OK, am I missing something here? According to this study reported in the Guardian Unlimited Observer, playing video games stimulates different areas of the brain than doing simple arithmetic equations.
Um ... yes? so? your point being?
I honestly don't see how this means that children are "halting the process of brain development". There is no chance in the world that everything children do will stimulate all portions of their brain all the time. I can't imagine that watching television, for example, or listening to music can provide all that much stimulus to the frontal lobes -- in fact, Prof. Kawashima even notes that you don't get a lot of frontal lobe stimulation from listening to music.
So what is he proposing? That parents have their children do nothing but math problems in their spare time?
To be sure, I understand that the results he found were unexpected -- although I'm not sure why; it seems pretty obvious on its face that there isn't a lot of cogitation going on during most computer games. I just don't understand why it's suddenly not acceptable (in Japan, of all places, which surely has some of the most violent media in the world and yet has a remarkably peaceful society) to allow children to do different things that stimulate different parts of their brain.
And I dread what will happen should the ideologues in His Fraudulency's administration chance across these results. (No fear of His Fraudulency himself running across them, of course; that would require reading. Foreign newspapers or [GASP!] the Heathen Internet, at that.)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
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