Cognitive Benefits of Video Gaming

Heather Andersen's blog recently asked an interesting question about video games: "Can certain video games improve brain function and athleticism? I hope to find out." You can find my attempted answer below.

I'm not sure about athleticism (maybe some Wii Fit games would help out?), but there are many studies showing how video games improve particular aspects of brain function, including visual acuity, spatial perception, the ability to pick out objects in a scene, working memory, reasoning, and strategy (more so for pre-adolescent players).

I've cited some articles summarizing studies below. Here are some interesting tidbits:

- Studies from Iowa State University and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York show how regular video game play improved the dexterity, speed, and error efficiency of laproscopic surgeons.
"One study of 33 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games were 27% faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37% fewer errors than those who didn't"
"The single best predictor of their skills is how much they had played video games in the past and how much they played now. Those were better predictors of surgical skills than years of training and number of surgeries performed . . . So the first question you might ask your surgeon is how many of these (surgeries) have you done and the second question is 'Are you a gamer?"

- A pediatric neurologist at UC-Irvine's School of Medicine showed how Tetris expanded portions of the cerebral cortex of test subjects.

- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that World of Warcraft "encouraged scientific thinking, like using systems and models for understanding situations and using math and testing to investigate problems." They found that "86% of test subjects shared knowledge to solve problems in the game and 58% used systematic and evaluative processes."

- National Geographic summarized the findings of researchers at University of Rochester in New York: "Action video gamers may be more attune to surroundings while performing tasks like driving down a residential street, where they may be more likely to pick out a child running after a ball than a non-video gamer"
"action game playing might be a useful tool to rehabilitate visually impaired patients or to train soldiers for combat"
"people who play action video games can process visual information more quickly and can track 30 percent more objects than non video game players."

- Neuroscientists at MIT have called video games "stunningly powerful" for learning.

Articles:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2008-08-18-video-games-learning_N.htm
http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/10/12/how_video_games_are_good_for_the_brain/?page=1
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0528_030528_videogames.html

Here's another article about a video game designed to help teens beat depression in New Zealand. It helped 44% of depressed teens completely recover, compared to 26% of depressed teens who completely recovered via traditional therapy: http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/20/study-playing-a-video-game-helps-teens-beat-depression/

Addressing BYU's study, there are several Pew Research Center studies claiming that multiplayer video games improve social experiences.

Most video game studies generally seem to agree that playing violent video games affects behavior in negative ways, and that excessive game play can lead to (childhood) obesity and other negative consequences, especially in the case of addiction.

Personally, I played video games growing up because they provided cognitive challenges that stretched my abilities, pushed me to improve, and offered emotional rewards (kind of like the feeling you get scoring a touchdown after hours of football practice). It was also fun to get together with friends and play Starcraft, Super Smash Brothers, or Halo. I don't disapprove of adult gaming, but only if you're in a position to handle it. Halo: Reach every other week on a Friday or Saturday night can be a fun, harmless stress reliever.

However, I think the amount of time children play video games should be carefully regulated by parents. Excessive play clearly affects moods, although I'm not sure how. I've noticed that sometimes when I start playing video games, it's hard to stop.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Heather!

Echo Chambers in 2012

The idea of the digital echo chamber definitely applies to our upcoming presidential election. Echo chambers suggest that when we, as voters, become myopic or merely reaffirm our own political views with the online content we digest, we experience several negative consequences. For example, we may limit our own perspectives. We may find it more difficult to relate with others. We may have more trouble discerning between facts and opinions. We may disengage with crowds. We may even lose cognitive function, at least compared to those who experience a diversity of thoughts and perspectives.

Proposal

I propose we create a class project aimed at taking steps to eliminate echo chambers in the 2012 Election. These steps would include (but are not limited to) the creation of a digital Wiki, eBook, or other publication to curate quality political websites from across the political spectrum into one simple location to inform voters on the issues. Each site we include in the publication would have a bio (with data like who made the site, for what purpose, when, how many hits it gets per month, general accuracy, party bias, etc) with a short, critical review written by a group member. Sites would be categorized by political issue (general, foreign policy, economy, gun control, etc). The publication would be aesthetic, colorful, and user-friendly. It would also be freely distributed, comprehensive, and easy to understand. 

