TED talk outlines how action games help your brain

Call of Duty Black Ops 2 akimbo pistols

How's your brain? Is it full of thoughts of the weekend and exciting upcoming things like DINNER and CHRISTMAS? Good, you might be pleased to know that thanks to action games like Call of Duty, your brain is probably better at juggling multiple thoughts of dinner and Christmas better than the average non-gamer brain. It's also good at tracking happy and sad children as they bounce around a circular playground, and is better at picking grey objects from a grey background. We can thank Gears of War for that. Cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier can do a much better job of explaining it all than I, so I'll give up the stage to her TED performance, which you'll find embedded below.

You can find plenty more talks on all sorts of topics on the TED site . For a more amusing turn, TED has been perfectly parodied by The Onion as well.

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.