Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Gaming for your health: Contrary to popular opinion, playing video games can be good for you.
Does playing video games make you smarter, or are they detrimental to your health? POPULAR MECHANICS took a closer look.
THERE’S A LOT of conflicting information about the effect video games have on us. Questions such as ‘Do they rot your brain and ruin your vision?’, or ‘Do they improve your hand-eye coordination and cognition to make you smarter?’ abound. According to brain scientist Professor Daphne Bavelier, video games can help us learn, focus, and – most fascinatingly – multitask. ‘In reasonable doses, even action-packed shooter games have powerful and positive effects on many different aspects of our behaviour. In the lab, we measure in a quantitative fashion what the impact of video games is on the brain,’ says Prof Bavelier.
She goes on to say that the notion that too much screen time is bad for your eyesight is a myth. ‘People who don’t play a lot of action games have normal (or correct) vision. Those who indulge in video games for five to 10 hours a week, their vision is better in two different ways – they can see small details in clutter, and can also recognise different levels of grey colour better,’ she explains. It’s like driving in the fog and being able to see the car in front of you.
Interestingly, the impact of video games on eyesight – specifically the attentional-blink (AB) rate span – has been researched heavily. There are many research reports on how the fast-paced action video games in particular are closely linked to enhanced cognitive abilities such as attending to multiple objects simultaneously, superior spatial skills as well as reduced attentional-blink effects.
And according to a French study, playing video games actually increased reading fluency in children with dyslexia. ‘After training, they significantly improved both their visual attention and their reading speed, without loss of reading accuracy,’ noted the report. ‘Our brains constantly perform probabilistic inferences,’ Prof Bavelier explains. ‘This kind of inference is used each time we make a decision.’
Video games can help us learn, focus and multitask.