What makes gamers stupid?
Counterstrike reduces gray matter in the hippocampus
Canadian scientists have found that those players who use spatial memory in video games increase the volume of gray matter in the hippocampus. For the rest, the volume, on the contrary, decreases. In addition, different genres of games affect the brain in different ways.
The hippocampus is an area of the brain that, among other things, is responsible for short–term memory and orientation in space. A decrease in the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus can lead to cognitive disorders and diseases. There is also an inverse relationship between the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus and the caudate nucleus (the formation of the brain, whose functions include stimulation and coordination of human movements). Ideally, both entities should be involved equally, since the strengthening of the functions of one leads to the weakening of the other.
Scientists conducted a series of three studies to clarify the impact of video games on the development or degradation of these areas of the brain. The participants of the experiments had to play various types of video games for 90 hours (2-4 hours three times a week), after which the MRI of the brain before and after the game marathon was compared using voxel-based morformetry (a computational method that allows you to track changes in the density of gray matter in certain areas of the brain).
It turned out that the influence of video games on the hippocampus depends on several factors.
Firstly, this is the genre of the game. So, 3D platformers (Super Mario) did not have a significant effect on the hippocampus of the subjects. But shooters (Fallout 3, Counterstrike, etc.) and role-playing games (such as Dead Island or Borderlands 2) caused a decrease in gray matter in the hippocampus.
Secondly, a significant factor is the strategy for orientation in space that the player chooses. It turned out that those players who rely on spatial landmarks for navigation increased the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus or entorhinal cortex (which is closely interconnected with the hippocampus), regardless of the genre of the game. But for those who relied more on motor memory, the hippocampus suffered, since the brain processes of such a player took place in the caudate nucleus.
The study brought scientists closer to understanding the nuances of the influence of video games on the human brain. One of the practical results may be changes in the design of video games that will "force" players to use the hippocampus more.
The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry in August 2017.
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28.08.2017