We’ve always known that playing endless hours of video games wasn’t GOOD for your brain – but we didn’t know that it could be this bad for it.
Researchers in Montreal have found the first link between playing first-person shooter games and loss of grey matter in the brain.
This could be bad news for some gamers.
The new research suggests that playing first-person shooter games can cause loss of grey matter in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain in charge of spatial memory and being able to remember past events and experiences.
Loss of grey matter in this part of the brain also puts certain users at a higher risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders like PTSD, depression and Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers used comparisons between brain scans from healthy participants between 18-30 years old with no history of playing video games before and after playing first-person shooter games VS playing 3D platform games.
They divided the group in two and had the first group play 90 hours of first-person shooter games like:
Call of Duty
Killzone
and Borderlands 2
The brain scans of some of the participants in this group showed significant loss of grey matter in the hippocampus.
But not all hope is lost!
The other group of participants played 90 hours of 3D platform games like Super Mario Odyssey.
The scans from this test showed growth in the hippocampus for all participants.
Which suggested that playing 3D platform games could actually help repair some of the grey matter lost and damaged from playing first-person shooting games.
So don’t hang up all of your controllers yet – just your gaming guns.
Check out this article by CBC, to read more about this research.
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