Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (17 page)

Basically, properly designed video games induce a more efficient pattern of activity in action-related brain areas. They do this by reorganizing brain activity so as to increase perceptual and motor speed as well as the increased eye-hand coordination needed for video games.

The effects induced by regular video-gaming can be compared to what occurs in the brain of a concert pianist. As a result of many hours of practice, the pianist’s brain has built up more efficient networks of neurons in the supplementary motor cortex, the brain area responsible for planning the finger movements required for each selection. With increased experience and practice, fewer and more efficient networks are recruited for the performance of each musical selection.

The principal benefit from video-game simulation is the acquisition of highly specific real-world skills. Probably the most familiar examples of this are the air-flight and air-traffic-controller simulators. Pilots and air traffic controllers routinely spend hundreds of hours on simulators in order to hone their skills. Unfortunately, their increased skill in handling flight-related situations doesn’t transfer to other life situations: if you’re scanning a crowd in search for a friend, you’re not going to find him any more quickly by enlisting the aid of an air traffic controller or pilot. That’s because their video training is highly specific. As a result, when it comes to attention
in general,
the controllers and the pilots aren’t any better than the rest of us.

But you might find your friend in that crowd more quickly if you ask an avid action-video gamer for assistance, based on the research of Daphne Bavelier, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of the prestigious Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester.

Bavelier discovered enhanced visual search skills in action-video gamers during an ongoing study carried out with one of her students, C. Shawn Green (himself an avid gamer). They compared students who played action-based video games with students who didn’t play video games at all (an underrepresented group on the average campus, as Bavalier and Green discovered). The video-playing contingent were not just casual players but were “hard-core” gamers who had played action-video games like Counter-Strike at least three days a week over the previous six months.

In the experiment all of the participants in the Bavelier-Green study rest their heads on a chin rest and stare at a square in the center of a computer screen. Randomly a target (a circle with a triangle enclosed within it) flashes at one of twenty-four possible locations on the screen. Immediately the screen is flooded for about a second with a clutter of circles, squares, and lines. Finally, the screen goes blank and the participants are asked to remember where the target had originally appeared on the screen. Regular video-game players do this with 80 percent accuracy, while nonplayers get it right only about 30 percent of the time.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “These differences could be the result of self-selection: people with superior visual attention might naturally be attracted to video games.” To cover that possibility, Bavalier and Green scrounged around the campus and after a good deal of effort came up with thirty-two non-video-playing students. Half of them were assigned to play the puzzle game Tetris, and half to play the action game Unreal Tournament. All played their assigned game for thirty hours over the course of about thirty days.

In case you’re not familiar with Unreal Tournament, it features a cornucopia of enemies and hazards coming at you on the screen from every direction. Allow your attention to waver for a few milliseconds and . . . lights out! In contrast, the classic falling-blocks puzzle game Tetris is far less visually demanding. Since the puzzle pieces always drop from the top of the screen, there isn’t any need to scan elsewhere.

At the end of the study, those students playing Unreal Tournament showed a 15 percent to 20 percent improvement in their ability to ignore visual distractions. The Tetris players showed no improvement.

With practice, “video-game players can process visual information more quickly and can track more objects on a computer screen than nonplayers,” according to Bavelier. Two processes serve as limiting factors in tracking objects on a screen.

The first,
attentional
blink, is the half-second recovery time required to detect a second target during a rapid-fire sequence of targets. For example, if I ask you to watch for a white letter appearing on a computer screen at some point in a stream of black letters, you’ll have no problem doing so. But if I then ask you to look for an X appearing after the white letter in a position ranging from immediately after the white letter to eight letters later, things become more complicated.

No problem if the X comes three or more letters later. But if the X appears very close in time to the white letter, you’ll probably miss it. That’s because while your brain is “busy” looking for the white letter, it will be unable, because of attentional blink, to process anything else. This brief but critical gap can be narrowed if a person spends several hours a week on a regular basis playing action-video games. In essence, action-video games enable the game players to shorten their attentional blink and thereby perceive and respond to threatening targets that typically spring unexpectedly from the periphery of the screen.

