function, spatial orientation, and memory formation.
We have long known about our brain’s plasticity, the way it literal reshapes itself as we learn. But these findings are particularly intriguing, as they show a direct, causal relationship between playing and brain growth. And according to the research team: “The presented video game training could therefore be used to counteract known risk factors for mental disease such as smaller hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume in, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disease.”
Even more intriguing is an additional data point: gamers who looked forward to playing showed even more change than those who merely played as requested, “evidence suggesting a predictive role of desire in volume change.”
We’ve discussed this sort of thin before, the idea that people have more control over their brain growth that science used to think: in a study (reported on by Scientific American) on permanent changes to working memory: “[Researchers] found that people who have a growth mindset about intelligence… showed greater improvement on the visuospatial reasoning tests than those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence.”
In other words—if you think you can get smarter, and you want to, and you want to have fun doing it, then playing games will definitely help.
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