The existence of this publication would fill a real gap in the online voting community by providing a quality, politically diverse website directory (with content reviews) from an objective, academic source. Increasing the diversity of quality information readily available to voters and encouraging diversity are two extremely effective ways of combating echo chambers.

Badges

I also had a tangential idea we might try. We create badges with each badge representing a distinct political view. This would divide the election into issues and move people away from voting strictly across party lines without examining each issue in detail. Once a participant has examined an issue in detail, he or she will take a basic information test. The last question of each test would allow participants to decide where they stand on that issue. The names of the badges would not be generic, like "Healthcare," but political statements, like "I strongly support Obamacare!" or "I mildly oppose Obamacare!", etc.

Homies, peers, enthusiasts, and experts would earn these political statement badges via Mozilla or another site and categorize them under some sort of "Election 2012" heading. We would then direct participants to seek out those with different viewpoints on key issues to ask them how they came to their conclusions. (If I could create a full-scale social media site based on this idea, I would, but I definitely don't have the resources for that.)

I know there's been a lot of proposals to work with badges this semester, but I thought it was an interesting idea, anyway. It may be too different from the original proposal to attempt, but at least we know badges are an exciting concept. Maybe it's a good thing for several different projects to experiment with them. Maybe not. The final word is Professor Burton's, of course.

Prior Art

There are lots of amateur lists of political fact/opinion sites on the internet (probably too many to count). However, most of them are myopic, incomplete, biased, ugly, disorganized, or otherwise impaired. This proposal encompasses more than a simple list or bibliography. Its goal is to present diverse, researched, quality resources in a reliable, objective manner to help assist voters this Fall and into the future.

A Recap of Social Proof

Contrary to the comic above, my blog post here doesn't refer to the type of social proof commonly associated with herd behavior. Rather, I'm referring to digital social proof, the idea that social media unfolds in phases of development, and that in each development phase ideas are passed to a community of homies, peers, enthusiasts, and experts for feedback. If feedback is received (and depending on the quality and frequency of the feedback), social proof is provided. The underlying premise is that ideas validated by others are worth exploring.

So, what kinds of social proof have I received now that my critical study of digital culture has been underway for over a month? Thanks go out to the following homies and peers for their extensive, insightful feedback on my ideas and blog posts thus far (their names with links to their digital culture blogs are found below):

Gideon Burton
Casey Deans
Greg Williams
Rebecca Ricks
Gwendolyn Hammer
Nicole Black
Katie Cannon Wilkie
Allie Crafton

Largely due to the social proof I've received from these individuals, my digital interests now encompass a small, pre-screened selection of (shockingly) cohesive issues: internet regulation, echo chambers, corporate influence, hacktivism, and personal identity. For me, the point on which these issues converge is capitalism. In future writings, I plan to explore the effects of capitalism on the internet using these lenses as vantage points.

Communities and Echo Chambers

After my last blog post, Gideon Burton directed my attention to Nyssa Silvester's chapter in Writing About Literature in the Digital Age. Here, Silvester explores "echo chamber theory," the idea that an excessively personalized internet environment limits a user's exposure to throngs of opinions and resources available to otherminded users. The concept extends itself by claiming that users who fail to actively seek out alternative opinions or resources on the web lapse into a perpetual cycle of reaffirming their own beliefs, as output matches input matches output.

In the first place, the internet's disregard for privacy can be frightening. In its algorithmic, illimitable (though still often awkwardly-executed) ability to troll our lives for data and personalize content for us, the internet reminds me of the story of the Target shopper whose father discovered she was pregnant after receiving baby ads based on her purchasing preferences. Yeah. Awkward. Life's a moving target; apparently we're all moving targets.

Privacy violations in the name of internet capitalism are frequent enough that most of us are used to the idea of trading our rights for access, effectively using our personal information as currency; well, they have to fund this thing somehow, or I can trust x company with my location as long as they don't have my birthday, or, in the tradition of the dilemma of countless Facebook users, something doesn't feel right here, but I guess I can trust Zynga with a majority of my significant personal information so I can play a few games.

