Friday, October 25, 2013

Trained for violence: how video games affect the brain...

The brain is a very adaptable organ. It has the cognitive ability to adapt to stress, whether real or imagined, but do violent video games and movies actually help us to adapt to a sadistic world, or help to create one?

Gamers and researchers have been on both sides of this argument, but with all the advances in brain imaging and the new studies in neuroplasticity, it seems hard to deny that old axiom that what goes in must come out. Part of the problem is that our brains are so adaptable, and a relatively new study coming out of the University of Missouri (U of M) shows that violent video games appear to make people more aggressive and desensitized to the violence that we see in our every day world. While this finding seems obvious, it is still relatively groundbreaking in science to understand that the relationship between our mind and our subjective experience actually has physical effects on our body and brain, effects that are dramatic and can even be enduring.

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According to the U of M study, even people who don’t normally play video games were still affected by playing violent games.

Part of the reason these findings may have merit is due to the way that empathy and compassion normally develop in a human being. We already know that those who have experienced violence or abuse in their childhoods are much more likely to perpetuate it on others as they become adults themselves. Sex offenders, for example, have a glaringly high incident rate of having lived thorough sexual misconduct themselves, even though not all offenders were molested themselves. In this example, a child does not learnt to develop empathy for another’s well-being, as is normally the case in someone’s developmental progress, which was not impeded by such an atrocity in their most important years. A loss of innocence is truly a sad thing, since empathy is a “potential psychological motivator for helping others in distress” as pointed out by a psychologists who conducted a study at the University of Miami. The authors go on to explain: Full story...

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