From: Can Playing Modern Warfare 3 Boost IQ and Diagnose Trauma?
0:00 IQ is dropping, gaming is a solution
0:45 Brain develops, changes, grows using neuroplasticity to reprogram and restructure the brain. Norman Doidge “The Brain that Changes Itself”. Stimulate and grow specific parts of the brain. Brain areas are able to be trained similar to any skill. Videogames already proved to be beneficial: increase gray matter, boost cognitive performance, spacial awareness, memory, attention span, decision making (Dr K has talked about this too), mental modelling. Different games train different aspects, as expected.
6:25 Some games also show atrophy in certain brain areas. CoD showed decrease of gray matter. Waypoint systems decrease spatial reasoning. If you are not using it, you are losing it. Tools we use make our life easier but make us use our brain less in certain ways: google maps, AI, calendars, todolists, excel etc. Go to a new city and find that even after 1 year you have no idea how to get around without a maps app. Phones handle most of what made daily life more difficult back in the day.
12:27 Of course we give something up with convenience, but we also gain new ways of life. We have to weight the pros and cons. Same way gyms roared in popularity, after people understood how bad the sitting/drive-everywhere lifestyle was for us, so shall the mental gyms rise: gaming for one as an example.
17:16 The way we approach tasks and challenges determines a lot: studies praise Minecraft for increase in creativity, but if the kids playing were told to be creative, the benefits dissapeared. Spatial reasoning has different approaches too: spatial learners used landmarks and markers to navigate and response learners who memorized how many blocks they had to move right/left etc. Response learners showed atrophy in the hippocampus, but increase in other areas. This shows how we can leverage the stronger parts of our brains to compensate atrophy in others.
19:40 It is very hard to measure, feel and see differences and effects of mental capabilities and states. This needs long term observation: kind of like fiddling with sleep routines to see what works best for you. What time to sleep at, how long to sleep, which postition to sleep in, what to do before and after sleep and then see the effects over time.
20:00 BDobbins personal gaming to irl cognitive change examples
32:05 Meditation research shows similar findings: some parts of the brain improve massively (related to relaxing, resting, the present) while others show decline (areas producing fear, anxiety, fast response). Playing certain games in certains ways can be a form of meditation. Escapism can be used as a form of suppressant: the practice of stabilizing a mentally unstable patient in psychiatry so that they can come to a state of handling their own problems. Same we SSRIs are used to mitigate disastrous states instead of fixing the myriad of problems, thoughts and ideas that brought these states, gaming can be used in a similar manner. Human stress response can become a vicious cycle (fear and anxiety create more of itself about itself making it ever harder to tackle the original problem): we must create a break it to deal with it. If we let the cycle go out of hand, the brain just isnt made to handle such loads: parts of our brain start getting overtrained, burnt out, thus pluning into decline, also affecting other parts of the body as well, leading in the end to worse everything essentially.
36:15 Amygdala hijack is the emotions taking over, distress taking the drivers wheel. Good in rare occasions but exceedingly disruptive when left behind the wheel for too long. Remaining calm can be the only way to not lose the shit or to break the cycle. Amygdala on the other hand affects our ability to socialize and emphatize, tipping the scale one or the other way too heavily can be detrimental in different ways (studies have shown mindfulness to the extreme has inhibited amygdala to an extent where it has been hard for people to emphatize).
39:00 It comes down to our choice what kind of brain do we want to have. Can’t have the cake and eat it too, can have all your stats maxed out. Modern lives have left the average person to choose to shrink their amygdala unconsciously to reduce stress responses and anxiety and maximize feel good chemicals.
40:38 Trauma comes from unprocessed events and thoughts. Example: person gets in a car crash, their body gets locked in the freeze state (fight, flight, freeze), they survive, the brain unfreezes but has unprocessed chunks that are not able to be accessed because the brain was frozen, each time they see a similar situation (like driving a car) they get a meltdown as they think they are still in that same situation that froze them first.
44:25 BDobbins personal trauma. “Body Remembers” book.
59:57 If you had a broken foot but did not know what a “broken foot” really is, you would probably naturally go into a pattern of avoiding pain (limping, putting weight only on the other foot, etc) and finding things that provide relief. Same with mental problems but it is harder to see what is wrong because it is not physical. What we can do is notice natural patterns. What we avoid and what we do for relief is a marker towards the progblem. We have to get away from circustances that are related to that trauma to heal them, otherwise everything will remind and resurface the trauma and keep the brain on alert, not able to relax which is needed for healing. Activites that feel good in hyper-vigilance feel unpleasant in healthier more normal conditions, and vice-versa.
1:06:21 The game design choices of popular games can point towards the overall mental state of the average target audience. IQ drop and mental health decline are linked. Trends irl also point towards the mental changes in populations. Modern western trends (worrying about global issues, feeling more and more responisiblity) go towards heightened amygdala and stress responses and decline in the areas of the brain that process emotions, trauma. “Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels”. Everything in our lives has been more and more regulated and controlled, leading us to think less and become more and more alienated from ourselves, others and the systems around us.
1:18:45 Mental training via gaming is a solution. BDobbins suggests World of Warcraft, Cities Skylines, Halo (the old ones).
1:35:00 Mental models and abstract thinking. Pure data vs gray areas.