[gunshots]

If you grew up playing video games like I did,

you've probably heard lots of conflicting information.

Some say too much gaming will ruin your vision

and rot your brain, while others claim that it

improves your hand eye coordination,

it can even make you smarter.

So, what exactly does gaming do

to our brain and our body?

To find out, I visited doctors and researchers.

We're seeing brain activity in different frequencies.

Tested my hand eye coordination against a pro gamer.

You can't catch up.

And somehow ended up in a sub-200 degree cryo chamber,

all to answer the question: how do video games affect us?

The stakes are higher than ever.

The industry is booming, Esports have gone mainstream,

there are college leagues, parents are even getting

video game tutors for their kids.

And thanks in part to smart phoness,

and free games like Fortnite,

gamers are playing more than ever before.

So given that we can play virtually anywhere

at any time, how is all this gaming changing us physically?

Let's start with the excuse I used

to give my mom when I was trying to get a

little bit more time on the Atari.

It's making me a better athlete.

To find out if that's actually true,

I headed to the sports academy in Thousand Oaks, California,

where amateur gamers and Esports pros

train under the same roof as traditional athletes.

This is pro gamer Matt Higgenbotham.

I'm known online as Acadian.

[Peter Rubin] Between training and casual gaming,

Matt plays eight to ten hours a day.

People say, you know, it improves hand-eye coordination,

it improves response time,

what have you seen in your own life?

If you only play League of Legends as like

your only activity with no physical exercise,

in my opinion, you're just going to get out of shape.

In terms of positives?

Yeah, maybe cognitive it would increase

the things you're going to use in the game:

reacting to things quickly, making decisions quickly.

[Peter] So is he right?. Let's find out

if being an avid gamer actually makes you sharper.

We're gonna be taking a bunch of cognitive tests,

one after the other. Now, Matt is a pro gamer,

I am very much not, so we're gonna see

exactly how our results break down.

The first test is my new arch nemesis, the Dynavision board,

which tests pure reaction time.

Your job is to hit the button when it lights up red, okay?

It's gonna move pretty quickly.

Okay.

So you're gonna wanna rely on your periphery.

Okay, I can use either hand, right?

You can use either hand, that's right.

This is gonna a mess I can already tell.

Now, Matt's calm. He's making it look easy,

but this is way, way harder than it looks.

Am I not seeing one?

Yep, down below, yeah there you go.

I just threw the whole test.

It's pretty fun actually.

Damn it!

I'm gonna walk you over to the next test.

Okay, yeah, so lets leave this far behind.

I'll see you in hell, Dynaboard.

The next one tests what's called Cognitive Processing.

It's also a reaction test, but, unlike the Dynavision Board,

there's a voice telling you to do the opposite

of what you're actually supposed to do.

Okay, there's going to be a voice

in your head that says stop or go,

don't listen to that voice. Keep hitting green.

My brain!

Yeah, it's tiring, right?

Your body gets fatigued, and so does the brain.

That's crazy!

The last test measures your ability

to track multiple objects at the same time.

We had to keep tabs on certain spheres as they

floated around in a 3D space. Kinda like trying

to win two games of three card monte at the same time.

Four seven.

Three and five. Six and eight.

I got better at it after like eight of them.

No, they bounced off each other, no!

[laughs] I don't know who lost them.

My confidence is shaken at this point.

Moment of truth [how are you], lets see how I did.

I hope you got some good news for me.

Of course, always. These tests are built

to really push your cognitive processing

but at the same time give you measurable results

and immediate feedback. Matt out-preformed you

in the more complex tests, so as tests

got more complicated, and had a significant

amount of distractions and opportunity for the brain

to start thinking about something that wasn't

primary to the task, he out-preformed you

pretty significantly in those tests.

If we were to compare both your scores to

a normal population, of which we have data,

he's in the ninety-eighth percentile,

and you're probably in the sixty or seventieth percentile.

So, are we talking about self selection here?

Is it that people who are good at this stuff

are playing games, or is there proof that

games can actually improve your cognition in that way?

No I think for sure games can help improve your cognition.

Playing video games can be very high speed,

can create a lot of chaos, create a lot

of multiple environments where you have to make decisions,

and all of these are forming skills in the brain.

So no, I think in general, just like in every capacity

of human performance, we all start with some baseline

based on genetics, but the opportunity to

train cognition I think it really powerful.

Okay, so a pro gamer who's twenty years

younger than me beat me at a few cognitive tests.

I mean, of course he did. What does

science have to say about all this?

Video games is a hugely broad category,

and we know for sure that the impact of a game

has to do with what you're asked to do.

So because of that, different games will

have different impacts on the brain.

You wouldn't ask, What's the impact of food on your body?.

You'd wanna know the composition of the food, right?

And so the same is true of video games,

so depending on what we would call the mechanics,

the dynamics, the content of individual games,

that is what would predict how

the games will affect your brain.

[Peter] Action games like Counterstrike,

Overwatch, and Fortnite are some of

the most popular with consumers these days.

And Green and his colleagues look to games like those

to find out what their impact is.

[Shawn] There are a sub-type of games, action games,

that have been linked with positive effects

in perceptual and cognitive skills.

These are games that have lots of fast motion in them,

lots of objects to track simultaneously,

and emphasis on peripheral processing,

so items first come at the edges of the screen.

The need to make quick and accurate

decisions under time pressure.

[Peter] Based on fifteen years worth of studies,

researchers found that action games biggest positive effects

were on perception, how our senses interpret

external stimuli like sights and sounds,

spatial cognition, which helps you coordinate yourself in

and navigate 3D environments,

and top down attention, the ability to focus on one object

While ignoring distractions

How far that generalizes, I think is

a pretty open question, so my expectation

is that there are plenty of people who show

pretty exceptional hand-eye coordination with a joystick

might not be able to catch a baseball very well.