Anyway, whether we knowingly consent to the use of our personal information online, advertisers and other entities inevitably find pieces of us and assemble pictures of who we are. The result can be an affected--even false--web experience for us in which the boundless internet becomes focused advertisement. The echo chamber produced may have a much greater influence than we're willing to believe. After all, what does the internet lose by refining its understanding of us? Isn't that what it's supposed to do? Doesn't it serve me when I Google "dermatologist" and the top results are for doctors in Provo, UT? Doesn't it make sense that LinkedIn tries to connect me with friends and colleagues from BYU before those at other institutions?

The problem here is that the internet tries to function as a free market and a local tool while simultaneously asserting a global experience. How do we eliminate the echo chamber this conflict creates? Silvester encourages us to leave our comfort zones, refrain from being elitist or relying on dogma, and reach out to other communities. I agree with her prescriptions.

However, there's also an underlying problem to address: most people don't recognize they're in echo chambers in the first place. At least one reason for this seems clear. Often when we surf the net, we frantically shift in and out of communities without realizing it. How is it that we seamlessly switch from talking to a single friend in Rhode Island to a class of peers in Utah to a global retailer in Shenzhen to a local market in New York all in a single internet session while barely realizing we engaged with different communities? Instead, we say we talked to our friends on the "internet," or on Facebook or Google+. We shopped on Amazon. Yahoo gave us a search result.

The fact that we're traversing communities gets lost in translation. The experience becomes less personal. Everything starts to run together. We delude ourselves into thinking of the internet as one big community rather than many small, interrelating parts. Subsequently, we stop thinking critically and default to cruise control. Focused advertisements and manipulated search results begin to define our internet experience and we turn inward, creating echo chambers. The internet becomes more amusing, entertaining, and self-serving as we become less interactive, attentive, and socially tied to communities.

So, how can we solve our recognition problem? I think Google+ is pointing the internet in the right direction by making the boundaries between internet communities more clearly defined. Its segregation of users into Circles will, if nothing else, remind users that they share membership in communities, which bolsters social responsibility, strengthens social contracts, and makes the Google+ experience more personal and meaningful. Google's strategy turns users outward to communities and, at least partially, prevents them from hooking inward on themselves.

A potential pitfall of Google+ Circles may be that they aren't sufficiently standardized; for example, if Bill puts Suzy in the "Digital Culture" community and Suzy puts Bill in the "Friends" community, it could complicate their relationship and may allow echo chambers to form. Any thoughts?

What Are Your Motives?

There's a fundamental discord in the way various groups treat the internet. Purists, for example, see the internet as an art form that should be kept free, unregulated, and consistently advanced. Entrepreneurs see the internet as a free market where advertising and online sales points can be established quickly at low costs. Visionaries see the internet as a way to change the world. Friends see the internet as a social gathering place, artists see it as a new medium or tool, and students see it as a place to learn and share ideas. Most people instinctively realize that the possibilities for content generation on the web are virtually endless. As with other endeavors, motives behind content generation directly influence the types of content produced.

In Howells' turn of the century novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, a variety of characters with different motives converge along a trend toward American industrialization and city living. The group meets in New York City to create a chic magazine called Every Other Week. They include March, a complacent businessman who goes with the flow; Fulkerson, an enthusiastic advertising spin man; Lindau, a German-born socialist; Dryfoos, an anti-union bankroller; Woodburn, a former Confederate colonel who believes slavery could still work if they improved the system; Beaton, a shallow cover artist; and Leighton, a beautiful and inadvertent feminist. The way each of these personalities approaches content generation for Every Other Week is at once similar to the way different camps approach internet content generation today.

Consider the ad-man: on page 141, the Every Other Week provides a mechanism for Fulkerson to talk candidly about the state of women and the potential redefinition of women's issues in the urban landscape. The conversation occurs in a private board meeting, but the content Every Other Week produces in its wake is reflective of its motives.

"We want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time," Fulkerson says. Then later, "[w]e've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-piety along the whole line . . . it'll make the fortune of the thing. See? . . . they haven't got the genius of organization. It takes a very masculine man for that."

With a dearth of opinions on women's issues in the group of men at the board meeting, Fulkerson's perspective goes uncontested, as does his motive to generally make a fortune of the magazine. Every Other Week thus begins to target women to create content for their fancies and unintentionally begins to redefine what the fancies of women should be. The magazine becomes as much a part of the development of women's issues as a generator of its content.

