Undead Astronauts

The military has picked up on the idea of using games to train top soldiers in keeping track of multiple moving objects. The system was already being used by top athletes to help them keep track of things moving on the playing field, and the military has picked up on it too. The game as it currently exists shows players 8 balls moving in 3D space and asks them to keep track of 4 of them while ignoring the others. There’s an evaluation session and further training is based on how well you tested in that session. The better players perform, the faster the balls move. There’s also a pvp mode and they plan to integrate physical conditioning into it too.

In addition to training, the military is going to use the game as a tool to see which soldiers need to work harder at brain training. I wonder if there’s a future where soldiers who have consistently poor performances will get cut from the program, just as if they had repeatedly failed physical tests. It would be interesting to see how progamers performed at the game. My guess is that SC2 players’ scores would be off the charts, but it’s also possible that top QB’s like Manning or Brady would naturally score well.

Imagine what could happen if this game became a widely available cognitive evaluation tool. Kids could get tested at a young age and adjust their sports/gaming expectations accordingly. As an athlete, if you’re terrible but physically fast, run track. If you’re decent and fast, play runningback. If you’re amazing and fast, you’re Cam Newton. If you’re a gamer and terrible, stick to Farmville or the Sims.

i’ve made plenty of posts recently on how gaming can reshape the brain. add another one to the mix.

a study published in cortex found something slightly new. previous studies found that certain brain regions grew w/ frequent gaming, but this one found that action gaming could task a different neural pathway entirely.

The study found that during the tasks the less experienced gamers were relying most on the parietal cortex (the brain area typically involved in hand-eye coordination), whereas the experienced gamers showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain.

wiki says that the prefrontal cortex is the home of complex behaviors, personality expression, and executive function. this result is interesting b/c it basically mirrors what some pro gamers (and pro competitors in general) say about how non-pros can become more pro-like. i’ve heard many times from pros that to be good, a person has to spend a lot of time developing fundamentals, but once that’s done, the person has to put his own personality and creativity into the gameplay.

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there are some really interesting results from neuroscience investigations into sports. as with videogaming, it looks like the brain changes with practice in sports, and athletes’ brains are more efficient than non-athletes’ brains.

The brain begins by setting a goal—pick up the fork, say, or deliver the tennis serve—and calculates the best course of action to reach it. As the brain starts issuing commands, it also begins to make predictions about what sort of sensations should come back from the body if it achieves the goal. If those predictions don’t match the actual sensations, the brain then revises its plan to reduce error. Shadmehr and Krakauer’s work demonstrates that the brain does not merely issue rigid commands; it also continually updates its solution to the problem of how to move the body. Athletes may perform better than the rest of us because their brains can find better solutions than ours do.

sports geniuses may be born, but they are also made. practice is required to optimize neural pathways for efficient calculation.

Even as practice changes the brain’s anatomy, it also helps different regions of the brain talk to one another. Some neurons strengthen their connections to other neurons and weaken their connections to still others. Early on, neurons in the front of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) are active. That region is vital for top-down control, which enables us to focus on a task and consider a range of responses. With practice, the prefrontal cortex grows quiet. Our predictions get faster and more accurate, so we don’t need so much careful oversight about how to respond.

the cool thing is that a group of researchers found a way to overclock practice sessions. they attached electrodes across relevant neural regions and had ppl practice a certain physical operation. the group w/ electrodes showed greater performance and longer lasting results after a period with no practice. this is potentially a huge deal. it’s somewhat akin to using performance enhancing drugs b/c an athlete can achieve greater results with the same amount of practice.

i’d imagine that this would most affect very technical sports and sports requiring reaction time, but less so pure performance sports. diving and ping-pong might get a boost from this research, but the 100m dash and weight lifting might not. this would have to affect videogaming as well.

pro-players of the future might have to jack-up when practicing to stay competitive b/c of the difficulty in banning such a practice. i mean how could u tell if someone has jacked if there aren’t chemical residues?

cultural neuroscience has continued to find differences between eastern and western minds (see previous finding here). a 2006 study found that chinese and whites use different parts of the brain to process arabic numbers. the chinese in the study processed numbers through the visuospatial regions of their brain while the whites used regions involved in language.

it’s beyond strange to me that an entire swath of humanity uses the language pathway to think about mathematical computations rather than visuospatial pathways, but maybe that’s only because i’ve been conditioned to think visuospatial iq is correlated to mathematical ability. it would be interesting to see which pathway was more computationally efficient for the brain.

once the most efficient pathway was determined, researchers could study how to train students to use the best pathway for mathematical problems. another possibility is that there is no universally efficient pathway. perhaps whichever pathway has the highest comparative iq (visuospatial or verbal) is going to be the most efficient. that would take education into experimental science. each student would need a brainscan to see which educational method he needed. if this turns out to be true for math, then what about other subjects?

1. love motels in taiwan are going high class. as high class as these things go anyways. believe me, u don’t wanna get stuck in the cheap ones where the beds don’t have sheets and u can see the stains. *shivers* oh, and don’t use the stairs when u go to these places. stairs are only used by the young professional female physical therapists.

2. science is proving games can make parts of your brain operate more efficiently and/or grow larger. correspondingly, it’s also discovering that size matters. ppl who have above average size in certain brain structures can be predicted to perform better on video games that require good hand-eye coordination and shifting strategies. that sounds like every worthwhile pvp game out there.

3. final round. this weekend in atl. biggest fighting game tourney in the southeast. catch it streaming here. jwong is in attendance.