Improve Your Memory With Facebook And Gaming!

The stereotypical gamer is not something that many (if any) people strive to achieve: sitting alone in their dirty rooms, eyes straining through the darkness to their screen whilst slowly eating their way through the pile of ready meals that line their couch; fortunately this is far from accurate in 99.99% per cent of cases, and as it turns out the benefits may be more profound than we’d previously thought.

This follows studies by Psychologist Dr Tracy Alloway of Stirling University assessing the effects of various games and websites (such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook) on the “working memory”, and the results of these are pretty interesting.

But before we have a look at the conclusions that Dr Alloway managed to draw I’ll just go over what is meant by “working memory”, and in fact it is relatively obvious: ‘the ability to remember and use information’.

Although that may not seem so important in out general wellbeing according to Tracy (who has spent many years working in the field) it can be more vital for success than happiness than even an high IQ, and things such as employing working memory to match answers in interviews in the best way demonstrates this nicely.

So, what’s good and what’s bad for you? Well let’s start with the bad news, and the results are quite interesting: the two main culprits appeared to be two of the giants of the internet world Twitter and Youtube, with texting and watching TV also getting a little criticism as well.

But what’s wrong with Twitter? I think this is best explained in Dr Alloway’s words:

“On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct, you don’t have to process that information…Your attention-span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving serve connections.”

The same problem of ‘instant’ information is also present on YouTube (and, unsurprisingly, TV also) where you are almost spoon fed information and entertainment and brain needs to do no work in processing and thus suffers, something that also happens in text (as in SMS) conversations – what I would like to know is whether or not the same applies for IM (as the same ‘instant’ nature would, I’d have thought, be similar) but unfortunately I don’t know.

However there are some beneficial sites within the social network world, and they come in the unlikely form of Facebook. By keeping a track of past actions, and the increased experience of being in a social group you stretch your working memory – and I imagine those horribly addictive games also go some way to keeping the brain on its toes.

Something else deemed worthy of ‘praise’ are computer games, and more specifically those that involve strategy and planning such as Age of Empires, the Total War series and the Sims (assuming you’re not the sort of person who just likes killing your own people). These are the sort of games that replicate and emphasise the everyday situations where you need to retain and act upon information, and although the social implications of playing these games may not be totally beneficial, there are at least some positives to go on.

Via – BBC

Related Pages:

1. Facebook In Real Life?
2. Your Guide to The New Facebook Redesign
3. Facebook Continues To Grow Towards World Domination?
4. How To Change Your Facebook Username (Vanity Name URL)
5. Facebook Vanity or Insanity URLs?

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