Your brain on games

People who played video games more frequently, defined as an average of 21 hours per week, have a bigger pleasure center of their brain than non-gamers, according to a study published by European researchers.

"The ventral striatum is usually associated with everything that brings pleasure," Simone Kühn, the study's lead author and a visiting neurology researcher at Charite University Medicine in Berlin, said in a statement.

"For instance food and monetary reward," she added. "It's also been associated with some addictions. If you show a smoker a cigarette, for example, the ventral striatum is activated."

The team of researchers, whose results were published Tuesday in the scientific journal Translational Psychology, compared MRI brain scans of a group of 14-year-olds from Berlin who played an average of four hours of video games per week with a group that average 21 hours.

The researchers, however, still do not know whether an enlarged pleasure center is a positive or negative effect.

Further studies needed

Other scientists in the field said the study's results suggested that the neurological effects of video games merit further study.

"[The ventral striatum] is a critical region in drug addiction, and this is one of the first papers to highlight a neurobiological link between video game play and drug addiction," Luke Clark, a lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, wrote in an e-mail sent to Deutsche Welle. He was not part of the study.

The researchers themselves noted this finding in the paper, saying that "volumetric differences in the striatum have previously been associated with addiction to drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol," but they cautioned that this was not necessarily a causal relationship with respect to video games.

"The unresolved question in the paper is how the volume difference arises: is this a consequence of regular video-game play, or do individual differences in striatal volume predispose some people to more regular (perhaps excessive) play?" Clark added.

"In drug addiction, both pathways seem likely," he said. "To separate these possibilities in video gamers, we need to scan people repeatedly around the time that these habits develop, in order to measure the actual change."

Author: Cyrus Farivar

Editor: Sean Sinico