The neuro-learning revolution

Below is an interesting article from this week's New Scientist  - basically it suggests that far from "dumbing us down",  computer games and many television shows are making us smarter.  

New Scientist  July 02, 2005

You're hanging with your homies at the crossroads when you spot a plain-clothes nark. Do you: (a) pull your baseball cap down over your eyes and your hoodie up over it, and try to mooch off down an alley, or (b) hijack that suburban car waiting at the lights with a "Baby on Board" sign to make a rubber-burning getaway?

Whatever - it's only a computer game: one rather like Grand Theft Auto. The one parents tell the kids is destroying their morals and rotting their brains. But perhaps if they listened to many academics and educationalists, rather than newspaper columnists, they would find that these specialists see a neuro-learning revolution going on in computer games.

Or maybe parents would rather listen to Bill Gates. In February, he told the US National Education Summit on High Schools that high schools are "obsolete", adding: "I don't just mean they're broken...I mean our high schools...even when they are working as designed...cannot teach all of our students what they need to know today."

People who have never played these games probably don't appreciate how much hard thinking they require. Steven Johnson has played a lot of games and thought a lot about them. Now a columnist for the magazines Wired and Discover, and a paid-up provocateur, he believes that not only games but - and this is an even viler heresy against received wisdom - ER and The Sopranos are good for us too. They teach our brain to explore complex webs of interactions with non-obvious structure.

In his latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You, Johnson argues that far from rotting our brains, popular culture is actually becoming more intellectually demanding and positively nutritious.

Liz Else and Mike Holderness were curious to find out whether Johnson is a smart commentator with a great-sounding contrarian idea, or the real deal.

What do most people think about popular culture?

There's a debate between two camps: one thinks popular culture is so depraved that the government needs to intervene, and the other just thinks it's really, really bad. The debate has focused almost exclusively on a morality-play model of culture: does it convey a positive, upbeat message for kids to learn good lessons from? I have focused instead on how much cognitive work you have to do to make sense of it. These are cultural forms that force you to work, to solve problems, to detect long-term patterns and to keep track of complicated networks. There is a distinct upward trend in complexity. Culture is not getting dumbed-down at all. For example, Hill Street Blues marked a revolutionary change in television storytelling, with its multiple interleaved narratives. The Sopranos is as big a leap again into complexity, with multiple narratives flowing through many scenes simultaneously.

You say that the effort required to "read" such popular culture or complete a game is making people smarter, but what exactly is doing that, and how?

I think games and interactive media are doing the most enhancement, and that television has had to play catch-up. If you haven't played a video game, do so. Play The Sims, which is the most popular game of all time, or even a game with violent scenarios like Grand Theft Auto, and you will discover that the mental challenge involved in getting to the end is astonishing. People talk about the violence, they dismiss games as cheap pleasures and worry about kids being addicted to them. But players have written an account of the things that you need to keep track of, and the universe of forces you have to take account of to get to the end of the game. This cheat-sheet is 53,000 words long, the length of a short novel. Generally, though, you learn the rules as you play.

But don't you get more from reading a novel?

A traditional intellectual exercise like that can offer great psychological depth, great understanding of cause and effect and narrative trajectories, richness of language, all of these things. But someone else has made all the decisions. By contrast, in every second of a video game you must evaluate its stateand make quick and accurate decisions. So you are getting smarter in terms of the ability to soak up a lot of data on the fly, then figure out the best strategy and decide the best path forward.

Could this have something to do with political scientist James Flynn's observation that raw scores in IQ tests are rising?

Perhaps. I've talked with Flynn about games, and his response was to remember his father coming home from a day of back-breaking labour. He just wanted to have his dinner and go to sleep. Watching something really complicated on TV or taking up a challenging puzzle game just wasn't on the cards.

Another thing that has changed is that we now live in a world of proliferating interfaces. Watching a movie, you just sat there. TV had a channel-changer. Now people have to learn the patterns of new interfaces as much as they need to understand actual information. To be able to sit in front of a new piece of technology and manipulate it without reading the manual is an important form of intelligence, one that we need more and more to be economically competitive. Games are doing a great job of training kids to do that.

Don't we risk losing other intelligences, though?

True, our social and emotional intelligences aren't getting a lot of enhancement from game experiences. Pattern recognition, problem solving and visual intelligence clearly are. But all the really interesting developments in the second phase of the internet's evolution, over the past three or four years, have been social. There are dating services. There are online communities, whether discussion forums or gaming clans, and they meet face to face too.

You tell an impressive story of your 7-year-old nephew playing Sim City for the first time and asking "why don't we reduce industrial taxes?" Wasn't he finding a message in the substructure of the game, and isn't that rather insidious?

Yes, games like Sim City do contain a theory of how the world works, which players internalise, and we critics need to evaluate that. But what I found amazing about my nephew was not the knowledge that he got about how cities work. It was his ability to decipher the rules of the game within 30 minutes of me showing it to him, and without me explaining all that much. We believe that playing chess is good for your brain not because there are important life lessons or morals to be learned from it, but because there is something about the kind of thinking you do that sharpens the mind.

What keeps players involved in the games?

I like the ideas of the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who talks about "seeking circuitry" in the brain, largely modulated by the dopamine reward system. If your reward is a little less than you expected, then seeking is activated and drives you to want to explore your environment. I think it is this mix of reward and exploration that sucks people in.

When you were a kid you spent many hours making your own simulations of baseball games using a pencil and paper. Did that work the same way?

I suspect that had less to do with neurology than with an educational theory - that the brain is most likely to be engaged in learning when we are working within the "regime of confidence": not too difficult and not too easy, but on the edge. Games are specifically designed to work exactly on that line.

What is your favourite game at the moment?

Over the years I've spent many, many hours playing Sim City. Now that I have two little kids and a busy life I manage 2 to 4 hours a week.

And 10 years ago?

Maybe it was 5 to 6.