Some say too much gaming will ruin your vision and rot your brain while others claim it improves your hand eye coordination and can even make you smarter.

So what exactly does gaming due to our brain and our body.

To find out I visited, doctors and researchers were seeing brain activity in different frequencies, tested my hand eye coordination against a pro gamer.

You can't catch up and somehow ended up in a sub 200 degree cryo chamber.

All to answer the question, how do video games affect us?

The stakes are higher than ever.

Industry is booming.

These sports have gone mainstream their college leagues, parents are even getting video game tutors for their kids and thanks in part to smartphones and free games like Fortnite Gamers are playing more than ever before.

So given that we can play virtually anywhere at any time, how is all this gaming changing us physically?

Let's start with the excuse I used to give my mom when I was trying to get a little bit more time on the Atari.

It's making me a better athlete to find out if that's actually true.

I headed to the Sports academy in 1000 oaks California for amateur gamers and esports pros trained under the same roof as traditional athletes.

This is pro gamer Matt Higginbotham, I'm known online as Acadians.

Between training and casual gaming.

Matt plays 8 to 10 hours a day?

People say, you know, it improves hand eye coordination, it improves response time, What have you seen in your own life if you only play League of Legends, that's like you're only activity with no physical exercise.

In my opinion, you're just going to get out of shape in terms of positive, maybe, maybe cognitive, it would increase the things you're going to use in the game, reacting to things quickly, making decisions quickly.

So is he?

Right.

Let's find out if being an avid gamer actually makes you sharper.

We're going to be taking a bunch of cognitive tests, one after the other.

Now, matt is a pro gamer.

I am very much not.

So we're going to see exactly how our results breakdown.

The first test is my new arch nemesis.

The Dyna vision board which tests your reaction time.

Your job is to hit the button when it lights up.

Right, okay.

It's going to move pretty quickly.

Okay, so you're gonna want to rely on your periphery.

Okay.

I can use either hand, Right.

That's going to be a mess.

I can already tell now matt calm and he's making it look easy.

But this is way, way harder than it looks.

Am I not seeing one, yep down below?

Yeah, There you go.

I just threw the whole test.

It's pretty fun actually, dammit.

Okay.

Yes, let's leave this far behind.

I'll see you in hell.

Dine aboard the next one test.

What's called cognitive processing under load.

It's also a reaction test.

But unlike the Dyna vision board, there's a voice telling you to do the opposite of what you're actually supposed to do?

Okay, there's gonna be a voice in your head that says stop and go green.

My brain.

Yeah it's tiring.

Right?

That's crazy.

The last test measures your ability to track multiple objects.

At the same time.

We had to keep tabs on certain spheres as they floated around in a three D.

Space.

Kind of like trying to win two games of three card monte at the same time.

47, three and five six and eight.

I got better at it after like eight of them.

No, they bounced off each other.

No no totally lost.

Um My confidence is shaken at this point of truth.

You got some good news for me.

It's always these tasks are built to really push your cognitive processing but but at the same time give you measurable results and immediate feedback matt Outperformed you in the more complex tasks.

So as task got more complicated and had a significant amount of distractions and opportunity for the brain to start thinking about something that wasn't primary to the task.

He outperformed you pretty significantly at those tasks if we were to compare both your scores to a normal population of which we have data.

He's in the 98th%ile and you're probably the 60 or 70%ile.

So are we talking about self selection here?

Is is it that people who are good at this stuff are playing games or is there proof that games can actually improve your cognition in that way?

No, I think for sure games can help improve your cognition.

Playing video games can be very high speed, can create a lot of chaos, create a lot of multiple environments where you have to make decisions and all of these reforming skills in the brain.

So no, I I think in general, just like in every capacity of human performance, we all start with some baseline Based on genetics, but the opportunity to train cognition I think is really powerful.

Okay, so a pro-Gamer who's 20 years younger than me beat me in a few cognitive tests.

I mean of course he did.

But what does science have to say about all this video games is a hugely broad category.

Um and we know for sure that the impact of a game has to do with what you're asked to do.

So because of that different games will have different impacts on on the brain.

You know, you wouldn't ask what's the impact of food on your body.

Um you don't want to know the composition of the food, right?

Um and so the same is true of video games.

So um you know, depending on what we would call the mechanics, the dynamics, the content of individual games, that is what would predict how the games will affect your brain?

Action games like counterstrike, Overwatch and Fortnite are some of the most popular with consumers these days.

And Green and his colleagues have two games like those to find out what their impact is.

There are a subtype of games, action games that have been linked with positive effects in perceptual and cognitive skills.

These are games that have lots of fast motion in them.

Lots of objects to track simultaneously.

An emphasis on peripheral processing.

So items first come at the edges of the screen, the need to make quick and accurate decisions under time pressure.

Based on 15 years worth of studies, researchers have found that action games biggest positive effects were on perception, how our senses interpret external stimuli like sights and sounds, spatial cognition which helps you orient yourself in and navigate three d environments and top down attention.

The ability to focus on one object while ignoring distractions.

How far that generalizes I think is a pretty open question.

So my expectation is that there are plenty of people who show pretty exceptional hand eye coordination with the joystick might not be able to catch a baseball very well.

