"Your Brain on Videogames"

The title of this TED talk is: “your brain on video games, Daphne Bavelier talks about how video games affect video-game-player's brain's. Some interesting information right off the bat is that the average age of video game players is 33, much higher than people may think at first. A particular focus of the talk is on action based, faced paced, first-person-shooter type videogames such as ‘Call of Duty’. In moderation, Bavelier argues that video games, in reasonable doses: "have powerful positive effects on many different parts of human behavior". Her lab measures in a quantitative data, that is measurable data the effects of playing videogames on people who play them. Things like vision for instance. They found that the vision of action gamers is a bit better than that of non-gamers. Specifically, in areas of clutter like reading small font and seeing/distinguishing gray-scales.

one way Bavelier's lab tests subjects is to  have them say the color of the 'text' that words are written in, which can become difficult when the word itself is a color different than the color of the text it is written in. the finding of her lab was that people who play action games resolve this mental conflict faster. Furthermore, action gamers scored better in object tracking, that is their ability to keep track of multiple objects, gamers scored almost double what the average person, or control group scored. This skill can be important for reacting and observing surroundings when driving or other activities that require awareness.

Daphne Bavelier explains that the areas of the brain that control attention span are much more efficient in those people who habitually play action games. The lab finding was that people who play videogames can switch tasks very fast, contrary to people who are “multimedia-taskers” that is people who are engaged in managing multiple social media apps, conversations and reading articles, basically staring at a different kind of screen than action gamers, these Multimedia-taskers tend to be very poor multi-taskers. Furthermore, even different types of video games have varying degrees of effects on the people who play them.

Her research is trying to distill the specific elements of action videogames that are causing the increased ability to multitask, focus, and help with vision, so that some kind of action game can be developed to help with rehabilitation, education, and other uses. They need long term results, and those are promising, since participants in her studies have kept their increased efficiency from playing small doses of action games even 5 months down the road.

The largest problem currently faced is marrying the worlds of the video game designers, people who exceed in marketing an irresistible product, and then filling that product with the specific elements of those action games that have the greatest effect on the aforementioned skills of focus, multitasking, and vision. In order to create a product that can be marketed to people recovering from brain trauma or other diseases, to education software that students actually enjoy participating in.

your Brain on Videogames