Do we see Fulkersons on the internet today? Are there businessmen or women who seek profit at the expense of all else? Are particular groups targeted? For what purposes?

Here we see that motives shade content generation and can even produce unexpected results. A Hazard of New Fortunes parallels the internet in its recognition of production bias. It's a particularly good parallel because the Every Other Week represents a diversity of content generators collaboratively striving to influence a large audience.

Here's an invitation: before you create your next blog post, podcast, audiobook, ebook, or store front, review your motives. Which camp(s) do you fall into? Are you a hobbyist or a professional? An academic or an entertainer? Is your content meant to inspire, provoke, transcend, or amuse? I think these are important questions. More posts on this topic to come.

Essays Last All Year Long

Below is a draft of a paper I wrote for Film and Literature last year. Although it's a work of comparison, several of its themes pertain to digital culture, including VR, cyborg relations, posthumanity, and remix culture. Are there sections of this draft we could use to spawn creative thinking or supplement future work?

You'll need to have watched A.I. or read “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” to understand all the references. You could also brush up with an online summary.

You may notice an absence of citations in the paper; I hadn't added them by the time I wrote this draft.


“Supertoys” and Artificial Intelligence Brandon Healy
The relationship between Brian Aldiss’s short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” and Steven Spielberg’s rather lengthy film Artificial Intelligence is somewhat superficial. While both works stand alone as entertaining and engaging pieces that succeed in their respective explorations of some of the more dramatic relationships between robots, humanity, love, and reality, Spielberg’s film departs from Aldiss’s short story by adding heavily to the plot. Among Spielberg's extensive additions are characters, concepts, and locations. Some of these additions work better than others and many are tangential. However, it is through these additions that Spielberg is also able to capture some of the key messages the short story hints at but does not fully develop. An interesting example of the interrelationship between the film and text is found in both interpretations’ treatment of the “sibling” scene, in which Monica and Henry rejoice at the prospect of producing a sibling for David. Specifically, Aldiss’s dialogue, Spielberg’s inclusion of an actual sibling for David, and both interpretations’ focus on breaking silence with raucous, emotional outbursts strongly interrelate.

In the section of the text where Monica and her husband Henry find out they can have a child, Aldiss’s dialogue is much more extensive than Spielberg's, and in some ways the film is lacking. In Spielberg’s version, Monica gets a phone call and the typical “no way” and “you’ve got to be joking”-type dialogue that often accompanies surprising news in film ensues. In many ways, this is a good interpretation because Spielberg leaves out specific details and stimulates the audience with a short period of suspense. Many people, including Linda Seger, the author of The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film, would probably agree that this is an effective adaptation to the medium of film. It evokes emotion and engages the audience.

However, the scene immediately following shows Monica running in slow motion toward Henry. Happy music drowns out the dialogue between Monica and her husband while they embrace and jump up and down. David is in the room and looks on with hesitation. While Aldiss’s dialogue appropriately matches its medium in this scene, the Spielberg version missed out on an opportunity to provide some insight into the couple’s feelings about David comparative to their feelings about their own potential child. The following dialogue from Aldiss’s text demonstrates this contrast:

. . . “Henry, Henry – oh, my darling, I was in despair … but I’ve just dialed the afternoon post and – you’ll never believe it! Oh, it’s wonderful!” . . .
“What do we do about them?” Henry asked [looking out the window].
“Teddy’s no trouble. He works well.”
“Is David malfunctioning?”
“His verbal communication-center is still giving trouble. I think he’ll have to go back to the factory again.”
“Okay. We’ll see how he does before the baby’s born.”

Here, Aldiss points out that Monica despairs even with David in her life. This means that David failed to fulfill his sole responsibility to comfort her. Monica then compares David to Teddy, the other machine, and talks strictly about David’s mechanical components. Henry dismissively changes the subject. In this scene, it seems as if Aldiss is emphasizing the human ability to outgrow and detach from things. Monica quickly becomes pragmatic in the face of opportunity and forgets her emotional attachment to David witnessed earlier in the story. Her knowledge that David is a machine also causes her to overlook the possibility that he feels complex emotions that typical kids have trouble expressing. This causes her to dismiss his unfinished messages as problems with his verbal communication-center.

