Father, Doctor, Geek, Gamer
Los Angeles, CA
Joined August 2010
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- Followers47
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Whenever parents are concerned about their child's delay in speech development, my go-to citation is "@ColinJost didn't speak til he was 5, and now hes married to Scarlett Johansson"
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Even in Med school I played DotA and @Warcraft , so multiple friends linked this study to me - but headlines are misleading, so I looked into what the ACTUAL study said:
The final study never says “your brain is 13.7 years younger.” (that's from a 2024 pre-print press release by @WesternU), but it does say frequent gamers scored better on short-term memory, reasoning, and processing speed.
But what is categorized as a gamer? To me, I think games have evolved into a more mainstream, easy to play (and win) format from when I was a kid. Early @NintendoAmerica (NES) games were damn near impossible to beat - the creators of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles should have an ICC warrant out for their arrest. Also the difference in focus and skill between RTS like @StarCraft or FPS like @CounterStrike vs like… Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing must have different cognitive benefits. This study just did a survey which I think can be stratified further.
"Frequent gamer" in the final paper is three or more hours a week, across any genre. "Infrequent" is any gaming under three hours. So what the paper actually reports is that frequent gamers scored higher than infrequent and non-gamers on a composite cognitive score, in a statistically significant way.
Reasoning showed the biggest gap between frequent and infrequent gamers. Processing speed also came in clearly ahead. But short-term memory improved with any gaming at all, but didn't keep improving with more hours. So some benefits look like a Threshold Effect (you get most of it just by playing regularly) and some look Dose-Dependent (more hours = more benefit… up to a point)
Also this was a cross-sectional, correlational study, meaning everyone was measured once. No random selection and signals to game more or less. Which makes it a chicken-and-egg problem: maybe gaming sharpens reasoning and processing speed, OR maybe people who already have sharp reasoning and fast processing speed are more drawn to gaming? The study can't tell you which direction the arrow points.
So I’d love it if @elonmusk was right and “play video games or be dumb” was a simple truth (because I play video games), but the nuances are in the actual paper. Exercise almost disappeared from the discourse around this study, but most people in the sample were already active adults (not the basement-dwelling gamer, South Park style stereotype of yore). Plus in this dataset, physical activity tracked with better mood, not necessarily cognitive scores.
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Uncommon W for the little guy in a world dominated by Billionaires doing whatever they want – at Onion Creek, TX
Accountability for the wealthiest people on Earth is hard to come by.
Thank you for believing in the power of independent journalism to accomplish it.
(And, yes, more to come.)
pablo.show/p/it-happened
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My first reaction was: good riddance! My second reaction was: wait, why are they doing this voluntarily?? Insurers don't hand out goodwill for free...This takes effect next month so I dug a little deeper...
reuters.com/legal/litigation…
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Though one can argue the amount of PA attempts abandoned mid-stream due to Provider Office Rage Quitting is not properly tracked, or the amount of who “learned their lesson” in previous attempts and just gave up for future patients, still less prior auth is less prior auth.
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Great talk by the first @neuralink "cyborg" @ModdedQuad here at @Ai4Conferences ! Too short though, he needs a longer session!! I've listened to @elonmusk @djseo and others before too so this was less technical and more personal but amazing! – at Winchester, NV
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The classic super long @Starbucks line literally 100 feet away from free coffee at the conference. Never change, conference attendees. #ai4 – at Winchester, NV
How do you follow that?? Amazing keynote maybe best I've ever seen @Ai4Conferences #ai4 – at Winchester, NV
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Godfather of AI Jeffrey Hinton. Soft spoken, well spoken, smart and thoughtful. His take on consciousness sounds more like a philosopher, which I love. Great insight – at Winchester, NV
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Day 2 keynote starting off amazingly with 3 key AI figures. Andrew Ng perfectly calling out the rhetoric squashing open source models - fear mongering for financial reasons – at Winchester, NV
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Fei-Fei Li also has the freedom to speak the truth unlike most of the others (outside of this keynote). Not trying to sell anything, just clean, concise insight – at Winchester, NV
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