Video Games Are Actually Good For You, BBC Claims

Video games could actually be good for you, according to experts speaking to BBC’s Horizon programme.

The programme spoke to experts who believe that games - and not just so-called ‘brain training’ titles - can actually improve people’s mental performance.

The University of Geneva’s Prof Daphne Bavelier believes that action games leave gamers with improved visual abilities - due to forcing them to switch attention rapidly.

In Professor Bavelier’s tests, gamers were better than non-gamers are remembering the colour of images in a sequence.

Professor Simone Kuhn of the Max-Planck Institute of Human Behaviour, in Berlin, found that areas of gamer’s brains actually grow over time as they play games.

She used an fMRI (functional MRI) scanner to monitor the brains of subjects as they played Super Mario 64 DS over several months.

She found that three areas of the brain - the prefrontal cortex, right hippocampus and cerebellum - had actually grown.

Professor Adam Gazzaley of the University of California designed a game to make pensioner’s brains multi-task - Neuroracer.

He found that players’ working memory and attention span had improved by 30%.