Can Playing Video Games Make Your Brain Bigger?
Does playing video games improve your brain? Or do bigger brains make it easier to learn video games? Psychologists say they can predict how well you’ll do on a video game by looking at the size of just three little structures inside your brain. If those structures are bigger, you’ll probably catch on more quickly and do better. But don’t start bragging about how gamers are naturally brainier just yet. The cutaway image shown below shows four brain structures studied in the video-game research. The caudate nucleus (blue), putamen (red), nucleus accumbens (orange spot) and hippocampus (green). Researchers found linkages between game performance and the first three structures!
The study, conducted by Erickson and 10 other researchers, appears in the journal Cerebral Cortex. “This is the first time that we’ve been able to take a real-world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game,” Erickson said in a news release issued today. The team’s findings come amid an increasing reliance on game-based “brain training” as a form of mental calisthenics. “Video games are now being used frequently through educational disciplines to train children and adults, in remedial situations, in business practices to train employees, and they’re even being used by the military,” Erickson told me.
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