Researchers have found that gamers brains have a similar reward system to those of problem gamblers – the results of the study may decide whether heavy gaming habits should count as an addiction.
Ghent University in Belgium performed a study on the brains of teenage gamers to help gauge whether intense or obsessive gaming habits have a neurological basis to be called an addiction.
Addiction, in a very general sense, is caused by dependence on a chemical substance – in this case, dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemical that makes us feel happy or gives us a feeling of reward. In the case of gamblers, reward is felt even if the gambler is losing, and in very severe cases, the act of losing promotes a far stronger dose of dopamine than winning.
Unlike recent studies performed by the likes of Baroness Greenfield and the University of Queensland (both of which came under heavy criticism due to their lack of factual citation and, in the case of the latter, utter absurdity), the study performed by Ghent is not a witch hunt.
“Although our subjects were not addicted to video games in the strict diagnostic sense, the current result seems to suggest that video gaming is related to addiction” said Dr Simone Kuhn in an interview with the Telegraph.
Scans of the gamers brain activity showed that they dopamine was released even upon losing, a sign of problematic addiction. However, Dr Luke Clark of the psychology department at the University of Cambridge sees these tests as a way to understand addiction:
“Studies like this are very useful because the area of the brain it concerns is at the heart of the brain’s reward system and we know addictive substances target the dopamine system, so the fact that the structure is altered in people who are high-frequency gamers is very interesting.”
See? Interesting. Not evil, not diabolical, and certainly not dehumanising.
Update: For full disclosure on the study readers can go here.
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Please get into the habit of citing the original papers. These might be interesting results, but it’s really impossible to tell without reading the original research – newspaper articles are at best a vague approximation, and at worst actively misleading.
Either way, this is probably nothing to worry about unduly. The dopaminergic reward system is involved in a huge range of activities (pretty much anything were some kind of motivation is involved) so the fact that there’s an increase in dopamine response in people regularly engaging in a task that involves a lot of conditioned learning isn’t surprising. Interesting, though. If anyone can find the paper, I’d be grateful.
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sqrrl101 (November 17th, 2011)
Done!
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Mark Ankucic (November 17th, 2011)