Playing Games Changes Your Brain (for the Better)

In front of you, a green field and blue sky. 

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.

What Can Your Brain Do While You Drive a Car?

Not very much. And nothing very well.

Your brain can’t really do anything else while you drive a car. Every time you do something else, the emphasis is on the “else.” While you’re checking your phone, you’re not driving anymore. The car is on autopilot.

We’re not including the things it does automatically, like regulate your breathing, heartbeat, and so on. But your brain can do those things when you’re asleep.

But you wouldn’t drive a car while asleep, would you?

Scientists have discovered that so-called “multi-tasking” requires a splitting of the brain. Different parts of your brain will be used to do a variety of things. If you eat popcorn while watching TV, part of your brain moves your hand into the bowl, while another part pays attention to what Daryl Dixon is doing to zombie number 62.

But driving is not just holding the wheel straight and watching the road. Your working memory temporarily memorizes where all the other cars are so you can keep a sense of them as they move around you. You’re long-term memory is recalling landmarks and routes for you to follow. You’re hippocampus is filtering out the sound of other cars but still paying attention for the sound of horns and sirens, making sure to send those impulses to your frontal cortex where you can process what to do with them.

So, while you’re checking your phone, you’re checking your phone, and nothing else. You’re wiping your working memory clean (where did the other cars go?), distracting your long-term memory (was that a right here or a left) and confusing your hippocampus (I hear a horn but there’s no horn icon in this text message).

And even nothing bad happens while you’re looking at the phone, when you look up again and disengage autopilot, you’re still not driving—you’re getting a whole new set of data before you’re fully immersed in the act of driving again.

So, go ahead, give yourself an estimate—how long did you glace at that phone? 2 seconds? Now double that, to account for how long it takes for your brain to switch.

A car traveling 55 mph covers 322 feet in 4 seconds. And since it takes a person about second to respond to a sudden change in environment, and since most cars take about 120 feet to come to a stop with a sudden application of the brakes from 55 mph, that all adds up to 600 feet.

Anything that happens less than two football fields away from you when you check your phone is going to be an accident.

The Roots of Modern Brain Training through Games

In 2008, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, and Walter J. Perrig presented a paper called “Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory” in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”.

Jaeggi et al conducted experiments on fluid intelligence by having subjects play a “dual n-back” game. (FAQ at gwern.net). Players are shown a grid which contains a letter in one square. Then a different letter in a different square is shown. Then a third, and players are asked if this third letter/position is the same as the first. A fourth is shown, and players answer if it is the same as the second. And so on. The challenge is to keep new information in memory while recalling and processing an older memory. The experiment was to see if, as players improve at the game, they would see improvements in their “working memory.”

Subjects were given a preliminary IQ test, and then played the game over spans ranging from 8 to 19 days. A subsequent IQ test showed better results, and those who played the game over 19 days showed more improvement than those who played for only 8.

Subsequent experiments, (including two more led by Jaeggi, with different teams) one led by Qiu Feiyue, and one led by Susanne Schweizer have produced similar results. These results contradict the conventional wisdom that IQ is hardwired and immutable. And while research into these methods for improving intelligence s still relatively new, controversies about improving intelligence are forcing us to reconsider just what the nature of intelligence is.

Authorities such as Michael Merzenich and Robert Plomin have provided additional grist for the controversy mill. Merzenich argues that improving one’s ability at a game merely makes on better at the game itself, and doesn’t necessarily translate to improvements in other areas. Plomin points out that since the idea of intelligence being unchangeable is flawed, science that contradicts this notion is not very remarkable.

But a collection of other studies show that, if nothing else, brain stimulation does result in physical changes in the brain, whatever the current definition of “intelligence” might be. Consider a study done of London Taxi drivers, which found that after intense practice for their licensing exams, (up to four years of practice) these cabbies had enlarged areas of the hippocampus. No one’s giving them Nobel prizes, but no one can deny the intellectual achievement of memorizing 25,000 streets.

And then there’s the Nun Study at the University of Kentucky, which has found a correlation between positive emotions and low incidence of Alzheimer’s. Intriguingly, they even found cases where nuns with physical (post-mortem) evidence of disease did not display any cognitive symptoms during their lives.

Perhaps this is pushing the boundaries of what IQ means, but if a group of women are living, happily, thirty and forty years past the average age of death, I’d call that pretty smart.