What qualities do computer games develop? Scientists have found out which computer games are most useful for the brain

Nikita Khokhlov

Neuropsychologist, head of the neuropsychology sector at the Center for Testing and Development "Humanitarian Technologies". Expert of the "Wikium" company.

There is a prejudice that computer games are extremely harmful. What are their benefits and harms from the point of view of clinical psychology and neuropsychology?

A computer game is an imitation of a certain activity, be it racing, aircraft control, strategies, quests. All this exists in real life, but in games it is simplified or exaggerated in order to arouse interest.

It is important to consider two aspects of games. First, the game is fun. And what gives pleasure requires a person to repeat this action - this is how addiction is formed. Second: the activity itself, which is imitated in the game. It can be useful because it is the training of certain skills.

What is the positive impact of, for example, vehicle simulation games? What brain functions do they develop?

Driving games are all about interacting with space, and this is something that modern children really lack.

70% of the children I see on diagnostics have a deficit in the function of assessing space.

Visual-spatial functions include orientation "right-left", "top-bottom", comparison of sizes, assessment of the location of elements in space. Children who were taught early to read almost always have difficulty with it. Reading activates neural networks in the left hemisphere of the brain, but it does not activate the right hemisphere, which is leading for the normal development of a child up to 8 years of age for most brain functions.

When one hemisphere works, the other slows down. Learning to read from 3-4 years of age without the simultaneous development of constructive-spatial functions can lead to mirror-like writing of letters and numbers, difficulties arise with the assessment of lengths. Such children very often see squares as rectangles, poorly remember the location of objects in space.

If a child is taught to read, one should at the same time be allowed to play such games so that he or she can navigate in space, react to changes in the environment, understand that somewhere you need to turn right, somewhere - to the left, somewhere - to stop. All this is transferred to real life, so there is benefit.

Do quests and strategies help your child's development?

I advise the children I work with to play quests: this is necessary for the development of programming, regulation and control of activities. In neuropsychology, this is distinguished as a special regulatory function of the brain, consisting of three parts.

Programming - the ability to draw up a program of actions before starting their implementation. Further - regulation... In the process of executing the program, you need to check the concept, check if there are any deviations. And finally the control - the result obtained must be checked for compliance with the program.

Regulatory function is above all other brain functions and is very important. People with undeveloped regulatory function show a decrease in all indicators when diagnosed. In children, this function is formed from 6–7 years old, the peak of development falls on average at 12–14 years old.

Games that require the implementation of rules (strategies, quests), a certain program in which you need to find out something, follow instructions, help develop regulation and control. It is important that this happens in a play situation: the child is interested, the learning proceeds not from under the stick, but at an involuntary level.

Are games that are simpler, requiring simple actions, where you need to hit the ball or place pictures, are they also useful?

Such games are used in the development of electronic interactive simulators of cognitive abilities.

True, most of it was done without taking into account psychological laws, but in any case, a game where you need to react to something and make decisions quickly develops attention and the lower levels of voluntary regulation and control.

What about shooters? There, too, a quick response is required.

There are positive aspects to shooting games. This is orientation in space: there is almost always movement along the corridor, you need to remember where you have been, where you have not been, where to go. Attention and reaction develops.

The negative moment is the load on the energy-consuming system of attention. You need to constantly be on alert, this is the pressure on the subcortical structures of the brain, which provide energy balance. Such training is only beneficial in certain amounts. Excessive loss of energy leads to the waste of neurotransmitters that bind neurons. Cases when children played for several days in a row and died are just about this.

Such a game is pleasant to a person, he does not seem to get tired of it, although at the objective level he gets tired. At a certain moment, a collapse occurs, when a person feels good, and the body works with its last strength. If you control such games in time, then they can be useful.

You have raised an important issue regarding time limits. How much time can a child play?

Everything is individual. There are children with certain difficulties, congenital and acquired, who get tired quickly. There should be more restrictions for them. I think that active games with constant concentration of attention can be played no more than an hour a day, in case of pathologies - no more than half an hour. But it is advisable to consult a psychologist.

