Bad at video games? Brain structure may be at fault (via arstechnica)

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that
expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of
attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train
on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in
cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an
innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that
gaming is a skill that can be learned.

New neurological research,
published in—and made freely available by—the journal Cerebral Cortex has found a correlation
between the size of a trio of structures in the human brain and their owner’s
ability to learn and play video games. Animal studies had focused the authors’
attention on three distinct structures deep within the brain: the caudate
nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum, and the nucleus accumbens in the
ventral striatum. It was known that the striatum was used in habit forming and
skill acquisition, so a role in video games skills makes sense.

I know who I am going to blame bad dps or hps on next time! My underdeveloped brain, that’s who!