14 DAY TRIAL // A research team from the Canadian McMaster University has found that players shooter video games can help some patients to correct impaired vision.
The team has worked with six patients aged between 19 and 31, all affected by a rare eye problem, to play the first-person shooter Medal of Honor, created by EALA aka Danger Close and published by Electronic Arts.
The six patients were engaged with the game for about 40 hour total, in two hour bursts for five days a week.
When the study ended, the patients reported eyesight improvement which was the equivalent of reading two extra lines on the familiar eye chart that every doctor’s office has.
Those patients involved with the study also reported being better able to recognize faces, read small print and judge the directions of small moving dots.
Daphne Maurer, who is leading the research effort into video games and eyesight, stated, “About two-thirds of the things we measured improved simply from playing an action videogame. I think it tells us that the visual nervous system is still plastic enough to either form or reveal connections in adulthood, and we suspect that might be true for any kind of visual defect.”
It seems that the improvements might also be linked to the adrenaline and dopamine that is released when playing games like Medal of Honor, which might actually make the brain better prepared to improve how it perceives the world around it.
The researcher added, “It is also called adrenaline for action, because you not only have to make a judgment based on what is going on on the screen but you have to act on it and you have to act on it from a real world perspective. So we think the manufacturers built into these games the effective ingredients for retraining the visual brain in adulthood.”
The McMaster University team is at the moment trying to create a non-violent game that has the same effects on eyesight.