New Mexican researchers report that brain training exercises, specifically playing the video game Tetris may actually up the amount of grey matter you have in your brain. The study appears in the open access peer-reviewed scientific journal BMC Research Notes and is one of the first to use two different imaging techniques to investigate the effect of practice on the brain.
The work comes out of the Mind Research Network (MRN) and involved both structural (to assess size) and functional (to measure activity) MRI scans performed on 26 teen girls both at the beginning and at the end of the study period.
The girls were told to play the computer puzzle game Tetris for 30 minutes a day all during the three-month period. A control group of girls underwent the MRI scans but did not play Tetris.
The scans saw improved efficiency in parts of the brain associated with critical thinking, reasoning, processing and language. The scans showed changes in parts of the brain’s cortex used for coordinated movements and incorporating experience from the senses with other information.
Tetris is no stranger to being used in research, and was a good tool for this type of work according to the experts. It’s easy to learn, you have to practice to be good so there’s a respectable learning curve. The game itself is engaging, and calls for thinking processes like paying attention, hand/eye coordination, memory and visual/spatial problem solving.
For those who’ve never played, and I admit to being one, you score points by rotating different shape pieces so they form a single, unbroken line, light up and then disappear. A lingering favorite in this era of slick computer graphics and ear splitting sound, Tetris is celebrating its 25th birthday this year, and to date has sold more than 70 million copies.
Using teens for this type of research had its reasoning too. Adolescent brains are still developing, making changes easier to spot. Girls were used as study subjects instead of boys because females at this age tend to have less computer game playing experience than their male counterparts. All the girls in the study had limited experience with computer games before the research began.
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Playing Tetris Might Build Your Brain Continued…
“We were excited to see cortical thickness differences between the girls that practiced Tetris and those that did not,” says co-investigator Richard Haier, a psychologist with the Mind Research Network. “But, it was surprising that these changes were not where we saw more efficiency. How a thicker cortex and increased brain efficiency are related remains a mystery.”
Once researchers believed that the number of brain cells a person had was set after a certain age. Now experts are wondering if this is true. “We showed that practice on a challenging visuospatial task has an impact on the structure of the cortex, which is in keeping with a growing body of scientific evidence showing that the brain can change with stimulation and is in striking contrast with the pervasive and only-recently outmoded belief that our brain’s structure is fixed,” concludes Dr. Sherif Karama, a co-investigator out of the Montreal Neurological Institute.
The next step for researchers is to see if the increase in brainpower achieved brain training exercises like playing this video game can be applied to other things, or will it only help your Tetris game?
To your good health,
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
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