How Video Games Boost Your Brain's Learning Capacity

Introduction

Neuroplasticity training often involves long, tedious sessions that can be a drag. What if interspersing video games with traditional training could not only make the process more enjoyable but also boost your brain's performance?

Understanding the relationship between gaming and learning could transform how we approach education, skill development, and even medical rehabilitation.

Recent Research

A recent study delved into this question of whether games can boost learning. Researchers studied whether games change how well people can hone their auditory skills—like getting better at telling apart two similar sounds. Let's break down the experiment.

The Teams in the Arena

A) The Pure Listeners

• Mission: To focus only on auditory tasks to see if sound drills alone could tune the brain."

B) The Gamers

• Mission: To play Tetris in silence. The aim? To see if the game alone would sharpen auditory or cognitive skills.

C) The Double Agents

• Mission: To alternate between auditory tasks and Tetris. Essentially, multitasking between fun and work.

D) The Taskmasters

• Mission: To combine auditory tasks with a monotonous visual task similar to Tetris. The aim was to determine whether the visual tasks alone contributed to any improvement in auditory skills.

E) The Benchwarmers

• Mission: To do absolutely nothing. These folks served as the control group.

The MVP

Ready for the surprise? The Double Agents—the group that alternated between auditory training and Tetris—outperformed everyone else. It seems, when you're having fun during your training sessions, and your brain releases dopamine, you're not just enjoying yourself—you're also boosting your learning capabilities.

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What does this all mean?

Experts in the field suggest that playing video games can have profound effects on our brain. Specifically, games can "lead to the release of reward signals such as dopamine." In simpler terms, this means games make us feel good.

But that's not all; dopamine also "promotes synaptic plasticity and contributes to experience-dependent learning," or in layman's terms, it makes our brain more adaptable and better at learning new things.

So, games make our brain release dopamine, and this dopamine not only makes us feel good but also helps our brain cells connect better. It's like giving your brain a natural boost to make learning easier and more effective.

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Conclusion

Whether it's medical rehabilitation or enhancing your day-to-day cognitive functions, the blend of fun and focused tasks might just be the cheat code you're looking for. So, the next time you're thinking of leveling up your skills, perhaps it's time to game on.

This is where TrainPain comes into play. TrainPain merges sensory neuroplasticity training with the engaging elements of gaming. Think of it as the Double Agents from the study: it gives you the rigorous training your nervous system needs while keeping things lively and rewarding through a game.

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The source for this post is a research study titled "Supramodal enhancement of auditory perceptual and cognitive learning by video game playing" that was published in"Frontiers in Psychology" in 2017.