Sutton-Smith did most of his research long before the technological advances that allow scientists today to scan brains for evidence of blood flow patterns related to mental illness and well-being. And he worked long before the explosion of video gaming—according to a meta-analysis I performed, more than 1.23 billion people play globally, including 155 million people in the United States. But thanks to a rapidly growing body of scientific research, we now know that his intuition that “the opposite of play is depression” is a perfectly apt description at a neurological level of what’s going on with these 1.23 billion video gamers.
In the past few years, multiple fMRIstudies, including a seminal one conducted at Stanford University, have peered into the brains of gamers. Their results show that when we play video games, two regions of the brain are continually hyperstimulated: the region most associated with motivation and goal-orientation (often referred to as “the reward pathways”) and the region most associated with learning and memory (the hippocampus). When you think about the experience of playing a video game, it makes perfect sense that these two regions of the brain would be hyperactivated. When we play games, we’re immediately and constantly focused on a goal. Whether it’s to solve a puzzle, find hidden objects, reach a finish line, or score more points than other players, the goal focuses our attention and creates a sense of motivation and determination. As we anticipate our potential success, our reward pathways light up.
Meanwhile, all video games—not just “educational” games—are designed to be learning experiences. Level 1 of any game is easy, because players are usually not very good at a new game the first time they try it. Immediately, the learning process kicks in, as they figure out the rules, test different strategies, and improve their skills. Crucially, as players succeed and advance in any video game, it gets harder, which requires players to continue to learn and improve for as long as they’re playing. This experience of consistently getting better at something is perhaps the signature pleasure of all video games. When there is nothing else to learn, and no way to keep improving, we usually stop playing. This is why adults don’t play tic-tac-toe! But as long as the game requires us to improve, our hippocampus will be engaged.
If you’ve ever wondered how you—or a loved one—can fail 20 times in a row at an Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga level and yet still be enthusiastic and determined to try just one more time, this distinct neurological activation pattern is the reason why. To nonplayers, this tendency to keep trying again and again to finish a game level can seem obsessive and irrational. But it’s exactly the resilient behavior you would expect from someone whose brain has been primed both to stay focused on her goal and to gain confidence in her ability to learn and get better.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting to researchers like me who are interested in the connection between gameplay and depression: These two regions of the brain, the reward pathways and the hippocampus, are the same two regions that get chronically understimulated, and that even shrink over time, when we’re clinically depressed.
In other words: Video game play is literally the neurological opposite of depression.
When the reward pathways are underactivated, we can’t anti
Comments
Post a Comment