The idea that experience alters the adult brain in
fundamental ways has finally become accepted, so the battle lines have
formed around which aspects of brain function are too basic, too hard
wired, for experience to change them. Whenever someone asserts that one
or another function is fixed and beyond the reach of experience, I refer
them to a study finding that the visual cortex—which you’d think is as
hard-wired as hard-wired can be—can adapt to an environment of visual
deprivation and segue into processing tactile and auditory sensations,
as scientists reported last year. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that playing action video games
can also alter the brain, especially circuits involved in vision,
attention and other skills you bring to bear when you play games such
as Halo or Call of Duty 2. But in a study being published online this afternoon in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists
are reporting that playing action video games improves an aspect of
vision that was thought to be pretty much fixed—namely, contrast
sensitivity. That’s the ability to detect tiny changes in shades of gray against a
uniform background, and is something you need to deploy when driving at
night or in poor-visibility conditions. You lose it with age, but amblyopia (“lazy eye”) can also impair contrast sensitivity. The only way to fix, supposedly, is with glasses or surgery. But maybe not. Expert action-video-game players, Daphne Bavelier
of the University of Rochester and colleagues find in the new study,
have better contrast sensitivity than people who play non-action video
games. To make sure that that correlation did not reflect a tendency for
people with sharp contrast sensitivity to gravitate toward action games
more than people with poor contrast sensitivity do, the scientists gave
the non-players intensive daily practice in playing action games. After
50 hours of play spread over 9 weeks, these players’ contrast
sensitivity improved. There was no such improvement after playing
non-action video games such as Sims. In 2003, Bavelier found that playing action video games can improve selective attention, as she and a colleague reported in Nature
(gotta keep alert for the incoming missile!). But scientists have long
suspected that selective attention is trainable. Contrast sensitivity,
however, was thought to be something nature makes you good or bad at,
something it took away as you aged, and something beyond the reach of
training. Apparently, that’s not so. Even more intriguing, its
deterioration may not be due solely to things happening in the eye.
Improvements can come about by tapping the brain’s power of
neuroplasticity, strongly suggesting that deterioration reflects events
in the brain and not (just?) the eye. If you want to immerse yourself in the power of video games to change the brain, Bavelier and two colleagues have written an excellent book chapter summarizing their and others’ findings, including how action video games improve players’ ability to read small print and—ironically, given the terrible reputation video games have among many educators—engage selective attention. |