For games where you can stop and think, like quests, such severe restrictions are not needed. If this does not interfere with daily activities, study, then this can be done for several hours a day.

And now about the adults. They love to play Dota, Counter-Strike, World of Tanks. It is clear that there is a relaxation effect, but is there any benefit?

In my practice, there have been cases when adults confessed that they were playing games because of the stress in everyday life.

It's better to look for productive ways to deal with stress and not just play games. As one of the ways - why not? There is nothing clearly wrong with that. It's bad if this is the only way to relax.

As far as the benefits for the brain are concerned, the point to remember here is that brain plasticity decreases with age. By the age of 7–8, the number of synapses in children becomes equal to the number of synapses in adults, and nerve cells differ little from nerve cells in adults. Then the plasticity of the brain decreases at 12-14 years old and after 17-18 years, although some processes develop further.

It is difficult to achieve significant changes in brain activity in adulthood; without the help of a neuropsychologist or psychophysiologist, it is almost impossible to do it correctly. But the psychological effect can be, it all depends on the problem being solved.

Games can keep the brain active, but not alter it.

Driving is known to prolong mental alertness in older people. Recently, there was a study that showed that people who drove in old age performed better on cognitive tests.

With games, apparently, the same situation. There are studies showing that specially designed video games stimulate the development of working memory and attention in older adults. It is not yet possible to measure it in dynamics from an early age, because games appeared relatively recently and those who played them did not reach old age. Available research is usually done on people who have not played before.

How is gambling addiction formed? And what games are better for adults to play?

If the game is used as a way to relax, it is about getting positive emotions that need to be controlled. A person can choose when to do it and manage the dose of positive emotions. Any physiological system strives for positive reinforcement, so a person without external control and sufficient volitional control will play more and more and strive to become addicted.

It is useful for adults to play games that have a cognitive function, for example, educational quests with encyclopedic information. Although it would be wrong to name specific genres: it's all about the psychological mechanisms and functions of the brain that respond to the game, and not the genre itself.

Many are worried about games with scenes of violence and cruelty. This allegedly provokes teenage violence. Are they really that bad? Is there anything more dangerous in games than violent scenes?

Yes, there has been talk that violent games provoke crime, but research has refuted this. The vast majority of children and adolescents perfectly distinguish between play and life situations.

Moreover, a certain aggression, which could be realized in life, finds a way out in a game situation, which reduces aggressive behavior.

Worse in games is another - the illusion of reversibility of consequences.

Violent scenes in games can arouse additional interest, but in most cases this is limited to searching the Internet for information about methods of murder, torture, but this is more a cognitive situation than a desire for violence.

Some literary works and films provoke aggression much more.

For example, the phenomenon of Goethe's book "The Sorrows of Young Werther" is well known, which caused a wave of suicides in Europe, because many wanted to be like the main character. This erases the line between suicide in real life and suicide in a work of art.

In a game, this border is usually not erased, everything is deliberately artificial, takes place within the framework of the screen that a person sees in front of him, and extremely rarely mixes with real life. If it is mixed, then this happens in people who, before the games, experienced difficulties with the perception of reality, had delusional constructions associated with the existence of alternative realities.

conclusions

• Computer games help children develop spatial skills, regulation and control, and attention.
• A child can play active games for no more than an hour a day.
• Gaming is a good way to deal with stress as long as you avoid addiction.
• Computer games help adults maintain brain activity.
• It is useful to play games with cognitive elements: quests, strategies, educational games.
• Computer games can reduce the adequacy of behavior, which can lead to rash actions. But they do not cause violence and aggression by themselves.

The latest research by scientists still suggests that computers, the Internet and computer games are more useful than harmful. Thus, it was found that active use of a computer contributes to the development of special areas of the brain. Also, computer classes are a good prevention of various mental illnesses, including schizophrenia.

