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Videogames May Enhance Eyesight
Hey, it took over 30 years to identify some potential health benefits from playing videogames!Thirty years ago (yes 1977) I was a first-year medical student and I already owned an obsolete PONG game system (manufactured by Atari!) No purported health benefits back then, simply a cool way to kill time.
Well, things have changed. Brain researchers from the University of Rochester claim that habitual videogame use may enhance the brain's visual processing capabilities by training the eyes to ignore noncontributory, distracting images.
Videogames appear sporadically in the health news. Some hand specialists worry that some gamers put themselves at risk for repetitive stress injuries - same for Blackberry addicts. Remember the false alarm about videogames and seizures? Only a rare few were susceptible and it appears that the monitors were likely more responsible, not the game content.
These researchers warn that any "improvement" is marginal, hard to appreciate in someone already seeing 20/20. Besides, 30 hours or more of playtime is needed to generate any measurable changes. They hypothesize that the real payoff may come in youngsters with lazy eye (amblyopia) by reawakening portions of the brain involuntarily inactivated so as to prevent a young child from having double vision. Imagine the bribes, "Timmy, you can play XBox all day so long as you keep your good eye patched!"
Hmmm. Maybe they are on to something!
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Technorati Tags: xbox, wii, playstation, eyesight
Labels: amblyopia, eyesight, lazy eye, videogames, vision
