How Video Games Can Help Improve Important Mental Skills

Gone are the days when blocks falling from the sky to build a column was considered an interesting way to pass time. Young adults these days refuse to devote their time to activities as dull as that.

The Video Games industry today makes more money in a year than Hollywood. What is the reason behind this? Video games today are complicated, challenging and useful. They engage the users and keep them coming back for more.

And this video explains why that is a good thing.

Lazing around and playing video games will not make anyone better at anything, but kids (and teenagers, even adults!) may benefit largely from playing modern video games for a certain amount of time.

Video games help strengthen our brain thus it improves valuable skills like memory and strategic planning, expands attention span and develops superior motor skills. As complex video games require the players to pay attention to details and work on multiple things at the same time while trying to not get killed in the game, the brain gets a lot of exercise which it wouldn’t otherwise.

Here is a list of video games which when played in moderation can act as amazing mental workout regimes.

Research says video games can prove to be extremely conducive for boosting our critical thinking skills as well. According to Dr. Brian Glass, of the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, “Previous research has demonstrated that action video games . . . can speed up decision making, but the current work finds that real-time strategy games can promote our ability to think on the fly and learn from past mistakes.”

Cognitive flexibility i.e. a person’s ability to adapt and quickly switch between tasks and think about multiple ideas at any given point of time to strategically solve problems can be trained and improved expertly by gaming regularly. Since cognitive flexibility is considered to be a cornerstone of human intelligence, gaming should be encouraged among children and young adults as they are at a stage where they are most likely to develop and grow faster.