POSITIVE LIFE

Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, and fine motor control. The study was led by Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She gave 23 adults a Nintendo DS and told them to play Super Mario 64 for at least 30 minutes a day for two months. A control group played nothing. MRI scans taken before and after showed that the Mario group had measurable increases in grey matter in the right hippocampus, the right prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum, and the increases were not found in the control group. The hippocampus is where the brain stores spatial maps. Super Mario 64 is a game built entirely around navigating three-dimensional space, jumping between platforms, remembering which doors lead where, and building a mental model of a world that does not exist. The brain treats a virtual world the same way it treats a real one: it maps it, stores it, and grows to accommodate it. The prefrontal cortex handles planning and strategy, which the game demands constantly. The cerebellum handles timing and coordination, which every jump requires. The brain was not just entertained. It was being trained, and the tissue responded the same way muscle responds to a weight: it got bigger. Kuhn said the results suggest that video game training could be used as a therapy for conditions where these brain regions are reduced, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related brain shrinkage. The prescription is a plumber in a red hat, 30 minutes a day. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2416…