Thursday, September 03, 2009

Tetris is good for you!

My brother-in-law sent out a link to Tetris can alter the structure of your brain:

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Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
The study, funded by Tetris' makers and authored by investigators at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, shows that playing the classic puzzle game had two distinct effects on the brains of research subjects: some areas in the brain showed greater efficiency (the blue areas in the diagram above), and different areas showed thicker cortexes, which is a sign of more grey matter (red).
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.

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Maybe we should include Tetris with our homeschooling!


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Technorati tags: Tetris

5 comments:

heather said...

COOL. I knew it was good for me. :)

Henry Cate said...

Now I wonder if people can convince their bosses to allow them to play a little Tetris at work? :-)

Martin the tetris brain said...

Why didn't this study come out when I was a kid.

Maybe back then I could have used it to get more time playing the game

Luke Holzmann said...

[smile] That good stuff.

Of course, any study conducted with funding from the people being studied does call the results into question a little, but there is hope for the gaming world yet [laughing].

~Luke

Henry Cate said...

Since it is education, maybe I should assign Tetris to my daughters! :-)