Most of our readers would agree but for those needing further convincing (come on!) here some good reading for you (and everyone else). A recent study from the UK has shown that video games can help improve the brain’s thinking and strategic thinking. The study was conducted by scientists from the Queen Mary University of London and University College of London and saw 72 female volunteers to play StarCraft and The Sims.
The volunteers were divided into three groups with one tasked to play The Sims whilst the remaining two group were assigned to play StarCraft, all of them asked to play 40 hours over the six to eight weeks. Not surprisingly (well for us) those who played Starcraft had better response times and accuracy in performing cognitive flexibility tasks than those who played The Sims.
“Previous research has demonstrated that action video games, such as Halo, can speed up decision making but the current work finds that real-time strategy games can promote our ability to think on the fly and learn from past mistakes,” stated researcher Dr. Brian Glass from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. “Our paper shows that cognitive flexibility, a cornerstone of human intelligence, is not a static trait but can be trained and improved using fun learning tools like gaming.”
You can view the full study at this link:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070350
Source: Times Herald