Looks like mom was wrong

Do you play video games? If you do how many hours a week do you play your games. Although I'm not kid any more (I'm 28) I still love playing them. My mom used to say to me when I was younger that if I continued to play video games for so long I would rot my brain. But maybe she is wrong and that is just a myth.

Now here me out. I just got done playing the new Call of Duty Black Ops 2 for a few hours and decided that I needed a break and do something constructive. So I pulled out my laptop and did a little online reading when I stumbled upon video on http://www.ted.com/talks . And what caught my eye was the very first video "Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games".

Daphne is a brain scientist and her research is to find new ways to make human brains Smarter, Better, Faster, Stronger. She goes on to say despite what people think of video games that nearly 70 percent of head of the households play video games. And what people don't know is that action packed games like C.O.D. is really good for the brain. In the video she gives little tasks to her audience to she how they do with these somewhat easy but complicated tests. And according to her research people who play action packed games usually test higher then people who don't. Also she goes on to debunk other rumors that video games will mess up your eye sight if you play them for along time. In her research it shows that gamers have better eye sight and seem to pick up little details in eye tests better.

Daphne uses different graphs and pictures through out the video to show her research. With her pictures  she shows what areas of the brain are affected by video games. My favorite graph was at the end when she shows her training graph were the volunteers would play action games for a few hours a day for two weeks and come back and do her tests. The results are very positive showing that everyone tested well above the original test. Even after five months after the training the results are still there. 

Ms. Bavelier does a pretty good job with her presentation. She uses some small humor to lighter up the crowd as she tries to get the audience to participate with her small tests. I was very engaged with this video despite the fact that she doesn't take questions from the audience. If I were to ask her one question it would be"Is there other types of video games that help the brain besides action games?" because she only covers action based games. But now its time to take a little stress break from all this blogging and hit the power button on my Playstation 3 and do my brain some good.

-Ryan Gormanhttp://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games.html