The second process,
subitizing,
refers to the ability to look at an array of objects and immediately and correctly enumerate them without resorting to counting. For example, when you quickly glance at the checkout lines in the supermarket and without counting automatically select the shortest line, you’re subitizing. Most people can do that with up to four objects. Anything beyond that subitizing limit of four must be counted and requires extra time, 250 to 350 milliseconds, for each additional item. But for action-video players, the subitizing number is 50 percent improved. What’s more, only one hour a day for ten days of action-video gaming with an emotionally intense shooting game such as Medal of Honor is sufficient to improve both visual attention and processing time. No improvement in either factor occurs among players of Tetris or other non-action-video games, Bavelier and Greene discovered.

Although no one has so far come up with a completely satisfying explanation for these differences, I suspect they’re due to the increased threat and fear levels experienced by players of games like Medal of Honor, where players can lose their “lives” rather than simply fail to solve a puzzle as with Tetris.

This arousal of fear and aggression in response to perceived threats also plays a part in explaining why violent video games incite violent behavior in certain predisposed players. The amygdala, a small almond-shaped nucleus below the cerebral cortex that responds to threatening or fearful faces, doesn’t distinguish between events occurring in a game and the same thing happening in “real life.”

“Playing action-video games can alter fundamental characteristics of the visual system,” Bavelier says. Essentially, video games provide a convenient and easily accessible means for changing the brain. The resulting fine-tuning of visual attention will enable you to see more, and respond more quickly and more accurately to simultaneously occurring events.

In order to understand the value of digital game-based learning as a training tool for brain enhancement, it’s helpful to distinguish between what’s called cognitive and physical fidelity. Physical fidelity means that the training program faithfully replicates the real-life situation. For example, the early versions of the air-flight simulators consisted of the front of a real airplane hooked up to computer displays. Sitting in one, you almost couldn’t tell whether you were in the cockpit of an actual plane or in a simulator.

Several years ago I experienced firsthand the effects of digital virtual learning-flight simulation based on physical fidelity. An airline pilot patient of mine was required by the FAA to undergo simulator testing after recovering from a recent head injury. As part of the evaluation, the FAA requested that I accompany him to the testing so that I could be interviewed about the risk that he might experience an epileptic seizure as a result of the head injury. While in the simulator my patient performed so well that he successfully completed the testing a half-hour early. Since a half-hour of paid-for time remained, the evaluators asked if I would like to try the simulator. Caught off guard, I readily agreed to what I anticipated would be an experience no different from playing a video game.

A few minutes later, I found myself strapped into a seat and at the controls of what had once been the cockpit of a real 747 but was now part of a simulated testing protocol. I remember two things about the experience: the initial thrill of looking through the windshield and observing how the scene changed as I moved the yoke (control wheel); and the uneasiness I immediately experienced when the instructor told me after several minutes of admittedly enjoyable flight simulation, “It’s now time to land the airplane. Listen to my instructions and I’ll tell you how to do it.” Of course I reminded myself for the umpteenth time that the simulated flight wasn’t “real.” But somehow that didn’t calm me down.

My fear further escalated when the “plane” rattled and shook violently as I landed it clumsily on the tarmac. At this point my hands started shaking; they were still shaking five minutes later when over iced tea the instructor explained what had gone wrong. Apparently at the last second I had been so rattled that I didn’t process his instructions correctly and pointed the nose of the plane down instead of flaring it up, resulting in a jolting, bone-jarring landing that in a real-life situation would have risked shearing off the nose wheel, causing the plane to spin totally out of control.

