from the we-told-our-mommas-gaming-would-help-us dept.
A researcher at University of California San Francisco has created an adaptive game with inputs from EEGs and fMRIs to enhance cognition in study participants:
The first step is to identify the target—the different facets of our cognitive capabilities and the underlying neural systems that drive them. These include attention, working memory and goal management. Gazzaley and his team measure these functions using fMRI and EEG. "We can gather biomarkers so we can see if we're having the impact we're looking for."
The second step focuses on taking advantage of the neuroplasticity of the brain to try and modify its functions. The chosen tool for achieving this is video games—"they are an immersive engaging interactive way of changing behaviour. Something happens in the brain when playing. The video game records in real time and adapts itself as well as giving feedback," explains Gazzaley. That goes back to your brain and creates the desired closed loop.
Finally, the team focuses on enhancing the effects by using high-resolution neural feedback to modify the game going forward. The team is using the Unity gaming engine to collate the data garnered from this.
One game the team has already created, Neuroracer, has already shown that 12 hours of gaming a week among 60- to 80-year-olds dramatically improves their ability to multitask, beyond the abilities of a 20-year-old playing the game for the first time. They are now carrying out a three-year study, to see how the game can be used as a diagnostics tool.
Gamification has been trying to devise ways to mimic the immersive quality of gaming in more training- and productive settings. Is biofeedback the missing link?
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Diverse Digital Interventions Remediate Cognitive Aging in Healthy Older Adults:
After a decade of work, scientists at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Center have developed a suite of video game interventions that improve key aspects of cognition in aging adults.
The games, which co-creator Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, says can be adapted to clinical populations as a new form of "experiential medicine," showed benefits on an array of important cognitive processes, including short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.
Each employs adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Gazzaley's lab pioneered in the widely cited 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature, which first demonstrated it was possible to restore diminished mental faculties in older people with just four weeks of training on a specially designed video game.
These algorithms achieve better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing in difficulty, depending on how well someone is playing the game. That keeps less skilled players from becoming overwhelmed, while still challenging those with greater ability. The games using these algorithms recreate common activities, such as driving, exercising and playing a drum, and use the skills each can engender to retrain cognitive processes that become deficient with age.
[...] The lab's most recent invention is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, that not only taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces. [...]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @07:35PM
http://www.lgdb.org/game/chaosesque-anthology [lgdb.org]
Go improve your cognitive abilities, libre
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 27 2015, @11:12PM
With flattened personality and "gamified" values.
Winners of a million followers, fans, friends, lovers, dollars…after all, a billion people tweeting, updating, flicking, swiping, tapping into the void a thousand times a minute can’t be wrong. Can they?
And therein is the paradox of the bullshit machine. We do more than humans have ever done before. But we are not accomplishing much; and we are, it seems to me, becoming even less than that.
https://medium.com/bad-words/the-bullshit-machine-df95646d0383 [medium.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday April 28 2015, @02:37AM
My favorite is http://sailonline.org/ [sailonline.org]
It's a sailboat navigation simulation game. You are racing in real time against people all over the planet. Weather is downloaded every 6 hours from NOAA. Races can be as little as 3-6 hours up to weeks long ocean races (right now we are in the middle of a race from Itajaí, Brazil to Newport, R.I., mirroring leg 6 of the Volvo Ocean Race.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday April 27 2015, @07:36PM
I'm wary about reports of this sort, that make broad inferences about X or Y being good for your brain because it increases neural response to certain classes of stimuli. Cognition is nothing if not complicated, and training your brain to do one thing well isn't necessarily an "improvement" if it inhibits other healthy mental behavior.
Multi-tasking, in particular is one of those skills I'm not sure is without cost. Singular methodical focus is necessary a lot of day-to-day tasks, and the vast majority of these studies make little-to-no effort to measure the extent of changes on multiple distinct mental performance metrics.
That said, I also am not claiming special knowledge of specific harm. Just that I think studies of this kind need to catalog more dependent variables.
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Monday April 27 2015, @07:44PM
I tend to respond in single words when gaming, such as huh, what, no, yes, and dammitwomanyougotmekilled.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 27 2015, @08:14PM
I would mod you +1 Insightful, but I'm out of mod points. Games tend to take alot of my concentration. Though, those terms are usually left for the games I can't pause. Usually, because they are online games.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @09:10PM
check da privilege
think of single men in nepal
(Score: 2, Funny) by Darth Turbogeek on Tuesday April 28 2015, @01:34AM
You mean you don't come up with flowery words about how you will romance your opponent's mother?
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Monday April 27 2015, @08:20PM
I share your doubts.
This looks like yet another 'one hammer for all nails' approach. That would work great if all nails were the same, but that is not the case.
As for multitasking, well it does not work for everything, and it does have an inescapable downside: each task takes a little longer to complete, but the batch of tasks are completed sooner overall.
