Saturday, January 1, 2011

This is your brain. This is your brain on video games

[img]http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/12/brain-videogames-12-30-2010.jpg
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Sure, you've probably seen countless scientific studies involving
video games -- but have you have you ever wondered what your brain
actually looked like while your playing video games? Well, feast your
eyes on the image above. That's an MRI scan of New York Times writer
Matt Richtel's brain that was captured while he played a simple
driving game -- all in the name of science (and journalism), of
course. As Richtel notes, however, that's just one example of the
ways researchers are using such technology to "map the ethereal
concept of attention," and scientists have turned up some other
interesting findings as of late. Researchers at the University of
Utah, for instance, have found that people's ability to juggle two
tasks begins to drop off in their 30s and then sharply drops in their
40s, which contradicts earlier suspicions that people's ability to
multitask only began to degrade when they're much older. Some other
researchers are still suspicious of those findings, however, and Dr.
Gazzaley of the University of California at San Diego is quick to
point out that all of this research is still in the earliest stages --
he's expecting some more detailed findings next year when his team
expands their tests and begin to incorporate EEG monitoring as well.

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