RESEARCHERS HAVE discovered that playing the computer game Tetris makes your brain grow. The only problem is they do not know if it makes you any smarter.
The study by the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, US, proved that playing Tetris for 30 minutes a day, for three months, will definitely make your brain grow in specific areas.
Playing the popular computer game also made the brain more efficient, but unfortunately not in the areas where the grey matter grew.
The research team used MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, to see inside the brain and take measurements of “grey matter”, the thinking part of the brain. They used another form of MRI to gauge whether the brains of the 26 adolescent girls used as test subjects could also function more efficiently.
“We used our Tetris study to see if mental practice increased cortical thickness, a sign of more grey matter,” Dr Rex Jung, a co-investigator of the study said.
“If it did, it could be an explanation for why previous studies have shown that mental practice increases brain efficiency. More grey matter in an area could mean that the area would not need to work as hard during Tetris play.” Details of the work were published yesterday in BioMed Central, the open access online publisher of peer-reviewed research.
The researchers showed that cortical thickness increased in a brain area associated with planning of complex movements. Grey matter also grew in an area linked to “multisensory integration”, the blending of mixed sensory inputs.
Brain efficiency, however, improved in different areas, one involved in critical thinking and another in reasoning and language, the researchers said.
The team chose adolescent girls because brain changes might be easier to spot in a young person, but also because girls generally spend less time playing computer games than boys.
The researchers were concerned they might not be able to see any brain changes in boys if they were already plugged into computer gaming.
