This is Your Brain on Violence

We haven’t talked about video games in a little while, but I saw this article on MSN, and it was pretty interesting. It’s about a recent study of teenager’s brains before and after playing violent video games. The researchers’ did find that there was a definite change, but if you read the interview with the head researcher, it’s clear that he’s pretty reluctant to say that these findings mean anything concrete. That’s understandable because it’s one tiny study.

But as the writer of the article notes, there’s a serious lack of any empirical evidence about the effects of violence in games on children. Mostly there’s just a lot of yelling back and forth. And this study may spur on future studies, and change that.

Of course, I would probably just be one of the people yelling, without any evidence to support me (perhaps a good reason that I didn’t pursue the sciences). It seems intuitive to me that violence in video games would give impressionable kids (and even teenagers, in fact, I still feel pretty impressionable myself) bad ideas.