Patterns

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/health/19patt.html

February 19, 2008
Vital Signs
Patterns: A Video Game, an M.R.I. and What Men’s Brains Do
By ERIC NAGOURNEY

Why does it often seem that men enjoy playing video games more than women? Perhaps because they do.

A new study finds that when men play the games, a part of the brain involved in feelings of reward and addiction becomes much more activated than it does in women.

This may explain why men are more likely to report feeling addicted to video games than women are, the researchers say in an online article in The Journal of Psychiatric Research. The lead author is Fumiko Hoeft of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

For the study, the researchers took a group of 22 young volunteers — half men, half women — and had them play a game as an M.R.I. machine looked at what was happening in their brains. The study found that in the men, there was much more activity in the mesocorticolimbic system.

Given the abundance in video games of violence and other themes near and dear to many men, there may be a natural explanation for why their brains light up more. But the senior author of the study, Dr. Allan L. Reiss, said the researchers made a point of steering the game they used in a more neutral direction.

The volunteers played a simple game in which they were told only to click the images of balls they saw, with no mention of a goal.

The players soon figured out that if they kept the balls from advancing too close to a wall, they gained ground. Both the men and the women did well — but the men did a lot better and appeared more motivated to acquire terrain.