Right?

Um And so um it's certainly the case that um perceptual motor skill development in one area won't necessarily generalize to all areas.

I'm curious about thoughts that you have about the thresholds between benefits gained from action games and where those diminishing returns might kick in.

You will get more learning gain from smaller sessions spread out over time than one big block.

With respect to perceptual and cognitive skills.

We've either seen a positive impact or a null impact.

We haven't seen any area that has been damaged where there is worse performance.

So those are the positive effects of playing action games.

But what if you could develop games that specifically harness those cognitive effects?

That's exactly what researchers are attempting at UCSF neuroscience lab.

Our goal is to bridge technology and neuroscience to improve the function of the reason we focus on cognitive control is because we look at it as a very sort of base of the pyramid that all other aspects of cognition like memory or reasoning decision making all the way up to things like wisdom are dependent upon it.

If you can't pay attention, everything crumbles right.

You can't build any of the higher order cognitive abilities.

Their custom designing games that could one day be prescribed as a kind of digital medicine for patients with conditions like A.

D.

H.

D.

So we're pharmaceutical medicines deliver molecular treatments.

We think of this medicine as a digital medicine that delivers experiential treatments.

The video game is essentially like our pill.

They hooked me up with an E.

E.

G.

Cap so that I could see my brain activity in real time while playing a steering game called project evo and we'll see your brain responding to it and there are signs it's working.

So that game is now in the FDA approval process to become the first ever describable video game.

What we have frequently found is that we're able to get transfer of benefits from gameplay to other aspects of attention that are very different than the game, neuroscience is also experimenting with virtual reality because VR can utilize your whole body as a controller and may well be able to compound the benefits for things like attention and memory.

A lot of data has shown that physical activity, even devoid of cognitive challenges has positive benefits on your brain, especially the aging brain.

So we asked the question, what happens if you give physical challenges that are integrated with cognitive challenge and create a sort of integrated approach?

Um will you have even more cognitive benefits if you're moving your entire body embodied challenges as opposed to playing that same game, just sitting there, just moving your fingers and we're testing that right now now, despite your findings and despite the fact that you've been able to replicate this and you're in phase three trials, there doesn't seem to be consensus in the medical community.

There are a lot of other scientists who say, well, no, I mean any any positives that you can derive from games are kind of mild and transitory at best.

How do you respond to that?

It's a complicated field and it's still early days.

I'm at least cautiously optimistic Based on what we've seen over the last 10 years that were really onto something that's going to be very positive for people using video games as a therapeutic.

And if these games are prescribed one day to improve brain function, there are still questions about what the dosage should be.

It is important to make it fun, but it is also critical to think of it as something that's dosed and played for a limited time and not interfering with the other important activities in your life.

Okay, now for the bad news, avid gaming can lead to injuries.

I see many people have repetitive motion injuries from gaming extensively.

You know, many gamers will gain from 8 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week.

So my goal when I'm talking to them, finding how much the game which games that they're playing and what are their injuries.

So injuries are the following often finger injuries, wrist injuries, elbow injuries, shoulder injuries, neck injuries, it's the wide gamut of the human body really.

Dr Harrison also sees something he calls gamer's thumb.

And this is an issue whereby someone will have tendonitis the back of their thumb as well as on the volar aspect of palmer aspect of their thumb.

So they'll have pain in the back of the thumb and the front.

Now that I've only seen with gamers when they present with that they have really abused their bodies.

Their thumbs are really on fire when this bad boy is down, then you got you got a problem.

So I'm here, I'm your patient, I don't have big problems yet but I want to prevent problems.

So let me show you like let's say five basic stretches so you wanna go down and then bring your fingers up, you feel that and loosen up your joints as well as for your risk just to start opening up everything and you get everything moving really nice in and out with the thumb.

Right then down.

This is one of the fundamental stretches that every gamer should do.

Council based, keyboard based mouse, whatever that is you want to have a healthy thumb, you do them for 5 to 10 minutes twice a day.

Not difficult.

I think video games are great.

Moderation is the key.

If you overdo it then there are always issues that will be attached to that look there's no question the gaming can wear you out.

Some gamers at the sports academy even subject themselves to cryotherapy after long sessions, the jury's still out on its effectiveness but some players swear by it so I decided to give it a try.

Alright so there's freezing cold gas, it's dry.

Go through this for 2, 2.5, 3 minutes when you come out, which I can only hope is going to be some time sometime soon when you come out and your body starts to warm up again, your blood then starts to recirculate and it goes back out to your extremities and the idea being that the circulation feels amazing and you go to the surgery and the gene.

Alright, those 2.5 minutes I made it.

Oh man!

So what have we learned here other than the fact that I'm a masochist, gaming can be good for your hand, eye coordination and perception can help with focus, attention, maybe even memory.

Just how all that translates into the real world though.

Still up for debate.

We also know that repetitive gaming can take a toll on your body.

So a little bit of moderation goes a long way when it comes to my own experience.

I've played games for more than 30 years, never suffered any gaming-related injuries.

And while I may never know if gaming help my brain, I do know it didn't destroy it.

So take that mom.