The cover of Nature this month features a “game changing” study suggesting that video games may improve brain function in certain measurable ways. The games, of course, are specifically designed for this purpose – they’re not off the shelf at the local game shop – and they give the brain’s attention areas a good workout. The research team led by Adam Gazzaley at the University of California, San Francisco say that a similar approach could become a therapeutic tool for people dealing with a range of issues, like ADHD, dementia, autism. All of these have a common denominator – the loss of cognitive control, which includes the closely linked capacities to attend, make decisions, and multitask. The research is still in its baby stages, so it’s too soon to take that bet, but the possibilities of the technology are alluring, and the study’s underlying logic worth paying attention to.
Gazzaley and colleagues designed a game called NeuroRacer in which the player drives a virtual car along a track and must respond to the appearance of specific road signs by pressing a button. The trick is that the player has to attend to one type of sign only, ignore the others, and continue “driving” all the while. Interestingly, as the participants improved at the task, the program upped the difficulty level. “Normally, when you get better at something, it gets easier,” Gazzaley says. But in NeuroRacer, “when you get better, it gets harder.”
The study had 46 participants, aged 60-85, engage in 12 hours of the training over the course of a month. During that time, they vastly improved their performance in the game, and at the end of that time, they were just as good as 20-somethings who had never played it before.
This may not sound so ground-breaking, but what is more convincing is that the players not only improved their performance at the game, but this skill transferred over to other cognitive tasks. This “transfer” is always the big question in research, since it’s not much use to gain a random skill if real-life tasks don’t also show improvement. But it turned out that the participants who’d been trained with NeuroRacer and then took tests challenging their attention and working memory did significantly better than the control group. These kinds of cognitive capacities are known to decrease with age, so the fact that they were apparently boosted after the game training is important.
“NeuroRacer doesn’t demand too much of those particular abilities — so it appears that the multitasking challenge may put pressure on the entire cognitive control system, raising the level of all of its components,” Gazzaley told Nature.
There were also some changes in brain waves, picked up through electroencephalography (EEG), that were suggestive of improved cognitive control. The older participants showed increases in a low-frequency brain wave called theta in the prefrontal cortex; and significantly, increases in “theta bursts” matched those of people in their 20’s. In fact, as Gazzaley tells me, “the older participants who showed the most robust changes in EEG – remember we’re measuring this while they’re playing the game – also showed most improvement in other cognitive tasks. And again, this transfer to other tasks is what’s so important.”
And what may be most noteworthy about the study is what its underlying logic implies about the aging brain. We’ve known only for a decade or two how plastic – or malleable – the adult brain is, in contrast to previous thinking that it was relatively fixed in its cognitive capabilities. But the new idea here is that not only are adult brains changeable, but older brains, which have already experienced the natural decline in cognitive capacity, might also be quite capable of improvement.
While it’s tempting to imagine a game like this being marketed for public consumption, Gazzaley says that his hunch for the future is that this family of games will be more a doctor-prescribed treatment than an over-the-counter remedy.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done in this new area in the form of larger studies over the longer term. And, of course, brain-imaging would add a lot of weight to the argument. “Our lab already has in the works fMRI studies to look at possible changes in brain structure,” says Gazzaley. “In other learning tasks, structural changes have been seen in shorter amounts of time than the length of this study. So it’s certainly possible.”
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Really not sure I see any point of Consol over PC's since Kinect, Wii and other alternative ways to play have been abandoned. Top 50 'most fun' game list coming soon! |
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Tell me a funny joke! |
