Playing action video games may cause depletion of grey matter in the brain, increasing the risk of diseases such as depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, a study has warned.<\/p>\n
Researchers from University of Montreal (UdeM) in Canada found that habitual players of action games have less grey matter in their hippocampus, a major part of the brain that is responsible for orientation and for recalling past experience.<\/p>\n
Previous studies have shown that hippocampus depletion puts a person at risk of developing brain illnesses and diseases ranging from depression to schizophrenia, Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Alzheimer’s disease.<\/p>\n
“Video games have been shown to benefit certain cognitive systems in the brain, mainly related to visual attention and short-term memory,” said Greg West, associate professor at UdeM.<\/p>\n
“But there is also behavioural evidence that there might be a cost to that, in terms of the impact on the hippocampus,” West added.<\/p>\n
There is another important part of the brain called the striatum that counterbalances the hippocampus, researchers said.<\/p>\n
It has an area known as the caudate nucleus that acts as a kind of “autopilot” and “reward system” – getting us home from work, for example, and telling us when it’s time to eat, drink and do other things that keep us alive and happy, they said.<\/p>\n
Gaming has been shown to stimulate the caudate nucleus more than the hippocampus, 85 per cent of players rely on that part of the brain to navigate their way through a game.<\/p>\n
Researchers found that the problem is that the more the people use caudate nucleus, the less they use the hippocampus, and as a result the hippocampus loses cells and atrophies.<\/p>\n
The team recruited close to 100 people (51 men, 46 women) and got them to come in and play a variety of popular shooter games like Call of Duty, Killzone and Borderlands 2, as well as three-dimensional games from the Super Mario series, for a total of 90 hours.<\/p>\n
The team scanned the brains of habitual players of action video games and comparing them to non-players, and found that less grey matter in the hippocampus of habitual players.<\/p>\n
They then followed that up with two studies to establish causality and found that it was indeed the gaming that led to changes in the brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Playing action video games may cause depletion of grey matter in the brain, increasing the risk of diseases such as depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, a study has warned. Researchers from University of Montreal (UdeM) in Canada found that habitual players of action games have less grey matter in their hippocampus, a major part of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1679,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions\/1679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}