There are many "horror stories" about the dangers of computers and the Internet. Basically, they all boil down to the fact that the virtual environment negatively affects the psyche of people, especially young people, makes them dependent on a computer and sometimes aggressive ... But there are unfounded statements, and there is research by scientists. What do the latter say about this?

It turns out that not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance. Take, for example, such a problem as adolescent suicides. After examining the results of a number of studies conducted by scientists from different countries, a group of experts from Oxford came to the conclusion that in some cases the Internet pushes young people to commit suicide, but in others, on the contrary, it helps them to give up their thoughts of suicide.

On the one hand, "freezing" on the Internet can really provoke depression, which in the long run can lead to a suicidal attempt. Communication on the Internet can lead to a decrease in self-esteem and anxiety, especially in case of assaults and threats from virtual interlocutors, and this is also a factor of suicide ... In addition, on the Internet you can find a lot of information about ways to "painless death". For example, 59 percent of adolescents who tried to commit suicide admitted that the Internet was their main source of information about the "technique" of this process. Whereas 80 percent of young New Zealanders who voluntarily inflicted cuts and other injuries on themselves said that they did it under the influence of online communication or reading articles on this topic ... Many suicides found themselves on the Network of like-minded people and partners who support them in their desire to leave this world ...

But it also turned out that quite often a teenager or young man refused to commit suicide, because he found friends and interlocutors on the Web. In some cases, they were discouraged from the fatal step by those who had already tried to commit suicide, or persuaded to seek psychological help.

The influence of computer games is also ambiguous. For example, Ulrich Weger of the University of Witten-Herdecke (Germany) and Steven Lofnan of the University of Melbourne (Australia) recently came to the conclusion that video games change our perception of reality. In particular, they can reduce our sensitivity to pain. This effect is observed if the player identifies himself with the character in the game.

During the study, volunteers were asked to report how many hours a week they play computer games. After that, everyone was given the task of getting paper clips out of the icy water to check the level of pain threshold.

Subjects were then asked to play a game either fully immersed or not fully immersed, and asked to take the same test with paper clips. It turned out that the participants in the first group were able to get more paper clips out of the water, since their pain threshold was reduced. But at the same time, they showed "callousness" towards others, if they had problems. That is, in the course of the game, a person can become as insensitive as the avatar with which he identifies himself.

American scientists have found that computer games contribute to the development of the speed of thinking and reaction. In the course of the experiments, it turned out that gamers memorized a much larger amount of information in a short period of time than people who are indifferent to computer games.

ON THIS TOPIC

Computer games increase intelligence. Their amateurs have a better reaction and solve complex problems faster.... This is the conclusion reached by researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The results obtained clearly contradict the opinion that the time spent at the computers, spent on killing monsters and aliens, does not give the players anything except the release of dopamine, ITAR-TASS reports. Scientists conducted an experiment with a group of students, which included fans of computer games and those who were indifferent to them. During the experiment, it turned out that games stimulate the development of motor-reflex functions of the body and hand-eye coordination, and the visual center of the brain in gamers processes information much faster. Scientists have narrowed the range of research as much as possible. This allowed for clearer results.

The experiment was based on the observation test. Students were shown a set of blinking letters on a special board. Each of them was shown for only one tenth of a second. Then the participants had to answer as soon as possible in what order the letters were placed.

The results demonstrated by gamers were definitely better... They memorized significantly more information. Each of them could give a serious head start to those not keen on computer games. At the same time, both categories of participants in the experiment equally quickly forgot which text was offered to them during testing. They focused on it only directly during the experiment.

Today, parents and doctors are sounding the alarm that young people are abusing computer games. At the same time, scientists have proven that there are benefits from computer games. In any case, when it comes to everyday and vital skills. Of course, this does not mean at all that you need to sit at the computer for days on end. But it is very useful to know about the benefits of such games.

