Gaming is Good for your Brain (in small doses)

Looks like another group has done another study on the mental and physical effects of gaming on youth. This new study, conducted by Jesus Pujol, M.D., of the Hospital del Mar in Spain and published in Annals of Neurology, has come to a startling revelation: video games can be good for you, but not if you play them too often.

Just a wee bit of sarcasm in there. A touch.

The study itself involved a pool of 2,442 children, aged between 7 and 11, and it tracked their gaming habits as well as the development of certain cognitive abilities and conduct-related problems. What they discovered was that there was a positive relationship between gaming one hour every week and the development of fine motor skills and had better overall scores at school... but gaming beyond that one-hour-per-week mark showed no visible improvement to either of those skills. In fact, the trend starts to reverse once you hit the nine hour per week mark, where children started to exhibit behavioral issues, getting into more fights, and expressing worse social skills.

Which sounds bad, but the study was quick to point out that the increase in performance with a healthy amount of gaming was actually quite dramatic--their brains were straight-up developing faster.

“Gaming use was associated with better function in brain circuits critical for learning based on the acquisition of new skills through practice. Children traditionally acquire motor skills through action, for instance in relation to sports and outdoor games. Neuroimaging research now suggests that training with desktop virtual environments is also capable of modulating brain systems that support motor skill learning. Video gaming per se is neither good nor bad, but its level of use makes it so.”

Neat stuff. So, for any prospective parents out there, managing a child's gaming time to maybe an hour a day or less is probably a safe bet to help them develop faster without turning them into the anti-social troglodytes who haunt Xbox Life. Not that I, a single 24-year old with no children, am going to tell you how to do your job, here.

I mean, what you do with your blood-spawn is your business.