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BRAINS ON GAMES

Daniel Cates, a world champion, began his dedicated training routine at age six. That was when he first discovered his natural affinity for the video game Command & Conquer, which in those days came free, bundled with Microsoft Windows. From then on Cates disdained playing with other kids, preferring to spend hours commanding and conquering in the basement of his family’s suburban home.1 At the math-and-science high school he attended, Cates would cut class and find his way to the computer room to play the puzzle game Minesweeper. The game requires locating mines hidden in an opaque grid and flagging them—without exposing one and getting blown up. Although he was just so-so when he started playing the game, endless hours of practice made Cates able to clear all the mines within ninety seconds—a feat that seemed impossible to him when he started learning the game (and utterly inconceivable to me when I just tried to play the game online; give it a go and you’ll see). At sixteen, he discovered his métier: online poker. In just eighteen months Cates went from losing five-dollar games in live-action kitchen poker to winning up to $500,000 online poker purses (and just in time—within a few years online poker became the target of laws against it, at least in the United States). By the time he was twenty, Cates had won $5.5 million at the game, $1 million more than the second-highest player’s reported earnings that year.2 Cates earned that remarkable sum by “grinding” (as in grinding away), playing not just game after game, but multiple simultaneous games, with all comers, including the most expert. Online poker lets you play as many opponents as you can handle simultaneously, with instant win-lose feedback, which fast-tracks the learning curve. A teenager who can play a dozen online hands at a time accrues as much cumulative practice at the game’s subtleties in a few short years as a lifetime gambler in his fifties who plays only the tables in Vegas. Cates’s gift for poker very likely built on the cognitive scaffolding started back when he dived into Command & Control as a first grader. Winning that battle game requires speedy cognitive processing of factors like how your troops can be deployed against your opponent’s, vigilance in picking up cues of when your enemy has just begun to weaken, and mercilessly attacking. Just before his switch to poker Cates was a world champion at Command & Control; the attention skills and killer instinct that made him a champ transferred readily to the card game. But in his twenties Cates woke up to the barrenness of his social world and nonexistent romantic life. He began a search for a lifestyle that would let him enjoy his winnings. What would that mean? “Exercise. Girls,” as he put it. Being world class in the online zone offers little help on singles night at the local bar. Video game strengths like rampant aggression at an opponent’s first sign of weakness transfer poorly to the dating scene. Last I heard, Cates was reading my book Social Intelligence. I wish him well. The book argues that interactions like those during online poker lack a vital learning loop for the interpersonal circuits of the brain that help us connect and, say, make a good impression on a first meeting. “Neurons that fire together wire together,” as psychologist Donald Hebb neatly put it back in the 1940s. The brain is plastic, constantly resculpting its circuitry as we go through our day. Whatever we are doing, as we do it our brain strengthens some circuits and not others. In face-to-face interactions our social circuitry picks up a multitude of cues and signals that help us connect well, and wire together the neurons involvethousands of hours spent online, the wiring of the social brain gets virtually no exercise. BOOSTS TO BRAIN POWER OR DAMAGE TO THE MIND?

“The majority of our socialization is flowing through machines,” says Marc Smith, a founder of the Social Media Research Foundation, “and that opens up great opportunities and many concerns.”3 While “majority” seems an overstatement, debates rage about both the opportunity and the concerns, with video games an epicenter of debate. A running stream of studies proclaim on the one hand that such games damage the mind, or on the other that they boost brainpower. Are those who argue the games give kids a sinister training in aggression right? Or, as others propose, do the games train vital attention skills? Or both? To help settle the matter, the prestigious journal Nature convened half a dozen experts to sort out the benefits from the harms.4 Turns out it’s like the effects of food—it all depends: some are nutritious; too much of others can be toxic. For video games the answers hinge on the specifics of which game strengthens what brain circuitry in a given way. Take, for instance, those hyperactive auto races and rapid-fire battles. The data on such action games shows enhancements in visual attention, speed of processing information, object tracking, and switching from one mental task to another. Many such games even seem to offer a silent tutorial in statistical inference—that is, sensing the odds that you can beat the enemies given your resources and their numbers. And more generally, various games have been found to improve visual acuity and spatial perception, attention switching, decision-making, and the ability to track objects (though many of those studies do not let us know if people drawn to the games are already a bit better at such mental skills, or whether the games improved them). Games that offer increasingly harder cognitive challenges—more accurate and challenging judgments and reactions at higher speeds, fully focused attention, increasing spans of