Ever played a video game? Maybe you should have. Video-gamers are better at paying attention to several things at once than non-players, and are better at ignoring irrelevant features of a problem. Very young children trained with video games have been shown to develop superior attention-management skills, scoring substantially higher than their untrained peers on some IQ tests. You can actually see the improvement on an EEG: four-year-olds trained on video games display patterns of activity in the attention-control parts of their brains that you’d normally expect to find in six-year-olds.
LRB · Jim Holt · Smarter, Happier, More Productive Thanks to Hugh Graham for pointing it out.