A new study reveals that habitual
players of action games have less grey matter in their hippocampus, a major
part of the brain. And the more depleted the hippocampus becomes, the more a
person is at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from
depression to schizophrenia, PTSD and Alzheimer's disease. Shaped like a
seahorse, hence its name, the hippocampus is the part of the brain that helps
people to orient themselves (so-called spatial memory) and to remember past
experience (episodic memory). However, there's another important part of the
brain called the striatum that counterbalances the hippocampus. It has an area
known as the caudate nucleus that acts as a kind of "autopilot" and
"reward system" – getting us home from work, for example, and telling
us when it's time to eat, drink, have sex and do other things that keep us
alive and happy. The caudate nucleus also helps us form habits and remember how
to do things like ride a bicycle. Gaming has been shown to stimulate the
caudate nucleus more than the hippocampus; 85 per cent of players rely on that
part of the brain to navigate their way through a game. The problem is, the
more they use the caudate nucleus, the less they use the hippocampus, and as a
result the hippocampus loses cells and atrophies, the new study shows. Specifically,
patients with Parkinson's disease combined with dementia, as well as those with
Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, depression or PTSD – all of whom have less
grey matter in their hippocampus – would not be advised to follow action video
game treatments, according to the study.
To do their investigation, the
researchers recruited close to 100 people (51 men, 46 women) at UdeM and got
them to come in and play a variety of popular shooter games like Call of Duty,
Killzone and Borderlands 2, as well as 3D games from the Super Mario series,
for a total of 90 hours. To establish which participants were spatial learners
(that is, those who favoured their hippocampus) versus response learners (those
using the reward system), the team first had each of them run through a ‘4-on-8’
virtual maze on their computer. From a central hub, they had to navigate down
four identical-looking paths to capture target objects, then, after their gates
were removed, go down the four others. To remember which paths they'd already
been down and not waste time looking for the objects they'd already taken,
spatial learners oriented themselves by the landmarks in the background: a
rock, a mountains, two trees. Response learners didn't do that; they ignored the
landmarks and concentrated instead on remembering a series of right and left
turns in a sequence from their starting position. Once their learning strategy
was established, participants then began playing the action and 3D-platform
video games. The same amount of screen time on each produced very different
effects on the brain. Ninety hours of playing action games led to hippocampal
atrophy in response learners, while 90 hours of playing 3D games led to
increased grey matter within the hippocampal memory system of all participants.
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