working memory—drive positive brain changes. “When you constantly need to scan the screen to detect little differences (because they may signal an enemy) and then orient attention to that area, you become better at those attentional skills,” says Douglas Gentile, a cognitive scientist at the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University.5 But, he adds, these skills do not necessarily transfer well to life outside the video screen. Though they might have great value for specific jobs, such as air traffic controllers, they are no help when it comes to ignoring the fidgety kid sitting next to you so you can focus on your reading. Fast-paced games, some experts argue, might acclimate some children to a stimulation rate quite unlike that in the classroom, a formula for even more than usual school boredom. Although video games may strengthen attention skills like rapidly filtering out visual distractions, they do little to amp up a more crucial skill for learning, sustaining focus on a gradually evolving body of information—such as paying attention in class and understanding what you’re reading, and how it ties in to what you learned last week or year. There’s a negative correlation between the hours a kid spends gaming and how well he does in school, very likely in direct ratio to time stolen from studies. When 3,034 Singaporean children and adolescents were followed for two years, those who became extreme gamers showed increases in anxiety, depression, and social phobia, and a drop in grades. But if they stopped their gaming habit, all those problems decreased.6 Then there’s the downside of playing countless hours of games that fine-tune the brain for a rapid, violent response.7 Some dangers here, the expert panel says, have been exaggerated in the popular press: violent games may increase low-level aggression, but such games in themselves are not going to turn a well-raised kid into a violent one. Yet when the games are played by children who, for example, have been the victim of physical abuse at home (and so are more prone to violence themselves), there might be a dangerous synergism—though no one can as yet predict with any certainty in which child this toxic chemistry will occur. Still, hours spent battling hordes intent on killing you understandably encourage “hostile attribution bias,” the instant assumption that the kid who bumped you in the hallway has a grudge. Just as troubling, violent gamers show lessenedwitnessing people being mean, as in bullying. Given that the paranoid vigilance such games encourage can occasionally mix tragically with the agitation and confusion of the mentally disturbed, do we want to be feeding our young from this mental menu? The recent generations raised on games and otherwise glued to video screens, one neuroscientist told me, amount to an unprecedented experiment: “a massive difference in how their brains are plastically engaged in life” compared with previous generations. The long-term question is what such games will do to their neural wiring, and so to the social fabric—and how this might either develop new strengths or warp healthy development. On the upside, the demand that a player keep focused despite snazzy distracting lures enhances executive function, whether for sheer concentration now or resisting impulse later. If you add to the game’s mix a need to cooperate and coordinate with other players, you’ve got a rehearsal of some valuable social skills. Kids who play games that require cooperation show more helpfulness in the course of a day. Perhaps those purely violent, me-against-all games could be redesigned so that a winning strategy demanded coming to the aid of those in trouble and finding helpers and allies—not just a hostile scan. SMART GAMES

The popular app Angry Birds lures millions of people into cumulative billions of hours of concentrated finger-flicking. If neurons that fire together wire together, you have to wonder just what mental skills, if any, are getting fine-tuned when your kids (or you) spend all that time lost in Angry Birds. The brain learns and remembers best when focus is greatest. Video games focus attention and get us to repeat moves over and over, and so are powerful tutorials. That presents an opportunity for training the brain. Michael Posner’s group at the University of Oregon gave children four to six years old five days of attention training, in sessions lasting up to forty minutes each. Part of the time they were playing a game where they used a joystick to control a cat on a screen that was trying to catch small moving objects. Although these three-plus hours of practice seem fairly short to track a change in the neural networks for attention, brain wave data suggested a shift in the activity of the circuitry for executive attention, toward levels seen in adults.8 The conclusion: target kids with the poorest attention for such training—those with autism, attention deficit, and other learning problems—since they stand to benefit the most. And beyond remedial lessons, Posner’s group proposes that attention training should be part of the education of every child, giving a boost in learning across the board. Those who, like Posner, see such potential brain training benefits propose that specially designed games could improve everything from visual tracking in “lazy eye” (known technically as amblyopia) to the hand-eye coordination of surgeons. A deficiency in the alerting network, research suggests, underlies attention deficit disorder; problems in orienting are seen in the fixations of autism.9 In the Netherlands, eleven-year-olds with ADHD played a computer game demanding heightened attention: they had to be vigilant for enemy bots popping up, for instance, and stay alert to when their own avatar’s energy