Neuroscience proves that video games “BOOST” your brain

Anyone who lived through the 90s and 2000s knows how much video games were “demonized” for supposedly being a bad influence on children and teenagers. However, over the years, more and more studies have been carried out in light of the brain activity and video gamesand that they can cause positive changes according to neuroscience.

According to the channel Medical News Todays, Scientists collected results from 116 scientific studies and published them in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, concluding that video games improve activities related to attention, including sustained and selective attention, when compared to people who do not play.

There is also evidence that video games increase the size and competence of parts of the brain responsible for skills visual special. It was also found that frequent gamers had an enlarged right hippocampus, the region responsible for storing memories.

This study is endorsed by another published in the journal Naturewhich concluded that cognitive performance was significantly improved in older adults and some of the adverse effects on the brain associated with aging could be reversed. This is because games act as a kind of “brain muscle building“.

An article has already been published by the Spanish edition of The Country, points out that electronic games can have a positive effect on people with depression, but that they should be an “extra tool” to help with brain regulation.

“The most important thing in determining the usefulness of a game of this type is the subsequent analysis, verifying whether it is actually achieving the changes we are looking for in the patient,” explains the psychologist Juan Antonio Roman.

“Video game-based interventions do not replace psychopharmacological treatment and psychotherapeutic monitoring, which are the basis for managing depression,” says psychologist Juan Antonio Román: “they do not rely on face-to-face counseling and are cheaper and easier to implement,” especially for “people living in remote areas, or in regions where the number of health care providers is limited.”

On the other hand, it is important to emphasize that there are also studies which show that excessive video game use can also be harmful to our mental health, with the category of “video game addiction” even existing, where interaction with video games becomes extreme and harms the individual’s life.