video games

Does multitasking seem to be getting tougher for you as the years pass? In fact, that’s quite normal. By the time you are 40, multitasking is nearly twice as challenging as when you were 20. The good news is that playing a video game has just been shown to improve cognitive function and, in particular, multitasking ability in healthy older adults. Adults subjects from 60 to 85 years old became as effective at multitasking as 20 year-olds after just a month of training, according to a new UCSF study.

There’s more evidence that playing video games can improve your brain in ways that go beyond an ability to get higher scores in those games:

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study.

Gaming companies know a lot about how to light up your brain – to be successful, a game has to be engaging from the start and addictive enough to keep the player coming back. Some video game makers have employed neuromarketing technology to test aspects of game play. We rarely do infographic posts here, but this is one that might be interesting to our readers:

If you want to know the direction that healthcare is headed in the near future, ask your kids which video games they’re playing today. The last year has seen an explosion of new approaches to solving healthcare problems, with many of them originating in the world of videogaming.