Are we getting dumber by playing one certain genre of games way too often?!

The University of Montreal has had an interesting experiment with 51 male and 46 female participants. They played first person shooter games, such as Killzone, Borderlands 2, and Call of Duty, for ninety hours. The result? They ended up with less of gray matter in their hippocampus, one of the key parts of the brain, than other people who have not played such games. What about other genres?

Quoting the research, „to establish which participants were spatial learners (that is, those who favored their hippocampus) versus “response learners” (those using the reward system), West and his team first had each of them run through a “4-on-8” virtual maze on their computer. From a central hub, they had to navigate down four identical-looking paths to capture target objects, then, after their gates were removed, go down the four others. To remember which paths they’d already been down and not waste time looking for the objects they’d already taken, spatial learners oriented themselves by the landmarks in the background: rock, mountains, two trees. Response learners didn’t do that; they ignored the landmarks and concentrated instead on remembering a series of right and left turns in a sequence from their starting position.”

After their learning strategy was established, they started to play 3D platformer games, which ended up increasing the gray matter in their hippocampal memory system. Playing Mario is apparently a good thing…

What we learned here is that sometimes it’s good to put the pistol down and pick up a platformer now and then…