This works great for a lot of things, but not every one. Not everything benefits from multitasking. example:Would you want your heart transplant surgeon multitasking in the surgery room with say, two other surgeries at the same time? Not me!
I say if you want to learn better multitasking, get a job as a short-order cook in a busy eatery. You will learn to multitask, or be out of a job in short order!
I don't doubt that this may bring about benefical therapies and treatments for some, but it would be a mistake to use it for every disorder/problem.
The key is recognising when/if the treatment does more harm than the 'disease'.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 27 2015, @08:50PM
These games don't develop your cognition, but may enhance the brain functions that support cognition. Like gym session for a, say, football player.
I guess it's up to you to choose a mean over a goal (i.e. take gym sessions only and hope you'll be inducted in the Football Hall of Fame), but don't tell me gym session are not useful
Extra info (maybe some of us need it) on NYTimes [nytimes.com]:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @04:01AM
but don't tell me gym session are not useful
Any benefits they may have are lost on the sorts of people who choose to participate in those activities in the first place (i.e. mostly morons). Furthermore, there are better, more fun ways of training your brain. Learning mathematics, logic, doing logic puzzles, programming, etc.
Rote memorization 'geniuses' love their working-memory challenges, though.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 28 2015, @05:03AM
Why do you think I provided the context by quoting from the NYTimes article?
Did you find any "rote memorization" references there?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @06:11PM
Working-memory challenges are basically made for rote memorization 'geniuses'. I would much rather focus on critical thinking skills than memory, as they seem to be something most are lacking.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 28 2015, @08:01PM
Working memory [wikipedia.org] is short term memory - your CPU cache. You won't be a good thinker (critical or not) if your cache is small.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 27 2015, @09:06PM
Could it just be a summarization issue? The SN story lists "attention, working memory and goal management" even if admittedly the second half is solely about measured gains in multitasking.
Like the "going to the gym" analogy and then exclusively focusing on measured bench press gains as a specific example although the participants also did cardio bunny stuff and synchronized swimming and whatnot.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 27 2015, @08:31PM
But... does work on dead salmon too [prefrontal.org]? (PDF - won Ignobel in 2009)
(point: study of "goal management" by fMRI - sounds fishy to me. Add entire classes of other function, like attention and working memory, don't pay attention to others like motor stimuli and I wonder how they are going to separate the "signals" for each of these functions).
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @12:02AM
fMRI = fishy Magnetic Resonance Imaging?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @02:07AM
(Score: 3, Funny) by ilPapa on Monday April 27 2015, @08:58PM
I'm leaving this story open on my wife's computer.
She thinks I'm half a moron for playing so many games. Actually, it's not so much about the gaming as the grunting and noises I make when I play games. I have a headset on, so I don't really hear myself. Also, she had my daughter sneak a picture of the look on my face when I'm really into a game, and it's not a pretty picture.
So maybe the cognitive benefits will sway her to allow me to spend $2500 on a new SLI PC build so I'll be able to max out Arkham Knight when it comes out. What do you think? Is it worth a shot?
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @04:14PM
http://cats.about.com/od/behaviortraining/a/discipline.htm [about.com]
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 28 2015, @12:31AM
I found that back in the early 90s if I left Master of Orion on my computer during the semester and played several hours of it daily I got notably lower grades in my college classes.
Obviously I'm doing something wrong. I did occasionally swap it out with Warlords, muds/mucks, and Castle Wolfenstein, so it's not just the choice of game.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday April 28 2015, @12:37AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 28 2015, @02:40AM
I suspect that my managing of the key resource, time, during those semesters left something to be desired. ;)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @12:50AM
Practicing skills makes you better at them, we've known that since before we invented science.
What's next, scientists discover water is wet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @06:58AM
Much of science is not to learn, but to prove. Gamers know games take various skills. Others have to be convinced with proof.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday April 28 2015, @08:12AM
we've known that since before we invented science.
Just we "knew" that the stars were fixed to a sphere, or that the Sun went round the Earth?
The whole point of science is that you don't just assume something is true because it's "obvious."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @07:44PM
Just we "knew" that the stars were fixed to a sphere, or that the Sun went round the Earth?
We assumed they did and hypothesized that we might be wrong based on the fact that our observations didn't add up.
The whole point of science is that you don't just assume something is true because it's "obvious."
No, the whole point of science is to attain truthful knowledge. Making assumptions is not only permissible, but absolutely necessary to that end.
It's both unfeasible and counter-productive to investigate every basic presumption one might form naturally, given the innumerate number of fundamental presumptions you need to make in order to function. To validate every single fact is an exercise in futility, which is why we rely on heuristic principles to cull unnecessary tests.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 28 2015, @02:27PM
Yeah, because if there's one thing 20-year-olds need, it's better multitasking skills. I mean right now most of us can only handle Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr while listening to music, finishing that assignment that's due in fifteen minutes, and walking into traffic. Clearly I need to do some more gaming so I can fit Instagram in there too ;)