1. Concentration and control

Call of Duty
Everyone knows that the best games are the hard ones. Defeating a seemingly "impossible" boss or gaining a "super wisdom" achievement is a pleasure. This dopamine rush really teaches people perseverance and personal responsibility.

The "reward" that the brain receives teaches a person to concentrate when doing something and helps him to control the situation around him. These skills are easily applied in the real world.

2. Therapy

"SPARX"
In 2012, a research team in New Zealand used a game called SPARX to treat depressed adolescents. It is worth noting that this game was specially designed to provide therapy for children. The study involved 168 adolescents with an average age of 15 years who suffered from depression.

Half of them were used as a control group and had regular interviews with psychologists, while the other half played SPARX. The SPARX user group showed encouraging results, with 44% of players recovering completely from depression, compared with 26% in the control group.

3. Marriage

"Pokemon-Go"
Games that have a great following or social aspect can really help make new friends. Some games even require a person to walk more in the fresh air (for example, "Pokemon-Go"). The real benefit here lies in the community that is formed for shared experiences.

Gaming agreements, online multiplayer sessions, and competitions help players meet new people and make friendships of their own interests. Moreover, some happy married couples met in online games.

4. Everyday reading skills

Rayman Raving Rabbids
In February 2013, Italian researchers presented evidence that computer games can help everyday skills like reading. Were taken two groups of children aged 7 to 13 years.

One group played Rayman Raving Rabbids and the other a slower game. When the reading skills of the two groups were tested after a while, it was found that those who played the action game could read faster and more accurately.

5. Multitasking

Call of Duty
The intense situational awareness and control required when playing shooters such as Call of Duty appears to improve the ability of gamers to simultaneously engage in visual and auditory tasks.

It may sound obvious, but it really helps in real life. Developing multitasking is a wonderful skill to master for your daily life. This helps overall performance.

6. Memory, motor skills, navigation

Super Mario 64
In 2013, German researchers studied how old computer games like Super Mario 64 influenced the brains of players. They asked 23 adults aged 25 to play Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months. The researchers also had a control group that did not play games at all.

The results were simply amazing. After scans of the brains of the players and the control group using an MRI machine, it was found that the gamers showed a noticeable increase in gray matter in the right hippocampus, right prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. These are areas responsible for memory, strategy, fine motor skills, and spatial navigation.

7. Improving vision

series "Wolfenstein"
A 2009 study at the University of Rochester found that shooting bad guys can improve vision. Players who enjoyed shooting pixelated enemies in games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 or Call of Duty helped enhance the contrast sensitivity function.

It is the ability to distinguish between subtle changes in image brightness. Moreover, it is one of the first visual skills to appear in children, and weakened over time. The researchers also believe that computer games could be used in the future to correct poor vision.

8. The level of intelligence

Call of Duty
It is unclear whether computer games improve overall intelligence, but it appears to help teach and strengthen new skills. This does not necessarily mean that the person will become smarter.

There are several games that have been designed to improve your problem-solving, critical thinking, and reading comprehension skills. Of course, there are also plenty of educational apps and games for kids of all ages.

9. Overall quality of life

"Unreal Tournament"
Whether a person is a hardcore gamer or not, a computer game can improve their overall quality of life. She can, for example, improve his physical fitness or help him achieve his goal. Thinking of yourself as a 1st-level character can identify areas that need improvement.

After that, you need to work on these abilities and monitor your progress. So you can "work through" almost all aspects of life. You can use strategies that have been developed in games and apply them in real life to achieve your goals.

BONUS

Those who are completely against computer games should learn about.

Train your mind, memory and attention. Continuing this topic - a discussion of what intellectual abilities are, how to develop them and what does computer games have to do with it.

What's the point?

The need to train the mental functions of the brain responsible for receiving, processing and storing information leads to an increase in the popularity of Internet resources that offer online games to develop mental abilities. The market for these useful entertainments is set to grow and, according to research by the Sharp Brains team of analysts, will reach $ 2 billion by 2015. Things are going so well that the segment leader, the Lumosity mind trainer, recently received $ 32 million in additional investment.

