14 DAY TRIAL // A new Canadian research found that playing video games many hours a day trains the brain for laparoscopic surgery precision of visuomotor tasks.
The fact of playing video games is basically reorganizing the brain's cortical network in young men who have a significant experience in this domain, which gives them, besides the obvious advantage of playing video games, a higher ability in performing other tasks that need visuomotor skills.
13 young men in their twenties, who had played video games at least four hours a week for the previous three years, were compared to a group of 13 young men without that experience.
Researchers from the Center for Vision Research at York University in Canada, placed the subjects into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and asked them to complete difficult visuomotor tasks, like using a joystick or looking one way and reaching in the opposite direction.
Lauren Sergio, associate professor in the Faculty of Health at York University explained that “by using high resolution brain imaging (fMRI), we were able to actually measure which brain areas were activated at a given time during the experiment.
“We tested how the skills learned from video game experience can transfer over to new tasks, rather than just looking at brain activity while the subject plays a video game,” she added.
Results showed that people without the gaming experience used their parietal cortex - the brain area typically involved in hand-eye coordination - to fulfill these difficult tasks, while the experienced gamers used their prefrontal cortex instead.
After seeing this, researchers concluded that exercising your visuomotor skills can reorganize the way the brain works.
This could be a big breakthrough for assessing the problems experienced by Alzheimer's patients, who have enormous difficulties to achieve the easiest visuomotor tasks.
Lead author Joshua Granek added that, in future, it would be really interesting to see if the type of video game matters as well as the actual number of hours that were played.
He also anted to study female gamers to see if their brain patters are different, like previous studies have suggested.
The results of this research were published in the October 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex.