Playing Tetris, the classic eighties video game, can boost the brain's grey matter, according to a new study.
“This kind of research is demonstrating the reasons and the conditions under which the brain becomes adaptive and changes,” says Richard Haier, a psychologist and co-investigator in the study, published yesterday in the online journal BMC Research Notes.
Researchers at the Mind Research Network, a non-profit organization based in Albuquerque, N.M., along with researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, studied a group of adolescent girls aged 12 to 15 who practised the puzzle game for 30 minutes a day over the course of three months. Using two brain imaging techniques, the study found that, compared with a control group of girls who did not practise Tetris, playing the game not only improved the brain's efficiency, it also increased the thickness of the cortex, an area of the brain scientists believe plays a role in the planning of complex, co-ordinated movements.
The study's findings, however, don't fit together as neatly as researchers may have hoped: The area of the brain to develop a thicker cortex was not the same area where researchers saw more efficiency.
“It is a mystery,” Dr. Haier says.
Tetris is an ideal tool for brain research, he adds.
“We picked it because it met all the requirements that we needed for a neuroimaging study of learning. It was simple to learn but it was very complex for the brain to play,” he says.
The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that, rather than having a fixed structure, the brain can change with stimulation, says Sherif Karama, a psychiatrist at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
“It's one more piece of the puzzle,” he says.