So it's certainly the case that a perceptual

motor skill development in one area

won't necessarily generalize to all areas.

I'm curious about thoughts that you have about

the thresh holds between benefits gained from action games

and where those diminishing returns might kick in.

You will get more learning gain from

smaller sessions spread out over time than one big block.

With respect to perceptual and cognitive skills,

we've either seen a positive impact or a null impact.

We haven't seen any area that has

been damaged, where there is worse performance.

[Peter] So those are the positive effects

of playing action games. But what if you develop games

that specifically harness those cognitive effects?

That's exactly what researchers are attempting

at UCSF's Neuroscape Lab.

Our goal is to bridge technology and neuroscience

to improve the function of your brain.

The reason we focus on cognitive control is because

we can look at it as the very, sort of, base of the pyramid

that all other aspects of cognition like

memory, reasoning, decision making,

all the way up to things like wisdom

are dependent upon it. If you can't pay attention,

everything crumbles. You can't build any of

the higher order cognitive abilities.

[Peter] Their custom designing games could one day

be prescribed as a kind of digital medicine

for patients with conditions like ADHD.

So, where pharmaceutical medicines

deliver molecular treatment, we think of this medicine

as a digital medicine that delivers experiential treatment.

The video game's essentially like our pill.

They hook me up with an EEG cap, so that

I can see my brain activity in real time,

while playing a steering game called Project Evo.

[inaudible] ... and we'll see your brain responding to it.

[Peter] And there are signs it's working.

[Adam] So there you go, you got it now.

That game is now in the SCA approval process

to become the first ever prescribe able video game.

What we have frequently found is that we're able

to get transferred benefits from game play

to other aspects of attention

that are very different than the game.

[Peter] Neuroscape is also experimenting

with Virtual Reality. Because VR can utilize

your whole body as a controller,

it may well be able to compound the benefits

for things like attention and memory.

A lot of data has shown that physical activity,

even devoid of cognitive challenges,

has positive benefits on your brain,

especially the aging brain. So we ask the question,

what happens if you give physical challenges

that are integrated with cognitive challenge

and create a sort of integrated approach?

Will you have even more cognitive benefits

if you're moving your entire body [inaudible] challenges

as opposed to playing that same game just sitting there just

moving your fingers, and we're testing that right now.

Now, despite your findings and despite the fact

that you've been able to replicate this and you're

in phase three trials, there doesn't seem to be

consensus in the medical community. There are a lot

of other scientists who say, Well no, I mean,

any positives that you can derive from games

are kind of mild and transitory at best,

how do you respond to that?

It's a complicated field and it's still early days.

I'm at least cautiously optimistic based on

what we've seen over the last ten years

that we're really onto something that's gonna

be very positive of people using video games as therapeutic.

And if these games are prescribed one day

to improve brain function, there are still questions

about what the dosage should be.

It is important to make it fun, but it is also critical

to think of it as something that's dosed

and played for a limited time,

and not interfering with the other

important activities in your life.

Okay, now for the bad news.

Avid gaming can lead to injuries.

I see many people have repetitive motion injuries

from gaming extensively. Many gamers will game

from eight to sixteen hours a day six or seven days a week.

So my goal when I'm talking to them:

find out how much they game,

which games that they're playing,

with their injuries. So injuries are the following;

often, finger injuries, wrist injuries, elbow injuries,

shoulder injuries, neck injuries.

It's the wide gamut of the human body, really.

[Peter] Doctor Harrison also sees something

he calls Gamer's Thumb.

This is an issue whereby someone will have

tendonitis, the back of their thumb, as well as

on the volar aspect or palmar aspect of the thumb.

So they'll have pain on the back of the thumb and the front.

Now, that I've only seen in gamers.

When they present with that,

they have really abused their bodies.

Their thumbs are really on fire.

When this bad boy is down, then you've got a problem.

So, I'm here, I'm your patient,

I don't have big problems yet,

but I want to prevent problems.

Let me show you, there's like five basic tricks, so

you're gonna go down, and then bring your fingers up.

Feel that? Loosen up your joints as well as for your wrists.

Just start opening up everything

and get everything moving really nice.

In and out with the thumb, and down.

This is one of the fundamental stretches

that every gamer should do.

Console base, keyboard base, mouse, whatever,

that is a thumb, you wanna have a healthy thumb.

You do them for five to ten minutes

twice a day, not difficult.

I think video games are great, moderation is the key.

If you overdo it, then there are always issues

that will be attached to that.

[Peter] Look, there's no question gaming can wear you out.

Some gamers at the Sports Academy even subject themselves

to Cryo therapy after long sessions.

The jury's still out on their effectiveness,

but some players swear by it.

So, I decided to give it a try.

Alright, so there's freezing cold gas, its dry.

You go through this fro two, two and a half, three minutes,

when you come out, which I can only hope

is gonna be sometime soon, when you come out

and your body starts to warm up again,

your blood then starts to recirculate

and goes back out to your extremities,

and the idea being that circulation feels amazing,

and you go to the [inaudible].

That was two and a half minutes, I made it!

So what have we learned here, other than

the fact that I'm a masochist?

Gaming can be good for your hand eye coordination

and perception. It can help with focus,

tension, maybe even memory.

Just how all that translates into

the real world, though, it still up for debate.

We also know the repetitive gaming

can take a tole on your body,

so a little bit of moderation goes a long way.

When it comes to my own experience,

I've played games more than thirty years,

never suffered any gaming related injuries.

While I may never know if gaming helped my brain,

I do know it didn't destroy it. So take that, Mom!

[exit music playing]