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Effect of Video Games on the Brain Function of Teenagers and Young Adults

Effect of Video Games on the Brain Function of Teenagers and Young Adults

By : Dhannyo Putta (Bioinformatics Cohort 2021)

Video games are one of the most influential and accessible sources of entertainment, with 97% of adolescents and adults spending at least an hour playing video games each day, making it a hobby that is an inseparable part of modern culture (Granic et al. 2014). The popularity of these video games is accompanied by numerous different thoughts from varying age groups and backgrounds, which suggests that video games are potentially good or bad for children. Cognitive development is an important process required by children to develop knowledge, skills, and problem-solving abilities. This progress includes the development of thinking, learning, perception, and memory, which is affected by several factors, such as biological, social, experiential, environmental, and motivational factors (Gauvain & Richert, 2016). From the psychometric approach, there are several categories of brain cognitive functions, including attention, thinking, learning, reasoning, remembering, problem solving, and decision making, which are handled by specific parts of the brain (Fisher et al., 2019).

Playing video games as a hobby will cause repetition in certain physical or mental practices, which can affect the brain. These repetitive actions will stimulate the neuron’s ability to grow, adapt, and reorganize its connections according to changes, which is useful for creating neural pathways between the stimulated parts of the brain. The intensity of these changes and the parts affected vary with each individual and is also dependent on the kind of game played. Action video games generally demand visual and auditory capabilities. Strategy video games specifically are correlated with self-control, avoidance of temptations, cognition, risk-taking, impulsivity management, and long-term impact decisions (Gabbiadini & Greitemeyer, 2017), while several other types of games also involve players in thinking, multi-tasking, and decision-making that have both an instantaneous and long-term impact. While numerous types of games may emphasize the importance of memory and knowledge.

The results of neuroimaging research on routine video game players show that these types of micro-activities can affect multiple parts of the brain. Rapid and fast action video games can increase gray matter volume in the dorsal striatum, which regulates movement and cognition (Erickson et al., 2010), occipital cortex, which processes visual signals, the hippocampus, which controls learning and memory, and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which takes part in decision making (Kühn et al., 2013), and the right posterior parietal cortex, which dictates spatial representation of objects for action planning and control (Tanaka et al., 2013), which supports the possibility of cognitive and neural benefits of playing video games. Meanwhile, psychomotor findings showed that playing action video games correlates with improvements in attention (Mishra et al., 2011), coordination of the hand and eye (Chandra et al., 2016), response efficiency (West et al., 2013), working memory (Blacker et al., 2014), and visual perception (Colzato et al., 2012) in teenagers and young adults.

However, playing video games can also have various negative effects on the brain, such as dopamine addiction, emotional desensitization, and social disconnection. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter involved in the brain’s reward system, motivation, memory, attention, and even regulating body movements. Research supports that up to 23% of teenagers and young adults show symptoms of addiction towards video games (Mathews et al., 2018). Overstimulation of the brain reward system will cause the dopamine in the brain to accumulate and the tolerance to dopamine will gradually increase, causing players the desire to play more to satisfy their growing needs for pleasure. As a side effect, a video game player might find other activities unrelated to video games becoming less fun and enjoyable because they don’t stimulate the dopamine reward system enough, causing them to be negligent in doing those activities. Oftentimes, video game addicts have problems with time management and have a tendency to procrastinate more (Karim & Chaudhri, 2012). Furthermore, research also shows that addiction to video games can progress into attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can also greatly reduce the productivity ofaddicted individuals (Mathews et al., 2018).

Another negative effect of video games is desensitization. Results from fMRI studies show that playing video games when the amygdala is stimulated will cause it to calm down, causing negative emotions to be constantly suppressed. Naturally, theexperience of negative emotions like fear, worry, or shame will stimulate the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that governs these negative emotions and is very important in our learning system because it generates connections with the hippocampus, the core of learning in our brain. This constant supression can lead to alexithymia, a condition in which individuals find it hard to determine their feelings towards something. Painful experiences are usually still imprinted on the memory, and the human brain learns from these memories. However, this condition can cause a lack of empathy, which causes social disconnection. (Hemenover & Bowman, 2018).

Another factor that can alter the effects of playing video games is what is done while playing. Although aggression and violence are often linked to video games, the evidence is lacking and it mostly depends on the video game player and the environment. Being exposed to a toxic video game environment for a long time with most of its players harassing, bullying, griefing, and spreading negativity towards others will cause a lot of harm towards those players and other players as well, because victims can create subconscious thoughts that such behaviors are tolerable and normal, which perhaps makes them perpetrators themselves. They may eventually believe that this harassment is behavior that is harmless and acceptable, which will cause problems in real-world interactions (Adinolf & Turkay, 2018).

Playing video games can have different positive and negative effects on each player, depending on the time spent playing and what is done while playing. This activity may bring some benefits if done at the ideal length and intensity, but will cause problems if done excessively and taken too seriously. As a teenager or young adult, wisdom and self-control in spending time efficiently are needed to make playing video games apositive activity without any negative effects 

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