“If you sit in front of the TV playing video games for too long, you’ll kill your eyesight!” I’m sure all you geeks out there have heard this hundreds of times while growing up -- I know I did. But within the past year there was a study done that proves good old mom and dad wrong.
It turns out that playing first person shooter games can actually improve your ability to pick out small details. Take that, parentals!
A study was published in the journal "Psychological Science," which describes an experiment where ten college students who did not regularly play video games were given eye tests, then spent 30 hours training on various first person shooter games. After the 30 hours were up, their eyes were tested again and their vision was found to be sharper than it was previously.
Another study was done where a group of students were broken into two groups -- one that played shooting games and another which played the Sims games. After nine weeks and 50 hours of their respective video games, the students who played the shooting games were able to discern the difference between close shades of grey.
Of course, this doesn’t work if you have a physical problem with your eyesight. But many of our eye troubles are neurological, and therefore can be helped or overcome with the right sort of training.
Yet it is possible to strain your eyes if you sit too close to the television for too long. Though it won’t affect your eyesight long term, you might get headaches or blurred vision. There are also some health risks from spending your days in front of a video game console rather than going outside and exercising.
But in the end, your spatial resolution (which is the fancy term for your ability to see small details in a cluttered space) will improve because the brain adapts to what you train it to do. For once, it’s good to hear some of the benefits of being a geek.
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