However, the commercial success of the venture forced scientists to argue even more about whether it is possible to develop the intellect of an adult and whether special computer games can help him in this. While some scientists argue that such fun, others argue that that part of our intellect, which is called mobile, can be actively developed with the help of games. Yet another study demonstrates a very simple truth: even simple reading and mental arithmetic can help develop mental abilities - and in the elderly.

Where does skepticism come from?

Skepticism is largely due to the fact that we live in an era of scientific paradigm change. Cognitive scientists, psychologists, doctors, educators and other professionals, whose work in one way or another relates to the psyche or the nervous system, lived with the idea that the human brain improves only in the early stages of development and, reaching the peak of development in adolescence , begins to fade gradually and irrevocably. Only about 30 years ago, studies began to appear that suggested that the human brain is still active throughout life.

The skepticism about these games is largely due to the fact that we live in an era of scientific paradigm shift. For a long time, experts have lived with the idea that the human brain develops only in the first stages of development and, having reached its peak in adolescence, begins to gradually and irrevocably fade.

Every year, such studies became more and more, they were conventionally combined under the theory of brain plasticity. According to Tatiana Chernigovskaya, professor at St. Petersburg State University, one of the leading Russian researchers in the field of cognitive sciences, plasticity allows us to talk about the possibility of developing the brain and cognitive functions of not only children, but also adults. There is only one caveat: the less you train the brain, the less plastic it is. The brain must always work, and it develops only when it is given a difficult task.

How does it work?

Imagine you want to learn how to play basketball well. You can just play outside with other guys. More seriously, you need to define what makes a good basketball game.

Basic skills Fast running, accurate throw, good two-handed dribbling, strong legs and arms, endurance.

Secondary skills Defense skills, team play and attack.

Tertiary skills Nice basketball game.

This structure makes it clear what needs to be done to play basketball well. You start special exercises to develop basic skills, of which there are many. The only problem is that it is not very clear how exactly the transition from the basic to the secondary level is carried out. But you can definitely say that developing basic skills will directly affect your basketball abilities. The picture is about the same with mental abilities. Intelligence is too complex a thing to develop entirely and at the same time, and if we dissect it, we will get basic mental processes, called cognitive functions, and their properties.

It is assumed that by developing these functions and their properties, you also develop intelligence. That is why, for example, by going to the site of any similar game, you will see that the games are divided there depending on what they develop: attention, memory, speed and flexibility of thinking. And this is correct, since developing intelligence as a whole is a dubious and incomprehensible task. Research confirms that subjects who have achieved some success in developing certain functions through play also perform better on intelligence tests.

The typology on which the developers of games that develop intelligence are based belongs to Raymond Kettel, who distinguished two types of intelligence: crystallized and flexible. The first is related to the ability to solve problems based on past experience, while the second is related to the ability to solve new problems.

As a rule, the development of such a game is based on the idea of \u200b\u200bwhat this or that cognitive function is. For example, if we are talking about attention, then we should highlight involuntary and voluntary attention. Involuntary attention is triggered in response to an unexpected stimulus, such as a strong sound or bright light. We need voluntary attention when we focus our conscious activity with some effort of will, for example, while reading a complex scientific text.

But such a typology is not enough, because there are also properties of attention that depend on brain function: volume, intensity, switchability, and others. If we want to develop the amount of attention, then in the game we must implement the situation when the player needs to simultaneously monitor several objects. And the complication of such a game will be to increase the number of objects of attention. A property such as intensity will develop if you need to focus on one object in the game, without being distracted by extraneous stimuli.

What is the problem?

For educational games to work, they need to get harder as the player progresses and give them feedback. So, ideally, the developer of such a game should first conduct research that confirms that the game develops cognitive functions - and develops exactly the functions for which it was designed (collectively, this is called "validity"). This requires an experiment - you need to get the focus group to play a game for a month.

