Action Video Games Affect The Brain Essay

Study shows that video games might be bad for your brain.

Some of you might have heard that video games can help your mind stay sharp as we get older. Think again. It seems that new evidence shows the exact opposite might be true.

A team of researchers in Quebec, Canada from the University of Montreal and the Douglas Institute in Quebec decided to work together and find out more. They wanted to know how video games affect brain structures. A psychologist from the University of Montreal, Dr. Gregory West, led the research team. They focused a lot of their work on action video games. What are action video games?

Action games are considered any game where the player has to use the controllers for aiming and shooting. These games get a lot of attention not only because they are very fun

Dr. West and his team wanted to investigate how action video games affect the brain. He had found in previous studies that action video games were associated with smaller sized hippocampus in player’s brains. His research team studied the brain imaging of 97 men and women who were asked to play either an action video game or a different type of game for comparison.

What did Dr. West find?

Dr. West found that action video games tend to make people think in a way known as “response learning”. In this kind of learning, players use their old, practiced habits within their game to navigate through the virtual environment. Compared to real-life, this is very different from what we know as “spatial learning”. People in real life get around by noticing clues in their environment and using landmarks. Dr. West discovered that response learning might be unhealthy for the brain.

From this most recent study, Dr. West and his colleagues concluded that action video games cause the hippocampus to shrink in size. In contrast, they saw that platform games increased the size of gray matter within the hippocampus.

But what is response