maybe this explains why i’m such a genious … lol not really … i’m actually bit more humble than that.
but, it is interesting in the following article they mentioned people that play video games and are bilingual were ‘unbeatable’ compared to their counterparts … and let’s see … i’ve spoken 5 languages (knowledge of each through varying degrees, but still …) throughout my life (Romanian, Hungarian, German, French, and English), and we all know i’m a huge video game nerd.
References: here
Ant wrote to mention a Globe and Mail article stating that
videogames keep the mind young and help in quick focusing on different
tasks. “A body of research suggests that playing video games provides
benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people
fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the
other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly
switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university
undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently
outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If
they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.”
An excerpt from the study:
That study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, shows the elderly lose the ability to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus on a task, and to turn down activity in inner brain regions that are most active when a person is in idle or default mode.
“You can’t turn off the extraneous things . . . the areas involved in thinking of the self — ‘What do I have to do? . . . Gee, I have a really bad headache,” said study leader Cheryl Grady, senior scientist and associate director at Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest.
In contrast, the brain images of people between ages 20 and 30 displayed a far more dramatic see-saw effect activating and de-activating regions as they shifted out of idle to task. The study found this pattern begins to dull in middle age and actually results in cognitive deficits beyond age 60.
Very interesting … I should get my dad to start playing video games.