Since the field of educational computer games is quite new, standards for their development have not yet been developed, so each game creator relies on his own instinct. This leads to the fact that when an article is published that criticizes the uselessness of games, both good and bad fall on the same size.

Why is everything so difficult?

Intelligence, attention, thinking, memory are all hypothetical constructs. What is a hypothetical construct? Our psyche is a kind of black box, and scientists can only guess what is happening there. For example, if we take any box and drop it from a height of two meters, then, having estimated the deformation of its body, we can make some assumptions about its internal structure. So it is with a person: by giving him a certain task and evaluating the results of his activity or his inner feelings, we can make some assumptions about his abilities. One subject will solve it quickly, another slowly, the third outside the box, and the fourth will not be able to solve it at all, but will be able to get pleasure from it.

After that, a palette of scientific hypotheses will appear, the tasks will be concretized, the experimental conditions will become more stringent, and after a few dozen different experiments, we would conclude that there are people who quickly solve problems, there are slowly solving problems, and all this has a correlation with their age. And we will call the measure of this relationship intelligence. Although no one really knows what this intelligence looks like or how its neural structure is organized, this is only a construct to describe the processes taking place in the black box.

This is one difficulty. The second is in the measuring instruments. If we continue the example with the box, then we can measure the deformation of the box after a fall with a ruler and a caliper and bring everything into a standard number system that other people can understand. But what if everyone has their own way of measuring? One will be in centimeters and the other in kilograms. Or more radically. Imagine that every hospital will have its own x-ray or tomograph. This will affect what diagnoses are made in a particular hospital and lead to controversy in the scientific community. The same picture applies to psychic phenomena. Diagnostics of intelligence, of course, has already become a relatively unified technology, but when a new field appears, for example, developing computer games, everyone begins to accuse each other of pseudoscience, because a common standard procedure for developing an educational game and assessing its effectiveness has not yet been developed.

Will it make sense?

However, even if the game is reliable and valid, it may not work for a particular user. Because the development of one or another cognitive function depends on the player's age, health and development of other functions. A healthy brain does not develop like a damaged or underdeveloped one, children develop differently from adults, and memory cannot be developed without attention.

For example, for preschoolers, brain development is directly related to the development of fine motor skills. And no computer game, at least at the current level of technical development, can replace it with real objective activity: modeling plasticine, playing musical instruments. It is unclear whether the same objective activity will have a positive effect on the intellectual abilities of adults. The level of development of some functions can also influence the development of others. Let's say you have an acquaintance. He is slow-minded - he thinks for a long time, cannot make a decision quickly, or delves into the conditions of the problem for a long time. The first thing that comes to mind is that he needs to develop thinking. But it’s not that simple. We need to see what it has with other functions. He may suffer from short-term memory, which does not allow him to remember all the conditions of the problem, or there may be problems with attention, which makes him unable to concentrate on the task, and this in turn leads to poor memory and thinking combined. Or, at the end of the day, he may simply not have motivation. Yuri Shevchenko, the creator of the Likeo project, notes that the problem may not be to develop, but to teach a person to use existing abilities. And this is already a separate work related to reflection and reorganization of the experience that a person has.

4 brain trainers on the internet

A collection of online exercises that promises to teach you to think faster, focus better and remember more. The founding team is reported to be made up of nothing less than the best neuroscientists in the world. Subscription - from $ 10 per month.

The application for the Nintendo console is a collection of math problems, attention exercises and other simple puzzles. The technique was founded by the controversial doctor Ryuta Kawashima, who himself appears at one of the levels in the game - in the guise of a demon.

Another revolutionary way to transform your mental abilities - this time with an individual system that creates a program for everyone based on their needs. Even exotic skills such as distance estimation, spatial perception and contextual memory can be trained.

A training course of 40 sessions that develop memory, improve attention, increase reaction speed, train flexibility and computational abilities. There is also a special section with articles like "What people who got rich young feel" or "How an unhappy childhood affects brain development."