That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-Video Games

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss the neuroscience behind playing video games. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Krigolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Byte. So, my son plays a lot of video games, and to be fair, I used to too. And I was wondering, you know, are video games really bad for the brain? So I thought I'd dive into that quickly. You know, there's some minuses to video games. Video game addiction is a real thing. And people that become addicted to video games, you see disruption in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing. So things we've talked about, the ventral striatum and the midbrain dopamine system.

Basically, what's happening with these people is they need to play to get that reward, and then they need to play more and more to get an even bigger reward. So they get addicted to the game. And, you know, some people ask about violent video games. One study that jumps into mind is they looked at the brain responses to people that played a lot of violent video games and the people that played a lot of non-violent video games. And what they found was that the people that played a lot of violent video games, their brain responses to violent video game images were reduced. responses to violent video game images were reduced. Now, that doesn't mean that these people are going to go out and do something bad. There's never been a causal study that shows a relationship between playing violent video games and subsequent violent behavior. Really, that finding, what it really means is that their brains at some level are sensitized to those images, which, you know, maybe isn't a great thing. But there's a lot of things on the plus side. Researchers have shown

that video game players have enhancements in their visual spatial attention, you know, their ability to orient and focus on specific cues, and they can do it a lot faster than the rest of us. And what's even cooler, the parts of the brain that are devoted to processing visual spatial attention are bigger than the rest of us. This is also true of perceptual processing in general. People that play a lot of video games, the parts of their brain that are associated with processing visual imagery respond faster than the rest of us, and those parts of the brain are even larger again than the rest of us, and those parts of the brain are even larger again than the rest of us. And finally, one that I really like, especially I think of my mom, she's getting

on there, is video games have been shown to improve cognitive function in the elderly. Yeah, that's right. Old timers that play video games, whatever they may be, it helps keep their brains young and active. So I'd say that the neuroscience on video games is pretty clear. There are some problems. They can be addictive and, you know, maybe exposure to violent images isn't the best thing. But there's a lot of pluses to playing video games. And it's definitely a lot better than just sitting on the couch and watching television. Remember, the website's up, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's

links to where you can fund us on Patreon and to our YouTube channel, which is slowly growing. It's pretty slow, but it's growing. And of course, the blog and some other stuff, our merch. We have a new t-shirt that's going to drop in a couple of days. And of course, the podcast. I'll see you this coming Sunday for a full episode, And I'm going to tell you all about something really cool. My name's Olaf Kregolsen. I'm that neuroscience guy. Thanks for listening to this neuroscience bite.