was getting too low.10 After just eight one-hour sessions they were better able to focus despite distractions (and not just while playing the game). At their best, “video games are controlled training regimens delivered in highly motivating” ways that result in “enduring physical and functional neurological remodeling,” says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has led the design of games meant to retrain the brains of older people with neurological deficits like memory loss and dementia.11 Ben Shapiro, who was in charge of worldwide drug discovery—including neuroscience—at Merck Research Laboratories, has joined the board of a company designing games that increase concentration and minimize distractions. He sees advantages in using smart practice rather than medication for such purposes. “Games like this could slow the loss of key cognitive functions with aging,” Shapiro tells me. He adds, “If you want to make people’s mental lives better, work directly with mental targets, rather than molecular ones—drugs are a shotgun approach, since nature uses the same molecules for many different purposes.” Dr. Merzenich puts little stock in the rather random—and decidedly mixed—benefits of off-the-shelf games, preferring to tailor ones that target a specific set of cognitive skills. A new generation of brain training apps, Douglas Gentile proposes, would apply smart practice techniques familiar to superb teachers: • clear objectives at progressively more difficult levels • adapting to the pace of the specific learner • immediate feedback and graduated practice challenges to the point of mastery • practicing the same skills in different contexts, encouraging skill transference

One day in the future, some predict, brain training games will be a standard part of schooling, with the best ones gathering data about the players as they simultaneously fine-tune themselves into the exact game needed—an empathic cognitive tutor. In the meantime, experts ruefully admit, the money spent on such education apps pales compared with budgets of gaming corporations—and so at present even the best brain training tools are sad echoes of the pizzazz of a Grand Theft Auto. But there are signs that may be changing. I just watched my four grandchildren, one by one, play the beta version of a game for the iPad called Tenacity. The game offers you a leisurely journey through any of a half dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. The challenge: Every time you exhale, you tap the iPad screen with one finger. And for every fifth exhalation you tap with two fingers—at least at the beginning level. At the time, the grandchildren ranged in age from six, eight, and a newly minted twelve to an about-to-be fourteen. They offer what amounts to a natural experiment in brain maturation and attention. The six-year-old goes first. He picks the desert scene, which puts him on a slow amble along a path through sand dunes, palms, and mud-daubed domiciles. The first try he had to be reminded of what to do; by the third he had gotten pretty good at coordinating his taps with his breath—though he still sometimes forgot the double taps. Even so, he was delighted to see a field of roses slowly emerge from the desert sand every time he got it right. A staircase spiraling through the sky was the choice of our eight-year-old. As the staircase unwound itself upward, there were occasional distractions: a helicopter flies into view, does a flip, and flies off; later a plane, a flock of birds—and at the highest altitude, various satellites. She stays intent on her tapping for the full ten minutes, despite having a bit of a fever that day. The next grandchild, just turned twelve, picks a staircase in space, where the distractions include planets, asteroid showers, and meteorites. While her younger two siblings had helped get their taps right by controlling their breathing and counting aloud, she just breathes naturally. And the last, soon to be fourteen, picks the desert scene and executes the whole routine effortlessly. At the end, she tells me, “I feel calm and relaxed—I like this game.” Indeed, all of them had immediately become enrapt, attuning to their breathing and the rhythm of their finger taps. “I felt really focused,” the twelve-year-old reported. “I want to do it again.” That’s exactly what the game designers hoped for. Tenacity, Davidson tells me, was developed by an award-winning game design group at the University of Wisconsin, with his input. “We took what we were learning about focus and calming in our contemplative neuroscience studies, and put it into a game so kids could get the benefits.” Tenacity strengthens selective attention, “the building block for all other kinds of learning,” he added. “The self-regulation of attention lets you focus on explicit goals and resist distraction,” a key to success in any domain. “If we can create a game kids want to play, it will be an efficient way to train attention, given how much time kids spend playing and how naturally it comes to them,” says Davidson, who heads the University’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. “They’ll love doing the homework.” Stanford University has a Calming Technology Lab, which focuses on gadgets that embed mindful, quieting focus. With one such calmer, “breathware,” you wear a belt that detects your breath rate. Should a chock-full inbox trigger what the developer calls “email apnea,” an iPhone app guides you through focusing exercises that calm your breath—and mind. Stanford’s Institute of Design offers a graduate course called “Designing Calm.” As one of the teachers, Gus Tai, says, ‘A lot of Silicon Valley tech is oriented toward distracting. But with calming tech, we’re asking how we can bring more balance to the world.”12