As an educator, I truly believe that brain research can teach us more about how young people learn. Now video games are being combined with neurological studies to further unlock the mysteries of learning.
For the last decade, video games have been scientifically linked to increased perception, attention, memory and problem solving. Research has also indicated these benefits will transfer to other real-world tasks. Conversely, these same studies reveal that, for most novice and non-gamers, the benefits of gaming are next to nil.
With these dualities ever present, researchers from various institutions wanted to dig a little deeper into this phenomenon. Is it the act of playing video games that allows brains to blossom, or is there something about a gamer’s brain structure that inherently allows them to learn and adapt more quickly?
With a little funding from the United States’ Office of Naval Research, scientists took MRIs of the brains of 39 non-gamers – 10 men and 29 women. Dividing them into two groups, participants played one of two versions of the game Space Fortress. The success of each player was correlated with the initial MRIs.
When I first heard about this study, the critical thinker within me wanted to know a little more about the game they were using for this test, Space Fortress is a game that looks more like something from the Atari 4800 era than an actual scientific tool. As it turns out, it has been used to map the benefits of video games throughout a variety of cognitive-based research projects since the late 1980s.
And with the help of a video game, this latest study, published in the science journal Cerebral Cortex (cercor.oxfordjournals.org) reveals more about predicting learning than anything previously discovered.
Leaving out such terms as striatal volumes and nucleus accumbens, the study basically found that the size of certain parts of a person’s brain would reflect how quickly he or she would acquire the skills needed to be successful at the game. According to The Globe and Mail, Kirk Erickson, the first author in the study and a professor of psychology, is quoted as saying, “We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate.”
The implications of this study are huge, especially in the education world. Imagine being able to use an MRI scan to predict not only how quickly a student could learn a particular skill, but knowing what specific learning strategies would best benefit the student. Mapping the ideal way an individual student might learn would not only improve the effectiveness of the teaching methods applied, but would also allow the student to feel success more quickly, thus increasing motivation towards further challenges.
Individualized, brain-based strategies could be effectively developed to turn reluctant readers into daily readers, take the guess work out of differentiating instruction towards meeting various learning styles, and — this being the most notable implication — help students learn more about how they learn as individuals. The more a student knows about what will and will not work for them, the more likely they are to overcome barriers to learning and take greater ownership of their education.
The repercussions of this study, and future studies like it, certainly are as far-reaching as they are exciting. And to think it all started with a video game.
When he’s not facilitating learning outcomes as a junior high teacher, St. Albert Catholic High School alumnus Derek Mitchell can be found wired to a video game console.