Looking back on the experience, I realize now that my conflict and apprehension resulted from my brain’s attempt to reconcile two conflicting interpretations of what was going on. I realized that the flight wasn’t “real” and that I couldn’t be harmed. Yet the combination of an actual airplane cockpit, the video imagery that changed in response to my movements of the control, and the shaking and rattling that coincided with my inexpert landing led to the powerful illusion that somehow I was
really
piloting an airplane.

During the debriefing, the evaluator told me—in an effort, I suspect, to make me feel better—that even some veteran pilots could be made to experience similar anxiety. “When we started using simulators, we used to push everybody to his or her limit,” he said. “Essentially, we kept adding challenges like the loss of an engine on takeoff, being hit by lightning, a sudden loss of altitude on final approach due to wind shear, loss of hydraulic pressure making it impossible to steer the aircraft, or one of the landing gears failing to retract. We kept pushing the pilots until eventually the plane crashed. The pilot who was the last to go down in flames earned the highest rating. We don’t do that anymore. We found that crashing a plane—even a virtual one—can set off tremendous anxiety in a pilot that sometimes takes a lot of debriefing to overcome.”

Today the emphasis in training programs has shifted from physical to
cognitive fidelity.
In contrast to physical fidelity, which uses some components of the real situation, cognitive fidelity faithfully incorporates only the relevant mental processing.

For example, the program “Space Fortress” is an attention enhancer aimed at improving pilot performance even though the game isn’t specifically related to pilot training. There are no simulated airplane cockpits or anything else to suggest that the test has anything to do with flying an airplane. “The key to success in training is to ensure that the cognitive demands in training resemble those of the real-life task,” suggests Professor Daniel Gopher, one of the world’s leaders in the field of cognitive training and author of the pioneering paper “Transfer of Skill from a Computer Game Trainer to Flight.”

“Ten hours of training with ‘Space Fortress’ resulted in 30 percent improvement in flight cadet trainee performance. When we compared ‘Space Fortress’ with a sophisticated, pictorial, high-level graphic and physical fidelity-based computer simulation of a Blackhawk helicopter, ‘Space Fortress’ proved successful in improving performance while the other, a NASA-sponsored program, did not.”

Nor are the benefits of cognitive fidelity training programs limited to airline pilots. Video games (digital game-based learning) are currently being used for everything from determining sources of water contamination (MIT’s Environmental Detectives) to learning German to training marines (MAK’s MAGTF-XXI) to dealing with a bioterrorist attack (Carnegie Mellon’s Biohazard/Hazmat) to treating neuropsychiatric conditions such as fear of heights, social phobias, addictions, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans from the Iraq war. As an indication of the verisimilitude of action-video games, the PTSD simulation is a modification of the Xbox game Full Spectrum Warrior.

“The inherent brain mechanisms for performing complex skills is different in highly experienced video gamers,” says Joshua A. Granek of the Centre for Vision Research at York University in Toronto. “Video-game training reorganizes the brain’s activity and leads to more efficient and effective control of skilled movements other than playing video games.”

In support of Granek’s claim, surgeons who play video games more than three hours per week commit 37 percent fewer errors in the operating room, are 27 percent faster at laparoscopic skills (surgery involving the maneuvering of instruments on the basis of images transmitted from a tiny camera placed at the operative site), and are 33 percent faster at suturing than surgeons who don’t play video games.

In older adults some astounding brain enhancements have been documented via the use of video games. In one of the earliest studies, elderly subjects (ranging in age from seventy-one to seventy-eight years) improved their scores on tests for both verbal and nonverbal intelligence after only one hour of video-gaming per week. As a result of such positive reports, older players are currently the fastest-growing segment of video gamers. According to an internal customer survey at PopCap Games in Seattle, more than 70 percent of its players are older than forty, with almost half of them older than fifty. What’s more, older players tend to spend more time playing per session than their younger counterparts. In one popular free site (
Pogo.com
), players fifty years of age and older accounted for more than 40 percent of the total time spent on the site.