The Berkeley Science Review: Articles

Train Your Brain
How video games can be good for you (view PDF)
by Katie Hart

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We largely accept that we can manipulate our bodies by changing our exercise and eating routines—but what about our brains? Because the brain is traditionally viewed as the locus of our true "self," too often we treat it as immutable. But just as our bodies grow and change, so do our brains. Mounting evidence from the field of neuroscience suggests that our environment molds our brains, and that we can exploit this plasticity through directed training, perhaps even to increase our intelligence.

"Intelligence is perceived as a unitary phenomenon, but a lot of this can be attributed to culture," says Mark Kishiyama, a post-doctoral fellow in Professor Robert Knight's lab in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "Americans tend to attribute intelligence to something innate, whereas Asian cultures perceive it more as discipline and hard work."

Kishiyama and others in the field of cognitive neuroscience are challenging this view of intelligence as a unitary, innate phenomenon with evidence that IQ, and other metrics of general "intelligence," actually measure the output of many discrete brain functions that can be improved with training. Ongoing studies in Assistant Professor of Psychology Silvia Bunge's lab have recently marshaled support that this is, indeed, the case. "We did a training study to see if we could train up reasoning ability in kids," Bunge explains. "After only 6 weeks, the training led to an improvement in IQ of, on average, 11 IQ points and as high as 20 points." Ten to 20 IQ points is considerable when you consider that the average person has an IQ of 100, and an IQ of 136 puts you in the 98th percentile, approaching genius status.

The unpublished study used two types of training on kids in an Oakland elementary school. One group played reasoning games such as Towers, a game in which players must strategically plan several moves ahead to transfer rings from one post to another. The other group played games intended to increase processing speed, like Blink, a card game based on matching shapes and colors as quickly as possible. The games themselves were not exceptional: Blink and Towers are both commercially available. But the results were intriguing. "Keep in mind it's a fairly small group of kids so far, and we're going to run the study again this semester," Bunge cautioned. "But there was a double dissociation between the two groups. The cognitive speed group got better on tasks that required them to think quickly. And the reasoning group got better at tasks that required them to plan."

Playing games with UC Berkeley graduate students twice a week might be sufficient in and of itself to improve IQ across the board, but the targeted improvements in Bunge's study suggest that training can actually boost specific aspects of IQ test performance. Bunge explains that because IQ measures the combined contributions of many interconnected cognitive functions, improving specific skills can lead to an overall increase in IQ. "We think of both reasoning and processing speed as being really important components that subserve cognition," Bunge says. "Your mind has to be quick enough to be able to think through problems, otherwise you're going to lose the thread and you won't be able to, for instance, do a mathematical calculation. So, processing speed is really important. And on the other side, being able to plan out, strategize, and tackle a novel problem, as in the reasoning, is also important."

Bunge's study highlights the significance of growing up in a cognitively enriched environment, where children play games and interact with adults, for performance on tests that measure intelligence. Unfortunately for less privileged children, other research suggests that the converse is also true: Kishiyama and Knight published a study earlier this year which suggests that kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have reduced function in a region of the brain associated with higher-order cognition.

Using electroencephalography, or EEG, measurements, the researchers recorded electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex. Responses to visual stimuli were found to differ between kids from low versus high socioeconomic status (SES) in ways that suggest differences in attention, one established function of this brain region. Kishiyama observed that the reduced responses in low SES children were similar to those seen in some stroke patients, but was quick to point out, "that's where the similarity is, but that's where the similarity ends. Stroke patients will have a certain amount of recovery because the brain is plastic, but they're not going to get complete recovery. The thing with these kids is that because there is no structural brain damage, just a functional disruption, it's something that can be reversed. That's what argues for the next step in terms of intervention."

Both Bunge's and Kishiyama's studies are preliminary, with limited sample sizes that temper the strength of their conclusions. What these studies truly represent is a jumping-off point: they offer a set of testable hypotheses about problems with large social implications. And indeed, powers beyond the confines of the scientific community are already taking those implications seriously. Bunge and Knight are involved in the Law and Neuroscience Project, an initiative funded by the MacArthur Foundation that was created to address the issues of criminal responsibility in light of modern understanding of the human brain. "There are all kinds of things that we're thinking about in terms of frontal lobe immaturity potentially being a mitigating factor for sentencing," says Bunge.

Research with adolescent brains, for instance, suggests that prefrontal cortex, and thus some higher cognition, is still developing into the early twenties. Why then, Bunge wonders, are children under the age of 18 locked away for life, especially given that brain function is trainable? Bunge says she is hopeful that her work and that of her colleagues will help bring reform to the legal system. "The judges that I have been speaking to find it heartening to know that there's at least some evidence that your brain function can change."

Katie Hart is a graduate student in chemistry.

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