First things first,
Brain Dead Image by : Ritika Agrawal &
Swag Ideas by: Akhil 'DarksouL' Verma
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“Video games damage the brain,”“video games can alter children’s brains,” “video games boost brain power.” These are all headlines that have come up over the years, and they’re helping spray a thoroughly confusing picture about how gaming might be affecting the brain.
It’s clear after flashbang of these conflicting studies, that research into this ‘No Man’s Land’ aka Virtual Duniya is still very much in its infancy. But one thing that seems to be consistently demonstrated is that video gaming can enhance certain skills, such as multi-tasking, perception, attention, task-switching and decision making.
So, what is it about this common hobby that bestows gamers with such a broad range of benefits? This is precisely where researchers think that they’ve finally found the cheat-code. Playing fast-paced action games can improve task performance like upcoming AMD Zen because it enhances your learning capabilities.
This is because playing such games helps our brains become more efficient at building models, or “templates,” of the world, which enables us to better predict what will happen next. “Better the template, better the performance. And now we know playing action video games actually fosters better templates.”
In many studies, researchers compared the abilities of action video gamers and non-gamers on a pattern discrimination task. This visual test, which involves identifying the orientation of fuzzy shapes on a screen, is tough at first but becomes easier with practice. As predicted, the ‘action gamers’, like me had the upper hand and outperformed the others. Further investigation revealed that this was because ‘action video gamers’ used better templates than non-gamers.
To take this further, they enrolled a group of noobs with little video game experience and trained them to play video games like a pro. Half of the participants were asked to play 50 hours of fast-paced strategy games, such as Counter Strike and DotA (both my favourites <3), whereas the other half were asked to play mellow strategy games, such as The Sims. (FYI.. I play Sims too, you will know the reason later.) They tested those noobs on the same visual task both before and after the training, and found that those who played action games became significantly better than those who spent their 50 hours playing happy virtual families, Ooh yeah... me, her and my two kids ^_^ [Reason]. Now I wonder why she says that I’m insane in the brain, hehe.
Next, they compared the abilities of action gamers and non-gamers, I’ll rather say noobs! on a perceptual learning task. To their surprise, there wasn’t much between the groups at the outset. However, the gamers became much better at the task than the non-gamers over time, developing better templates for the task much faster than the others. This demonstrates an “accelerated learning curve.” [read title again, y=mx+c] Furthermore, when the groups were re-tested every few months for the next year, the action gamers still did better than the non-gamers, suggesting their better template building abilities were retained.
So, play games be a gamer because gamers are interesting, intelligent and fascinating species in this universe than others. And FPS Strategy gamers are much much beyond them. This is the new era of new kind of sport and no sport is better than eSports. <3
“No Thanks No Regards Only Blessings, G-G-DABLU-PEE Commend Me TY”
-Pandit. Floki (aka Shwetank ‘PinaK’ Pandey)
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