MIT Reports: Gamers Have Bigger Brains

MIT researchers have shown that people who play video games tend to have larger brains.

Technically, people who play video games have bigger striatum which affects motor skills, acquisition of new skills and react with strategies to deal with changing environments.

From the Fast Company article:

According to Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author on the study, this is the first time–ever–that the size of a specific region of the brain has been linked to better performance and learning in a real-world task.

Without getting all nerdcore on everyone, I think this shows the evolutionary importance of gameplay has been in human development.  People who play games learn to think abstractly, they perceive situations and stimuli in multiple perspectives and they’re willing to experiment, while retaining what works and what doesn’t.

A study I’d love to see would be one that tracks the ability of gamers to visually multi-task.  From anecdotal evidence, I’d suspect that we are, but then I haven’t seen the data on that study yet.

So, next time someone says you’re rotting your brain away, you now know that you’re actually contributing to the evolution of our species with your superior striatum.

via: FastCompany

MIT Reports: Gamers Have Bigger Brains