This Is Your Brain on Violence

Certainly they’re more malleable than adults. There’s reasonably good evidence that, at least for males, there’s continued development of the brain into the 20s. Young adults and late teens are fairly similar. We didn’t look at the younger kids because they have to hold still in the MRI machine for an hour or so.

You looked at kids’ brains after 30 minutes of videogame playing. Do you think you would have gotten the same effects if they’d played for just, say, 10 minutes?

There have been some psychological studies that looked at behavior after only 10 or 20 minutes of videogame playing, and they did see some changes in behavior. I think we erred on the side of a longer exposure to get a stronger effect and it’s more likely that someone is going to sit down and play the game for 30 minutes. Often times it takes several minutes before they get into the depths of the game. They get somewhat more difficult tasks as they go along.

Do you think it could be a permanent change that would last longer than 30 minutes?

We didn’t look at that in this study. We’d like to look at the duration of the effect and potential reversibility. We’d like to do more of a longitudinal study, where we had people play for longer periods of time and look to see what the brain activation patterns were before they started playing and at various times after, and look to see how permanent or nonpermanent [the changes] are. And have some people stop playing the game; have some people do some other interventions. There are computer games called cognitive attentional training, used in children with attention-deficit disorder (ADD) as sort of either a compliment to medical treatment or in lieu of medical treatment to help development attention. We could see if playing games like that could reverse some of these brain changes. In some of our previous research, where we looked at the amount of violent media exposure in the past year and correlated it to brain activity, we did see similar changes in those individuals, suggesting longer-term effects.

You deliberately used a video game without a maximum amount of violence in it?