Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault

Gotta love these studies that take MRI’s of brains of people doing particular tasks.  It’s worth noting that similar findings have been found in many other tasks as well.  We just have to accept that sometimes people are better at doing that things than others, and it is probably to some degree, innate talent.

This also explains why I never was able to beat Super Mario Brothers.  Curse that level 8 stage 2!

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.

New neurological research, published in—and made freely available by—the journal Cerebral Cortex has found a correlation between the size of a trio of structures in the human brain and their owner’s ability to learn and play video games. Animal studies had focused the authors’ attention on three distinct structures deep within the brain: the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum, and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum. It was known that the striatum was used in habit forming and skill acquisition, so a role in video games skills makes sense.

via Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault.

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edwinleap.com | Sunday morning in the ER

The whole post is a good read, but the following caught my eye:

A reflection: Is our national medical obsession with chest pain a manifestation of our national anxiety and fear of uncertainty? Of our national terror of death, or our collective unease even in the face of relative security and prosperity? Is it because we’ve subsituted faith for pharmaceuticals?

via edwinleap.com | Sunday morning in the ER.

My answer: yes.   More specifically, we have substituted Science as the religion, humanity as supreme, and have found both sorely lacking.

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The New Yorker: The Checklist

A really great article by Atul Gawande (writer of “Complications” and “Better”) was published in the New Yorker. The ariticle follows the work on intensivist Dr Peter Pronovost, who made simple workflow interventions which made dramatic reductions on the rate of complications in the intensive care unit. The following quote, however, made him an instant hero to me:

“The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.”

A link to the article is here.

Thanks Phil Andrus at the Mount Sinai Emergency Medicine Critical Care Blog for bringing this to my attention.

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