Video game addiction may have negative effects in the brain

A small study has found that people who play action games on a regular basis may undergo brain changes associated with certain kinds of neurological and psychiatric disorders. If this linkage holds up under scrutiny, it could mean that gamers are putting their minds at risk. 

A group of fifty-nine young adults, and divided them into two groups based on their gaming habits. One group (26 people) comprised of people who regularly played at least six hours per week of action video games (like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Tomb Raider), while a second group was composed of those who didn’t. 

Then both groups of volunteers were asked to navigate a virtual-reality maze. For the first few runs, the maze contained landmarks, like trees, a rock and some mountains – but after that, the landmarks disappeared, which meant that the volunteers had to navigate the maze from memory. 

Overall, gamers and non-gamers were equally adept at navigating the maze, but they reported using different strategies. Eighty percent of video gamers used a response strategy, which means using sequences of turns, rather than environmental cues, to navigate. Only 42 percent of non-gamers relied on memorized movement sequences. 

That difference may have implications for gamers’ brains. People who display response learning strategies tend to have a bigger and more active striatum – a part of the brain that links simple stimulus-response-reward sequences together – and a smaller and less active hippocampus, which forms episodic, relationship-based memories.

Playing video games could thus be building up players’ striatum at the expense of their hippocampus. And that has implications for overall brain health, since a shrunken hippocampus is associated with risk of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.