Frequent gamers have brain differences
According to the journal of Translational Psychiatry, playing video games excessively every week leads to changes in brain functions. Psychologists Simon Kuhn and his colleagues at Ghent University in Berlin studied 154 adolescents. All the children in the study were 14 years of age. The researchers put the children in two groups: frequent gamers and infrequent gamers. The group of frequent gamers contained 24 female and 52 male participants who played more than nine hours of video games per week. The infrequent gamer group contained 58 females and 20 males who played less than 9 hours of video games per week. The frequent gamers had more gray matter in their left ventral striatum. This area of the brain has been linked to emotion and behavior.Also, previous research has connected the ventral striatum to addictive behavior.The researchers used FMRI to observe the brain of participants during a selected reward task. The psychologists found the frequent gamer group showed greater brain activity when they did not receive a reward during the task, similar to the response of addicted gamblers who lose money. Addicted gamblers have shown increased levels of dopamine in the brain when they lose their money. The researchers were able to correlate brain structure and video games, this correlation may help future research in the area of addictive behavior.
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I find it fascinating that the same area that the frequent gamers had more of (gray matter in the left ventral striatum) is also the same region where addictive behavior is connected to. Does having more gray matter in this region cause the addictive behavior or do those who exhibit addictive behavior cause more gray matter to accumulate in this area? I noticed that my two friends who play video games frequently have addictive behaviors like getting into a show series frequently or trying one sort of food and then eating nothing but that one type of food for weeks. It is quite interesting to see that with most of the articles I'm reading, it seems like the brain controls a lot of what we take to be personality traits. I also noticed that there are more males in the experiment than females. Besides the fact that people attribute video games as a stereotypic male past time, I would like to know if there is a gender difference in addicting behavior. Also is there an age difference as well? Was it important, in evolutionary terms, to display addictive behaviors that may have gotten our ancestors in a safe and predictable routine?
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting about this finding is that the enhanced gray matter in the left ventral striatum is linked to emotion and behavior. The emotional impact of video games has been a hot topic for quite some time now. This lead me to believe that violent video games may indeed produce more violent behaviors in impressionable children and adolescents. Gamers may see real-life violent actions and situations as alluring due to the positive responses they experienced with the video games. Thus, they become more likely to replicate these stimulations in their day to day lives. Maybe with this finding, more age restrictions and regulations will be placed on violent video games.
ReplyDeleteI think that understanding how reward and other feedback influences brain activity is very important. Seeing that almost everything that we do today involves some sort of social media, watching sports to eating, it is pretty obvious that we are reliant on some sort of rewarding feedback. I think it would be interesting to explore how things such as social media feedback influences brain activity. I say this because just as active gamers or gamblers have greater brain activity when they do not receive a reward, I wonder if a Facebook user has greater activity in the similar area when they do not receive some sort of social feedback such as a "like" on an article that they post.
ReplyDeleteThis is super interesting, particularly if you take into consideration the research that has gone on in the area of social psychology. It's been established that playing video games increases emotions like arousal, aggression, etc. I can't help but wonder if this enlarged left ventral striatum, which is stated be associated with emotions, plays a part in this. The idea that playing a video game might activate this area involved with addiction and simultaneously this area causes aggression is a little worrisome.
ReplyDeleteThis is crazy. I agree with Meghan! As soon as I read that the grey matter was linked to the part of the brain with emotion and behavior, I immediately thought about violent video games. Many children today are playing violent video games and this may have an impact on their lives. My brother personally plays about 30 hours of video games a week and yells and screams at the TV while playing. When I say yelling and screaming, I mean that he swears and using bad language to others online.
ReplyDeleteThis is so interesting. I know how worked up some people get when they're playing a game, and also the range of emotions violent games can put one through. I wonder if the research they've found will be able to show how addicting video games are in correlation to the amount of brain activity similar to gamblers. Maybe the worse a person is at a game, or the less they get rewarded, the more addicted they become to it?
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