Study Shows Playing Video Games Really Can Make Your Brain Bigger-

Previous research on whether playing video games
can make us smarter has been mixed, but a new
study demonstrates a very tangible effect of
playing video games: Parts of the brain can get
bigger.
In particular, playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes
a day over two months increased adult volunteers'
brain volume in their right hippocampus, the right
prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum. These
regions in the brain are responsible for memory
formation, strategic planning, muscle control, and
spatial navigation.
The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Development and Charité University
Medicine St. Hedwig-Krankenhaus measured the
volunteers' brains via MRI and compared them with
a control group that didn't play video games. They
found "significant gray matter increase" among the
gamers and theorize that playing video games
could be useful to treat brain disorders:
The presented video game training could
therefore be used to counteract known risk
factors for mental disease such as smaller
hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume
in, for example, post-traumatic stress
disorder, schizophrenia and
neurodegenerative disease.
While researchers are mixed on whether a bigger
brain necessarily means you're smarter, the size of
certain areas of the brain can be significant.
( Discovery points to Albert Einstein's average-sized
brain with the parts connected to mathematical
thinking larger than usual.) Increased gray matter
has been positively correlated with better memory,
and decreased gray matter correlated with things
like bipolar disorder and dementia.
Especially interesting in this study: the volunteers
who said they enjoyed playing the video games had
even higher increased gray matter. (Also, as Kotaku
has reported, the size of certain parts of your brain
may be related to how good you are at playing
video games. It all makes sense now!)

In any case, this may be just more supporting
evidence that playing video games can be
beneficial for more than just entertainment.
Playing Super Mario induces structural brain
plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from
training with a commercial video game (Abstract) |
Molecular Psychiatry via Quartz
Photo by Tom Newby Photography.

Source- @LifeHacker