what researchers said ?
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Video games can change brain regions responsible for attention and visual skills, making them more efficient, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Catalonia in Spain and the Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, also examined brain regions associated with the reward system, and how they relate to video game addiction.
The researchers followed the results of 116 scientific studies, including 22 studies that monitored structural changes in the brain, and 94 studied changes in brain function or behavior. They found that video games could change how the brain, even its structure, They can affect our interests.
The brain regions involved in attention and reward operations were more efficient for video game users, and demonstrated that video games can also increase the size and efficiency of brain regions related to spatial memory, expanding the area of the right hippocampus.
Games really useful
But video games can also cause the so-called "Internet Games Disorder", as it changes functional and structural changes in the nervous system of its addicts. According to the study, these neurological changes are similar to those seen in other addiction disorders such as alcoholism, smoking, etc. In another study, scientists at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, used a version of Tetris to treat people suffering from disease "Blindness", or what is known as a lazy eye disease that leads to impaired vision. Through training, the player's brain is supposed to learn a better way to coordinate the vision between the eyes, helping the weak eye rediscover how to see the shapes and improve the eye's deep sense of those shapes within the image as a result.
The game "Super Mario", one of the most successful video games and most widespread through the Nintendo Nintendo Japanese, lead to strengthen some areas of the brain, especially in charge of trends and training memory and planning Strategic, as well as fine motor skills.
In contrast, Ayman Ibrahim Pasha, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Kafr El-Sheikh University, said: "The subject of video games is not without contradictions. Despite the positive effect of the study, the research team recognized the risk of addiction as a side effect.
Pasha added that the study followed the results of 116 studies on video games, but did not show the different aspects of the research, such as the characteristics and ages of participants, the characteristics of each type of video games, and the objectives for which the studies were conducted.
He said video games could cause addiction, distract children's attention, and may lead to social isolation and autism in case of addiction. "If the study has proved that video games address moderate cognitive disorders, this is another issue, but we must not lose sight of their side effects."