Many people might think twice before handing a child a first-person shooter game for one simple reason: they’re awfully violent. But associate professor of psychiatry Véronique Bohbot, BA’90, has uncovered a more subtle reason to treat those games like drugs or alcohol. Too much Call of Duty shrinks a part of the brain called the hippocampus, putting frequent players at an increased risk for a suite of psychiatric disorders.
Shooter games tend to have a built-in GPS to help players navigate through the virtual world. This encourages players to rely on stimulus response to make their way around—the same way you might find yourself automatically turning left at the stop sign next to the yellow house on your way home from work, as opposed to working out where you are based on spatial clues.
The hippocampus is exercised in spatial navigation, and when Bohbot scanned the brains of those who frequently played shooter games a few years ago, she found that the hippocampus region was smaller compared to that in non-gamers.
“We thought, ‘Wow, this is serious,’” says Bohbot. A smaller hippocampus means that the brain could be more vulnerable to depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and other disorders.
To show that this wasn’t merely a case of correlation, she and her team had 100 people who didn’t play videos games regularly come into the lab. They spent 90 hours playing non-shooter games like Super Mario 64, or first person shooter games. She scanned their brans before and after.
Lo and behold, the action game group had smaller hippocampi than when they started. This doesn’t mean that you should never play Call of Duty, says Bohbot—but you’d be wise to cap play at a couple of hours a week. She suggests spending that extra time playing games that are good for your hippocampus, like logic or puzzle games. Or Super Mario.
