Computer Games & Brain Development

Parents who are concerned about their children's game habits have good reason to be. Computer games may halt the development of the frontal areas of the brain, reports Professor Ryunta Kawashima from Tohoku University in Japan. Together with his colleagues, he measured the level of brain activity in teenagers playing a Nintendo game and found that computer games stimulate only those parts of the brain associated with vision and movement. As the frontal areas of the brain are involved in controlling behavior and making rational decisions, the researchers speculate that children who spend several hours a day playing computer games may have issues with self-control.

Beta Waves

• An earlier study conducted by Akio Mori, a cranial nerve specialist at Nihon University College of Humanities and Sciences in Tokyo, yielded similar conclusions. Mori analyzed the EEG profiles of 240 participants between the ages of six and 29 and found that regular gamers had less frontal lobe beta brainwave activity, which is characteristic of an active cognitive state, than people who rarely play computer games. According to Mori, the gamers' EEG profiles were akin to the profiles of people suffering from heavy dementia.

Violent Games

• Other studies suggest that the violent content of computer games stimulates arousal centers in the brain that lie outside of the cortical areas involved in perception and thinking. Dr. Vincent Mathews, a professor of radiology at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and his colleagues compared a group of teenagers who played a game involving military combat to another group who played a nonviolent game. The researchers found that the first group showed more activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotional arousal, and less activation in the frontal lobes than the second group.

Neural Connections

• According to Dr. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, the teen years are the time where the growth of new brain tissue slows down and children enter into the pruning phase. During this phase, the cells and connections that are used will survive and flourish, and the rest will wither and die. A teen who regularly engages in arithmetic and logic puzzles forms stronger neural connections in the frontal brain areas than someone who mostly plays computer games, Dr. Giedd says. Neural connections are tendencies of neurons to activate each other. They partially determine our cognitive abilities, and once they are formed, they are hard to alter.

Training Games

• Advertisers of "brain-training" games promise that, unlike standard computer games, training games can help people re-train the brain. However, a study conducted in collaboration between British researchers and the BBC Lab UK website and published in Nature Online suggests otherwise. 11,430 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 60 practiced online tasks for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, for six weeks. One group of participants was given reasoning, planning and problem-solving tasks, a second group was given commercial brain-training programs focused on developing short-term memory, attention, and mathematics, and a third group used the Internet to find answers to obscure questions. After the six weeks, none of the three groups had a significant advantage in scores on tests measuring reasoning, memory and learning abilities.

The Research is Inconclusive

• Peter Snyder, a neurologist who studies aging at Brown University's Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island, remains unconvinced that brain training has no effect on brain development. The people who can benefit from re-training the brain are older people, people with degenerative brain diseases, for example Alzheimer's, and people who have suffered brain injuries, Snyder says. The participants in the study published in Nature Online were volunteers with high starting scores unlikely to improve within a short time interval. If the study had targeted groups with a lower mean starting score and had involved more intense training over a longer time period, the training may well have led to measurable improvement, Snyder adds.