Games victim of bad CNN headline
(Visited 10184 times) Game talk
Sep 022010
There it was on the front page of CNN today: “Games delay, then speed dementia?”
Only, of course, you click through to the article, and the headline is different: Brain exercises delay, speed up dementia?.
What sort of brain exercises? Well, everything:
Activities that counted toward being “cognitively active” included going to a museum, watching television, listening to radio, reading newspapers, reading magazines, reading books, and playing games.
Grr.
This stuff does matter — plenty of people will read just the headline, and move on. Why doesn’t it say “going to museums delays then speeds up dementia”?
16 Responses to “Games victim of bad CNN headline”
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“Cognitively active,” eh? So the only way to avoid dementia is to be a vegetable?
I’m sorry, what where we talking about?
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Look at the research that correlates the number of years of education to the chance of developing dementia. That’s interesting. Makes me wish I’d gone on to a PhD.
Also provides better motivation to stay on at school than any projected earnings graph.
This stuff ticks me off but eventually, all politicians will be gamers and their media lackeys will report differently out of the same self interest that guides them today. So one hopes.
@Bhagpuss Everybody’s developing some level of dementia (if, of course, they live long enough).
They “stole” the article from the Discovery News website. And for those who don’t get it, here’s how it goes. Brain training (reading brain-challenging materials, playing chess etc.) delays the visible symptoms of dementia. The disease, though, still develops and, when the symptoms begin to appear, they show up faster than they normally would (because they’re all hidden until the moment they’re visible).
Watching today’s television programs or listening to the radio is not brain training. Quite the opposite…
@Bhagpuss, that doesn’t surprise me much. There’s a decent amount of research that seems to implicate a lack of novel experience and new learning as being a large part of even normal cognitive decay. Once you’re over 30 you tend to fall into a bit of a rut where you’re repeating the same set of skills over and over again. The parts of the hippocampus responsible for neurogenesis start shutting down, and it’s all downhill from there. Spending more of your life in a novel stimuli rich environment where you’re constantly learning new things slows that process down quite a bit.
If the underlying theories on that are correct, staying in higher education longer isn’t so much the important bit, it’s learning new things and being exposed to new concepts/ideas/experiences that does it. You can do that even without a school setting, provided you’ve got the dedication for it. It’s certainly a *lot* easier in a structured academic environment to be sure, though.
@ Derek, Politicians are gamers. They play the biggest game of them all, politics. It’s the RMT politicians ya gotta look out for.
maybe because very few if none 20 something “museum” worker/director is running a rss blog feed that talks about getting vc money and making billions from networked clicking and gambling activities.;)
If politics is the art of getting funded to preserve the status quo, then it is the game where you trade-off shannon entropy for gibbs/boltzman entropy. As the campaign contributor, I give you money to make me comfortably uninformed.
Think of it as DementiaCraft. I know it makes me mad. 🙂
From what I’ve gathered, the thrust of the research is that brain exercise helps dementia patients function at a higher cognitive level… up to the point where nothing helps, at which time they rapidly decline to the same baseline as other dementia patients. Delaying the onset of the symptoms means that when they can no longer be delayed, functioning declines more sharply.
It doesn’t mean games and other brain exercise are in any way harmful; on the contrary, they help extend the amount of time the patient is functional. It just means that no amount of brain exercise is a magic bullet, and we would be well-served to research dementia as any other disease, not as an unavoidable consequence of aging. There are tantalizing leads in the field of life extension that could make the issue of maintaining optimum brain health more important than ever.
Standard disclaimer; I have an active interest in medicine and human biology, but I’m strictly a layman. Please forgive me if my understanding is oversimplified.
I see so many news titles like this, not just negative ones related to video games, but titles that are just misleading to their content.
I’m forced to agree. Headline writing is a profession and an art, but the state of the art seems to be in decline in the digital age. It’s as if the writers don’t much care whether you find the headline accurate or informative, as long as they rack up another ad impression.
LOL.. as if this GENERATION of “journalists writers” FINDS MORE VALUE in GAMING the world to get an HIGH SCORE, rather than “providing the maybe dull truth/facts” of reality?
With all the attention to be to top google results for R….who would have tHUNK! it? lol;)
maybe the top google result for R should be Responsible?…yeah i know so an alien thought. RELEVANT perhaps….?
ART?..mmm. top A i get is AMAZON or APPLE…neither has much to do with the art or artist. In fact they are only the middlemen.
so much for meta newness…:)
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