Can't figure out why your old lady won't sit and play Halo 3 with you, guys? Don't know why the man in your life won't stop playing Call of Duty 4 until the wee hours of the morning, ladies? According to a new study by the Stanford School of Medicine, the part of the brain that gives of a feeling of reward and accomplishment is more active in men than in women.

Twenty-two men and women were given a simple game, in which they had to control a number of balls and a wall in a certain way to protect territory and ultimately win the game, while their brain patterns were tracked on a fMRI machine.

"The females 'got' the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect," said Reiss, who is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed."

Both groups showed activity in the mesocorticolimbic center, which is the part of the brain associated with rewards and addictions, but the males showed a lot more activity.

So there you have it. Could this really be the reason your girlfriend won't play Xbox with you? I guess it would account for the higher number of males that play video games than females, and would also make sense why not all guys love games, and why not all girls don't. After all, having a gendered brain doesn't mean that your brain is exactly the same as everyone else of your gender, just similar. I think it also comes down to nature vs. nurture, too: video games are becoming a bigger part of our culture, so regardless of how your brain is wired, you'll be more inclined to play games. More information on the study in the press release after the jump.

02/04/08

VIDEO GAMES ACTIVATE REWARD REGIONS OF BRAIN IN MEN MORE THAN WOMEN,
STANFORD STUDY FINDS

STANFORD, Calif. - Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can't put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.

"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

More than 230 million video and computer games were sold in 2005, and polls show that 40 percent of Americans play games on a computer or a console. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive survey, young males are two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, such as the Halo series so popular in recent years.

Despite the popularity of video and computer games, little is known about the neural processes that occur as people play these games. And no research had been done on gender-specific differences in the brain's response to video games.

Reiss, senior author of the study and the Howard C. Robbins Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has long been interested in studying gender differences; in 2005, he published a study showing that men and women process humor differently. He and his colleagues became interested in exploring the concept of territoriality, and they determined the best way to do so was with a simple computer game.

The researchers designed a game involving a vertical line (the "wall") in the middle of a computer screen. When the game begins, 10 balls appear to the right of the wall and travel left toward the wall. Each time a ball is clicked, it disappears from the screen. If the balls are kept a certain
distance from the wall, the wall moves to the right and the player gains territory, or space, on the screen. If a ball hits the wall before it's clicked, the line moves to the left and the player loses territory on the screen.

During this study, 22 young adults (11 men and 11 women) played numerous 24-second intervals of the game while being hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, machine. fMRI is designed to produce a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity.

Study participants were instructed to click as many balls as possible; they weren't told that they could gain or lose territory depending on what they did with the balls. Reiss said all participants quickly learned the point of the game, and the male and female participants wound up clicking on the same number of balls. The men, however, wound up gaining a significantly greater amount of space than the women. That's because the men identified which balls - the ones closest to the "wall" - would help them acquire the most space if clicked.

"The females 'got' the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect," said Reiss, who is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed."

After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain's mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of
activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn't the case with women.) Three structures within the reward circuit - the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex - were also shown to influence each other much more in men than in women. And the better connected this circuit was, the better males performed in the game.

The findings indicate, the researchers said, that successfully acquiring territory in a computer game format is more rewarding for men than for women. And Reiss, for one, isn't surprised. "I think it's fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial," he said. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species-they're the males."

Reiss said this research also suggests that males have neural circuitry that makes them more liable than women to feel rewarded by a computer game with a territorial component and then more motivated to continue game-playing behavior. Based on this, he said, it makes sense that males are more prone to getting hooked on video games than females.

"Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory- and aggression-type games," he pointed out.

Reiss said the team's findings may apply to other types of video and computer games. "This is a fairly representative, generic computer game," he said, adding that he and his colleagues are planning further work in this area.

Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, senior research scientist, was first author of the study. Co-authors include Christa Watson, social science research assistant; Shelli Kesler, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; and Keith Bettinger, software developer.

# # #

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu.

GP: One thing I found especially concerning... was [an e-mail] comment that you only saw the [Indiana University] brain scan pix five minutes before air [of The Morning Show]. That being the case, do you think it appropriate to go on and offer a professional opinion based on the scans to the audience?

Dr. Bartell: That's the way it is with TV — it's just not a black and white thing. I am genuinely sorry that it caused such a sense that I was being so disrespectful [to gamers]. The scans aside I stand by my opinion that violent games should not be played by teens... As to whether I should have responded to the scans — my intent was going on air to discuss whether the church should be holding Halo nights, clearly that was derailed.

GP: In all honesty, I'm having difficulty reconciling "that's the way it is with TV" to responsible professionalism. It smacks of sensationalism. Just being candid here.

Dr. Bartell: I can understand how you feel... there is an element of sensationalism to it I suppose...I couldn't — five minutes before going on air — say, sorry I won't do it, I don't have enough background information about this brain scan! I'm just not that much of a purist...

From the looks of it, not only does Dr. Bartell have a horse in this race, but The Morning Show doesn't seem too keen on video games, either. For a program that oversimplifies major issues into 4-minute coffee talk to an audience that should be, I dunno, working, there must be a more suitable story to run like "drink more water" or "the bad people are coming to knock over children not wearing their bike helmets after raping the tailpipe of your unlocked car and wiping avian influenza on the seats."

How Fox Morning Show Sensationalized the Halo-in-Church Issue [gamepolitics]

The BBC reports that Belgian researchers have proved the common sense adage that more sleep is good for your brain. Volunteers played Duke Nukem, going on place-finding missions. Players had to find various locals as scientists mapped their brain activity with MRI. Researchers learned that the part of the brain involved with memory and direction was most active when gamers had to retrieve memories to find their destinations. Folks that had slept were automatically able to retrieve info, while the sleep-deprived ones had to think harder. "It looks like sleep accelerates this normal process. It looks like the memories are reprocessed during sleep," said a Belgian researcher. Good to know, but Duke Nukem?!

Full Story Here [BBC]

Just in case you thought all of that talk about Will Wright's giant brain hurting everyone during his GDC keynote was crap, I've uploaded a taste of the brainy blather. This is Wright addressing why the existence of life is so... or rather that radioactive...um, that life spreads really...actually, I have no idea what the video is about.