Games that help us

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Playing Brain
We receive most of the information about the world around us through our vision, so we are very dependent on how our eyes work. But receiving information is only half the battle: we also need to be able to handle it. The occipital cortex of the brain and a number of related areas of brain tissue are responsible for processing visual information. Computer games have been focused on visual perception from the very beginning. Joystick vibration and sound accompaniment of the gameplay are, by and large, not so important for commercial success. Scientists have accumulated enough data to say that video games have a positive effect on our ability to process visual information. This is not surprising: the brain can be “trained” just like the muscles of our body.

In 2010 , a group of scientists from Rochester and Minneapolis published a paper showing that people who regularly played video games performed better on visual attention tasks than those who did not play video games. Players of Halo and similar games had an advantage: such activities force the human brain to track objects with specific properties and filter out unnecessary visual information. Thus, a person works better with large arrays of visual data. The scientists themselves say that this technique can help people in situations where their eyes stop processing information normally, for example, with amblyopia. In addition to improving visual attention, players develop spatial thinking and are better at solving problems that require focusing on several objects at the same time.

In the same 2010 , the journal Cortex published event planner email database list an article by Canadian researchers showing differences in information processing between gamers and non-gamers. 13 people who played video games at least four hours a week for three years were compared with the same number of people with no gaming experience. Both groups performed tasks involving the simultaneous use of the visual and motor cortex. The subjects' brain activity was monitored using a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. This device allows us to track even minimal changes in the work of our main organ. The result: gamers coped with the tasks much better than those who did not play. At the same time, they were found to have a change in the way they processed information. Inexperienced gamers used the parietal cortex, as is usually the case with such tasks. Experienced gamers actively involved the frontal lobe in information processing, which suggests that the "gaming" brain works better. Such changes improve any work with visual information that requires simultaneous manual activity, such as surgical skills or assembling various devices. Later studies showed that shooters and computer racing games speed up decision-making based on visual cues.

In 2013, a study was conducted at Leiden University that also compared the brain activity of gamers with that of non-gamers. The gamers showed greater flexibility in their brain activity and an improved ability to switch from one task to another. A video of this study can be viewed at YouTube. Also on YouTubeDaphne Bevillier's speechat a TED conference, one of the authors of the 2010 study I wrote about above.