I was at cocktail party last week when I heard the terrifying news. A notice in Scientific American reported that video games change brain chemistry.
In a study conducted at the Cyclotron Unit of Hammersmith Hospital in London, Dr Paul Grasby and his fellow researchers determined that playing video games triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.
(The details, if you’re interested: the scientists injected eight men with a tracer substance known as carbon-11 raclopride. The molecule competes against the naturally occurring chemical dopamine for receptor sites in the brain. By monitoring the brains of video game players with positron emission tomography scans, the scientists were able to detect how many receptor sites were filled by their tracer chemical. The more dopamine produced by the brain, the less available sites there are for the carbon-11. The men playing video games had significantly less receptors open for the carbon-11, which means they were producing massive amounts of dopamine.)
What the scientists believe they found through this rather laborious process was that dopamine production in the brain doubles during video game play. The increase in secretion of this psychoactive chemical was roughly the same as when a person is injected with amphetamines or the attention-deficit disorder drug, Ritalin. Worse, this alteration in brain chemistry is the first hard evidence that video game playing is addictive.
As someone who has laughed off the concerned cries of parents and teachers about the perils of Duke Nukem, I was quite taken aback. If I hadn’t been on my third glass of wine, I wouldn’t have been able to finish my dinner.
“I guess this means you’ll be retracting your last three books,” a particularly competitive media theorist friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, jibed.
Indeed, at first glance, it appears old Marshall McLuhan was right yet again. The medium is not only the message, it is the “massage”. That is, the media we use and watch, regardless of their content, have a physical and psychological effect on us. The flickering TV screen itself massages our brains in ways we might only be beginning to understand. Like the “brain machines” with flashing lights that hi-tech New Agers attach to their eyes to transport themselves into meditative states, our TVs, computers and video games appear to have a calculable impact on our nervous systems.
And it’s not a good one at all. According to the study, video games are the electronic equivalent of a dose of speed. No wonder so many kids need Ritalin and similar chemicals to stay alert in school. They are addicted to raised dopamine levels, and can’t concentrate on anything without them.
What is the effect of my computer monitor? I wondered. Mine is set to a refresh rate of 85Hz (the image flashes 85 times a second). Do different refresh rates do different things? Is this why I feel so compelled to check my e-mail before I go to bed? Am I addicted to the monitor?
And what about all those parents and children who I told not to worry about their love of video games? Have I condemned them to a life of addiction, or a painful withdrawal period some day in a future video game recovery clinic?
I took a careful second look at the study as published in Scientific American and found nothing to cheer me up, so I went back to an earlier report published in New Scientist. It was there I found my salvation.
The subjects of the experiments weren’t simply playing video games. They were playing for “money”. The men would win cash prizes for successfully manoeuvring a tank and collecting enemy flags.
So, if we want to be scientific about all this, mightn’t the observed increase in dopamine levels be associated more with the known compulsive and addictive sport of gambling than the video games these studies were meant to analyse and condemn? Or, at the very least, hasn’t cash already been proven itself a sufficient incentive for many a questionable action? I know “my” brain chemistry changes when I have a $100 bill dangled in front of me.
In fact, come to think of it, couldn’t we more easily blame the speed-like drive of today’s Internet on the many businesses racing to capitalise on this new marketplace than the students, the elderly and the workers using it to communicate with one another about their lives and loves? I don’t remember feeling the same desperate compunction to check my e-mail before I started using it to distribute my column as well as my invoices.
The real reason we give Ritalin to young children is that they don’t pay enough attention to what we tell them. Is this because their attention spans are shorter, or because – as the new economists have declared – we are living in an “attention economy”, where the only limited resource is people’s ability to pay attention to all the marketing messages that businesses aim at them? What better way to increase that resource than drug the population whose attention you’re trying to get?
Maybe I’m just staving off the inevitable proof that the technologies I enjoy are somehow dangerous, debilitating or addictive. But until someone can show me the brain damage caused by playing games for free, I’m hanging on to my joystick. c Douglas Rushkoff
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