Since the concept of ‘brain plasticity’ made its way into the study of the nervous system, many scientific works have been carried out to find out the type of activities that are capable of producing the change in the structure of our brain or in its shape. to work.
According to statistics, 40% of Spaniards have played a video game in the last year . When playing is done frequently, we know that certain changes take place in our cognitive functions such as perceptual abilities or attention.
In addition, playing can be associated with modifications in certain areas of our brain. This is how Kühn and Gallinat (2013) describe it in an article published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. In their study, they performed MRI scans on 62 adult men and correlated the volume of different brain areas with the amount of time they would have spent playing video games throughout their lives.
The research results showed the greater the amount of time spent playing during life, the greater the volume of gray matter in various brain structures : the entorhinal cortex in the left and right parahippocampal regions, as well as the lower parietal lobes. and occipital left. These structures are relevant in visual attention and the processing of the spatial information necessary for navigation tasks.
But the most interesting thing is that the type of games played by the participants made it possible to predict the volume of the entorhinal gray matter, the most important being puzzles, logic games and those that include platforms. Those of action and those based on role were those that had a negative influence on the volume of this brain structure, according to the authors.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
