Are researchers running out of things to research about? Probably not, but a group of psychology professors at the University of Illinois have been doing some research and discovered that you can tell how gifted someone is at gaming by analyzing their brain. According to them, a scan of the basal ganglia (the part of the brain in charge of voluntary motor control, habits, eye movements and cognitive, emotional functions) can accurately determine a person’s skills at video games. Scientists made a group of test subjects who weren’t frequent gamers and made them play a videogame developed by the university called Space Fortress. They took scans of the brain size and activity before and after playing the game and they noticed that there was a positive correlation between its size and the person’s skills. It looks you now can have scientific proof to call someone a noob at games – just bring them for an MRI scan.
Filed in . Read more about Brain, Research, Scan and Science.