Drudge linked to a brief article today on Yahoo news, Brain sees violent video games as real life -study, which framed the evidence in such a way as to obfuscate the distinction between reality and fantasy.
The brains of players of violent video games react as if the violence were real, a study has suggested.
Klaus Mathiak at the University of Aachen in Germany studied the brain patterns of 13 men aged 18 to 26 who, on average, played video games for two hours a day.
....
Mathiak found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became active and that during a fight, emotional parts of the brain were shut down.
The pattern was the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations.
(emphasis mine-SW)
While this is a brief recap, it is characteristic of the lazy manner in which reporters approach scientific studies.
One can suspect that the writer (of the original magazine article or of the Yahoo recap, it is impossible to say from this snippet) is opposed to violent entertainment on the grounds of increasing the risks of violence. This, of course, fits into the well worn memes that include "guns are always bad", "war is not the answer", and "if we are nicer, our enemies will like us more."
The premise is that playing violent video games directly affects the brain of the players and predisposes them to violence.
It suggests that video games are a "training for the brain to react with this pattern," Mathiak says.
The research was presented at a meeting in Canada and reported by New Scientist magazine.
Whether violent videos make people more aggressive though is hard to prove, the magazine noted. Studies have suggested players of violent games are in fact more aggressive but have left open the question of whether the games made them that way.
The article suggests that our brains cannot distinguish simulations from reality. Since almost everyone can, in fact, distinguish the two states, there is an error at the base of the article that turns the outcome 180 degrees from what is presented.
In Psychoanalysis, we see patients 3 to 5 sessions a week; they lie on the couch in order to encourage their imagination to flourish and to allow them to slightly loosen their bonds with reality. At times, in analysis, the patient can almost feel as if they are in a waking dream. The past, their earliest relationships, their conflicts, become activated in an emotionally powerful and real-feeling way. However, despite the fact that we are hovering on the boundary between reality and fantasy, there is never any doubt about what is real and what is not.
On extraordinarily rare occasions, a patient will have difficulty differentiating reality and fantasy and some can actually lose the ability to make the distinction. When this failure of reality testing occurs, we recognize that our patient has become "psychotic within the transference."
Since the study nowhere reports that the subjects lost reality testing and were never psychotic and unaware that what they were doing was a game, the idea that this could be in any way predictive of violent behavior "in reality" is ridiculous.
Keep this in mind next time you read about how violent games and movies cause violence.
Recent Comments