Computer games are creating a dumbed-down generation of children far more disposed to violence than their parents, according to a controversial new study.
The tendency to lose control is not due to children absorbing the aggression involved in the computer game itself, as previous researchers have suggested, but rather to the damage done by stunting the developing mind.
Using the most sophisticated technology available, the level of brain activity was measured in hundreds of teenagers playing a Nintendo game and compared to the brain scans of other students doing a simple, repetitive arithmetical exercise. To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement.
In contrast, arithmetic stimulated brain activity in both the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe -- the area of the brain most associated with learning, memory and emotion.
Most worrying of all was that the frontal lobe, which continues to develop in humans until the age of about 20, also has an important role to play in keeping an individual's behaviour in check.
Whenever you use self-control to refrain from lashing out or doing something you should not, the frontal lobe is hard at work.
Children often do things they shouldn't because their frontal lobes are underdeveloped. The more work done to thicken the fibres connecting the neurons in this part of the brain, the better the child's ability will be to control their behaviour. The more this area is stimulated, the more these fibres will thicken.
The students who played computer games were halting the process of brain development and affecting their ability to control potentially anti-social elements of their behaviour.
"The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated," Kawashima said.
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