Adam Bruno

Playing Tetris has made you really smart, right? No? Well, blame those paint chips you ate as a kid, because I’ve played a whole lot of Tetris and other puzzle games, and now I’m a freakin’ genius!

Seriously, it turns out playing Tetris can be great for your gray matter! Read on!

Researchers at the Mind Research Network studied 26 adolescent girls with limited computer experience. They had one group regularly play Tetris and evaluated the results. “We did our Tetris study to see if mental practice increased cortical thickness, a sign of more gray matter,” Dr. Rex Jung, a co-investigator on the Tetris study and a clinical neuropsychologist said. “If it did, it could be an explanation for why previous studies have shown that mental practice increases brain efficiency.”

The girls who played Tetris showed increased brain efficiency and thicker cortices in several areas. “Tetris, for the brain, is quite complex,” said Dr. Richard Haier, a co-investigator in the study. “It requires many cognitive processes like attention, hand/eye co-ordination, memory and visual spatial problem solving all working together very quickly. It’s not surprising that we see changes throughout the brain.” Haier has conducted previous Tetris research and continues to search for links between video games and brain development.

Why adolescent girls, though? Researchers felt that many boys tend to have considerably more computer game experience and thought that might make it harder to detect changes in their brains after game practice. They chose adolescents because the brain changes considerably during that age, and thus it is easier to discover any unusual changes.

Researchers remain optimistic about Tetris’s effects. “We hope to continue this work with larger, more diverse samples to investigate whether the brain changes we measured revert back when subjects stop playing Tetris,” said Dr. Jung. “Similarly, we are interested if the skills learned in Tetris, and the associated brain changes, transfer to other cognitive areas such as working memory, processing speed, or spatial reasoning.”

I wonder if other puzzle games have similar effects. I’m guessing they do.

Source: The Mind Research Network