Video Games Good For Eyesight February 8, 2007
Read more Consoles , Entertainment , Games , Gizmodo UK , Home Entertainment , PC , PS3 , Wii , Xbox
Woo-hoo! Finally, video games are good for something after all.
After being shown to be bad for pretty much everything else (aggression, social skills etc.) researchers at the University of Rochester have found that playing action video games, like Unreal Tournament, can improve your vision.
In experiments, people that played action games for a few hours each day over a month saw a 20% improvement in their ability to recognise letters in a clutter – a visual test similar to reading the bottom line on the eye chart at the opticians. Another unlucky control group got to play Tetris.
“Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information,” says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in.”
So, next time someone blathers on about the evils of gaming you have some bona fide research to debunk them, partially. Then, thanks to your heightened aggression levels from gaming, you can proceed to beating the crap out of them.-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
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I agree too