Meanwhile, the expendable machines down in the garden heatedly struggle to determine their place and the meaning of existence. The audience is able to connect with their struggle to find meaning and sympathize with their naivety in the face of potential abandonment.

Although Spielberg may have missed the mark by discarding Aldiss’s dialogue, he makes an effective addition to the “sibling” section of the text by altering the good news Henry and Monica receive and adding a brother character named Martin. Spielberg’s addition of Martin effectively embodies the contrast between David and a real boy. It also highlights Aldiss’s idea that David is actually real in quite a few ways. Through David’s interaction with Martin, Spielberg demonstrates that David has the ability to calculate, ponder, set goals, grapple with feelings, and pursue aspirations. As the plot thickens, Spielberg shows David becoming even more human. Spielberg’s illustration plays with the idea that an object can become human simply by taking on human characteristics. Is David human? What does it mean to be human if he isn’t? Does he have a soul? In both Spielberg and Aldiss’s stories, Monica is attached to David emotionally at differing levels but never treats him like she would treat a real boy—like she would treat Martin. However, the audience in both interpretations is made to believe that David is functionally identical to a real boy, cognitively and emotionally. This is a side of David that Monica never sees, or at least never acknowledges.

Both interpretations leave the audience pondering what it means to be human, but Spielberg’s interpretation embodies the contrast more effectively by placing David and Martin in situations in which they closely interact. A good example of this occurs at the dinner table when both boys engage in a spinach-eating competition as Monica protests.

Spielberg’s interpretation also places more of an emphasis on the animal question by frequently placing David in the same room as Martin and Teddy. In these scenes, the audience sees that David shares far more cognitive and emotional similarities with Martin than Teddy, particularly as he reasons through the problem of making Monica love him. On another level, however, Teddy’s presence evokes the idea of an animal and reminds us that David has a higher cognitive function than animals. If David functions at a higher cognitive level than animals, does that make him real? If not, is being organic the only requirement? Ultimately, Martin’s addition incorporates several new layers of depth and contrast to the story.

Although Aldiss’s dialogue is more effective than Spielberg’s and Spielberg’s additions develop Aldiss’s concepts more fully in the “sibling” scene, the two interpretations are similar in terms of tone. Primarily, both interpretations create silence to break it later on. Also in both cases, the silence is broken by emotional outbursts from Monica and Henry.

In Aldiss’s version, the tone of the Swinton’s home is depressing before Henry comes home. Monica’s interactions with David lead only to frustration and tears. With Henry’s arrival, Aldiss’s vocabulary becomes loud and forceful. He uses phrases such as “immediately . . . flung her arms round him,” “kiss[ed] him ardently,” “clasped her tighter,” “yell[ed in] joy,” and “laugh[ed] at each other’s happiness.” The abrupt jarring leaves the audience wondering whether Monica cares about David at all. In Spielberg’s version, there is an awkward interchange between Monica and David before she answers the phone. The tone is almost eerie. The music quickly elevates as Monica discovers her biological son has been cured. David is left with an expression that mimics the previous tone, as if he is being left behind, while Monica and Henry advance with explosive new cadences.

Aldiss and Spielberg effectively contribute to each other’s interpretations of the “sibling” scene in terms of dialogue, adaptive licenses, and tone. Both artists largely remain true to their respective mediums while enacting these interpretations. Potential improvements can be found in both cases, but the armature and main plot points of the adaptation of this particular section remain intact.

****

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

The strengths of this book come from its three guiding questions (or stories) on virtual reality: 1) how information lost its body, or how it became a separate entity from the material in which it's embedded, 2) how the cyborg was created and how it became a "technological artifact and cultural icon" after World War II, and 3) how the "historically constructed" idea of the human is influenced by a different construction called the posthuman. These are A+ questions.

Hayles' narrative pivots on the first story above; she suggests that human consciousness is actually separate from humans. Basically, it might be possible to put human consciousness into a corporeal form that's not a human body. The age-old theme of human mind versus body isn't new, but it's complicated by the digital age because we may be able to test it by inserting human consciousness into computers. This begs the questions: should we? and to what extent is consciousness affected by our physical construction?

Hayles buoys up her narrative with painstaking history, attention to detail, and quality connections. 3.5/5 stars.

View all my reviews

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"Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions--new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake." -Michael Scott