Kotaku
The professor behind the top selling Brain Age game series in Japan released a study five years ago that he said showed video games stunt brain development and could lead to "an increasingly violent society."
According to an April 2001 story in The Observer, Ryuta Kawashima, at the time a professor at Tohoku University in Japan, did a study investigating the levels of brain activity in children who play video games. He used the same sort of computer imaging technique used for developing the first Brain Age game. Kawashima hooked children up to a device that showed which areas of the brain were being used in real time and then had them play Nintendo games. He then had the same children do an excercise called the Kraepelin test, which is just doing basic math problems for 30 minutes. (A similar program is found in Brain Age.)
The study found that the children playing games were only using the parts of their brain used for vision and movement, while the group doing Kraepelin test were using the left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe, which is where learning, memory, emotion and impulse control take place.
Kawashima presented his findings to an education conference in the UK, saying that children who play games stop the development process in certain parts of their brain and could limit their ability to control anti-social behavior.
Kawashima told the Observer that the discovery's importance couldn't be underestimated.
"There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children — who play computer games — that we have never seen before."
"The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society and these students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud or learning arithmetic."
"Children need to be encouraged to learn basic reading and writing, of course," he said.
"But the other thing is to ask them to play outside with other children and interact and to communicate with others as much as possible.
"This is how they will develop, retain their creativity and become good people," he said.
I stumbled upon this old research while working on a story about Brain Age for the Rocky Mountain News and was initially stunned, but on closer examination it doesn't really contradict anything being said about Brain Age.
Kawashima's personal opinions on gaming aside, he does say his Brain games help stimulate the same parts of the brain that he initially said was left untouched by traditional gaming.
When contacted for comment Thursday, Nintendo pointed out that the study is five years old and argued that it never established that gaming was actually harmful.
"Brain Age is designed specifically to let players use the portions of their brains that were shown to be inhibited when people played only certain kinds of games excessively. As everyone knows, doing anything excessively is typically not good for you. Dr. Kawashima's brain-research expertise demonstrates that Nintendo has partnered with the right person to help make Brain Age as creative and as stimulating as possible."
