“Video games train the brain”, a cliché, but also a question that neuroscientists have been asking for years: can a frequently repeated activity, such as playing a video game, really change the way the brain works? Playing is not trivial: you have to constantly and simultaneously follow what is happening, ignore useless stimuli, remember information, predict the next moves and react in often very short times. Today, researchers can observe brain activity while a person plays and study whether, in regular gamers, some brain regions have different characteristics.
Research indicates that the habit of gaming is accompanied by measurable differences, both in activity and in brain structure and organization, especially in areas related to attention, memory and motivation. It is still early, however, to talk about a “better” brain. Many differences are small and it is not always possible to understand whether they are truly a consequence of video games. The still difficult part is establishing where they come from and what meaning they have in daily life. Understanding whether these changes are useful, irrelevant or linked to negative consequences requires studies capable of following people for much longer.
Watching your brain while playing
Before the arrival of modern neuroimaging techniques, scientists could evaluate the effects of video games almost exclusively from the outside. They measured reaction times, proposed memory exercises or tested how long a person could maintain attention. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has made it possible to observe the phenomenon from another perspective. This technique detects changes in blood flow in different regions of the brain. When an area is busier, it needs more oxygen and receives more blood. By tracking these changes, researchers can reconstruct which areas participate most in an activity, even if they are not directly measuring the firing of individual neurons.
In 2006 Klaus Mathiak and his colleagues tried using this method in an experiment on thirteen young adults who played a first-person shooter while inside the scanner. The brain did not maintain the same activation pattern throughout the game, but reacted to different moments of the game. During moments of combat, some areas linked to emotional responses, such as the amygdala and the rostral part of the anterior cingulate cortex, reduced their activity. However, the dorsal part of the cingulate cortex, involved in control, attention and management of actions, was more activated.
The experiment also showed something more general. A game does not proceed through a completely predictable sequence, as often happens in laboratory exercises. The player must adapt, choose and continually change their response. For this reason, video games can be used as a model for activities that are closer to real life. The study of Mathiak However, he photographed what was happening at that moment. He couldn’t say whether, once the console was turned off, those changes disappeared or left a lasting trace.
Attention and memory: do video games really train the brain?
The idea that video games automatically train attention is widespread, but studies have not always given such clear results. Fabio Richlan and his team examined 28 young adults, dividing them into two equally sized groups: regular gamers and people who didn’t game. They all underwent tests of attention and visuospatial processing during a functional MRI.
A clear advantage could be expected from players, who are used to tracking targets, controlling complex environments and reacting quickly. In the tests, however, the two groups behaved more or less the same way. The differences only appeared when looking at the scans. In fact, in video gamers some frontal and parietal regions were more involved, which participate in the management of attention and the preparation of actions.
The data is interesting precisely because it did not correspond to a better overall performance. The people arrived at similar results, but their brains seemed to organize the task in an at least partially different way. This prevents any increased activation from being translated into an advantage. An area that works harder does not necessarily indicate a more efficient brain: it may simply reveal the use of a different strategy.
What emerged from studying more than two thousand children
In 2022, Chaarani, Ortega and Yuan tackled the topic on a much larger scale. The researchers used data fromAdolescent Brain Cognitive Development Studya US project that follows the brain development of thousands of children. The analysis covered 2,217 participants aged 9 and 10 years. On the one hand there were children who declared that they did not play; on the other, those who dedicated at least 21 hours a week to video games, therefore on average three hours a day.
During the experiment the children had to carry out working memory and inhibitory control exercises. Working memory allows you to retain information for a short time while you are using it. Inhibitory control, on the other hand, serves to block an immediate response when it is not the correct one. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging recorded which brain regions were most affected.
The children who played more frequently performed slightly better on both types of tests. Their scans also showed different activation patterns in some areas related to attention and memory. However, it was not a huge difference, and even the authors themselves invited the results to be read with caution. However, it should be noted, for the sake of complete transparency, that the study had, at the time of its first publication, several errors which caused it to be retracted. However, the general conclusions remained substantially the same even in the corrected version. A further invitation to caution invoked by the authors themselves in interpreting the data.
Why do video games keep us glued to the screen?
In video games you continually receive something in exchange for your actions. You complete a mission, beat a level, obtain an item, or improve a score. They are virtual rewards, but the brain processes them through the same circuits that intervene when we achieve other types of goals. One of the protagonists of this process is the reward system, a network that contributes to motivation and learning. Dopamine also participates in its functioning, which has the arduous role of helping the brain to recognize relevant events and to learn which behaviors should be repeated.
Robert Lorenz and colleagues tried to understand whether prolonged experience with a video game could affect this system. Fifty young adults were divided into two groups. Participants in the first were required to play Super Mario 64 DS for at least thirty minutes a day, for two months. Those in the second class continued their lives normally, without following this training. At the end of two months, the ventral striatum in the players’ brains showed a more stable response to rewards than that found in the control group. The ventral striatum is involved in motivation and the value we attribute to rewarding stimuli. It is therefore plausible that daily practice had produced an adaptation in the way of processing rewards. However, the result does not allow us to say that video games permanently increase dopamine. It signals a limited change in the response of a system which, during the game, is called into question very often.
The differences do not only concern operation
While brain activity measured with fMRI can vary even within a few seconds, the structure of the brain is studied by measuring characteristics such as the thickness of certain regions and the organization of connections. Chandrama Mukherjee and his team followed this second path, comparing the brain images of 46 young adults.
In regular gamers, some areas of the parietal lobe and precuneus – parts of the brain that are fundamental for perceiving and understanding the world around us – appeared slightly thicker. Differences were also noted in the white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that connect distant brain regions. Some of these connections were more developed in participants who played regularly.
According to the researchers, the characteristics observed may have to do with the demands of action video games. In these games you need to orient yourself quickly, control multiple elements at the same time and coordinate what you see with your hand movements. Repeated over a long period of time, such activities could help modify the neural networks used more often. However, there is a limit that cannot be ignored. Mukherjee and colleagues compared different people at one point in time, without looking at what their brains were like before they started playing. As a result, we don’t know whether the differences appeared with video game experience. Some individuals may possess characteristics right from the start that make them more skilled at visuospatial tasks and, for this reason, be more attracted to video games.
