Careful with shooters because they cause brain damage; at least so claims a new study
It does not appear that even in today's advanced world of video games they fail to escape the accusations of people who never played a single in their life. These people spit on games without any experience and foundation and associate them with violence and other forms of bad behavior. Numerous studies have been carried out to disprove or confirm numerous myths, and it seems that scientists from Canada have confirmed the myth that games cause brain damage.
At the University of Montreal, a group of researchers headed by Clu. Prof. Dr. Sc. Greg West of Psychology Department has published a survey that players who like to spend time with first-person shooter have less grey matter in their hippocampus. The less grey matter in the brain, the greater the chance that a person develops a mental illness that can vary from depression to schizophrenia, from PTSD to Alzheimer's. "Video games positively influence certain cognitive systems in the brain, mainly on visual attention and short-term memory. However, there are behavioral evidence that this will take its toll at the expense of the hippocampus, " - West said.
To prove their claim, scientists from Canada divided people into two groups: the first group had the task of spending 90 hours in Killzone, CoD and Borderlands 2, and the other group had to spend that time in 3D platforms. After completing the game, the respondents made a scan of the brain that showed that the time spent with first-person shooter grey matter massively decreased, and the opposite effect was achieved by playing a 3D platform.
On the other hand, cf. Prof. Dr. Sc. Andrew Przybylski of the University of Oxford is not confident of this type of brain research. "Just because the hippocampal size can be associated with some of the things we are concerned about in other populations does not mean that there really is some consistent, illegal link between the size of the hippocampus and dementia." Furthermore, Przybylski is aware of the importance of technology in today's world and said that such research should not be used to determine policies or to direct children to play a particular type of video game.
What do you think of all this? Which of these two scientists do you agree with? Do you have any other opinion? Feel free to share your thoughts with us.
Tagged with: Surveys, Survivors, Shooters
