The worse your eyesight is, the more computer games you should play?

You may have some friends around you who wear glasses that look like the bottom of a glass bottle because of playing games; you may have also heard of many examples of "going blind due to playing games all night long"; even you yourself, after happily masturbating or watching your butt all night, will instantly have a little worry about "going blind".

But the opposite may be true: playing certain computer games can make your eyesight sharper, even better than that of ordinary people. Of course, the premise is that you don't really stay up all night to kill monsters, and the games you play have a little technical content.

The game gives you clairvoyance

Daphne Bavelier, a brain neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, conducted an experiment in which she divided the college students participating in the experiment into three groups. One group played action games such as "Call of Duty" and "Unreal Tournament", one group played non-action games such as "The Sims", and one group did not play games. Those who played games had to play every day and ensure 10 to 15 hours of gaming time per week.

One month later, the Call of Duty group had a 43% higher "contrast sensitivity" than before, while the Sims group and the non-game group had no change. The 43% increase in sensitivity not only means that these action game players can see a smaller E in the vision test, but they can also see more clearly in dim places.

When we talk about vision, it actually includes four abilities: visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, color perception and effective field of view. Contrast sensitivity refers to the ability to distinguish subtle changes in the same gray background, such as whether you can see the road conditions clearly when driving at night, and whether you can see the words on the printed matter clearly.

Normal people, that is, people who don't play action games, generally have contrast sensitivity within the normal threshold, but it decreases with age. But action game players have contrast sensitivity beyond the average person, they are better able to distinguish different shades of gray, can see small text without a magnifying glass, and can see the road more clearly when driving at night.

In addition to improved contrast sensitivity, Bafilia said that action game players also surpass ordinary people in other visual abilities, such as being able to track multiple moving objects at the same time and pay almost equal attention to them.

Rejuvenation by shooting

In addition to turning ordinary people into clairvoyants, playing games can also help treat certain eye diseases, such as amblyopia and cataracts, as another professor, Daphne Maurer, of McMaster University in Canada, has demonstrated through experiments.

Amblyopia is usually caused by the failure of one eye to develop normally. In the absence of organ disease, the vision of a single eye of an amblyopic patient cannot reach above 0.6. This is an eye disease that begins in early childhood. 3-4 out of every 100 children are affected by amblyopia. Children wearing glasses with one side covered by a black cloth on the street are often children with amblyopia. Their normal eye is covered with a black cloth so that the amblyopic eye can be used more, gradually improving vision and balancing the vision of both eyes.

The five extremely poor siblings from Liangshan County, Shandong Province, all have congenital defects, four of them have serious vision problems and suffer from severe amblyopia.

The efficiency of this black cloth covering method is very low, and every 120 hours of covering can improve about 0.1 degree, which is one line on the vision chart. But in a project funded by the National Eye Institute, researchers asked 20 amblyopic people aged 15 to 61 to play games for 40 hours, 1-2 hours a day. After one month, the visual resolution of the subjects, whether playing action games or ordinary games, has improved, with an average improvement of 1.5 lines, or 0.15 degrees.

Playing computer games also has a miraculous effect on cataracts. This kind of vision damage caused by lens opacity can cause sequelae even after surgery. Many patients after surgery cannot read small words, track moving objects, and even have difficulty recognizing faces. Daphne Moller of McMaster University found 6 such patients aged 19 to 31 who had undergone cataract surgery and asked them to play first-person shooter games for 40 hours in a month. As a result, their vision improved by 1-2 lines of the eye chart.

Among them, action games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 have the best effect on improving vision in patients after cataract surgery, but Moeller did not figure out whether it was the action or violence of the game that brought this effect to gamers. In any case, non-action games such as Tetris, which are neither violent nor exciting, have basically no effect on improving vision.

Your brain can still be saved.

This experimental result, which sounds like a rumor in the circle of friends, is actually very reasonable when you look into it. In addition to being affected by the eye itself, human vision is also controlled by the visual nerve, and playing games is an upgrade to this part of the nerve control.

What you see is not all the signals received by your eyes, but the result of the brain's screening. Your brain decides what you can see and what you can't see. Even if some images have entered your retina, if your brain does not pay enough attention to them, you will be "blind". Playing games can train our brains, enhance their ability to process visual signals, and notice more details, especially those moving objects that non-gamers usually don't pay enough attention to.

When gamers stare at the computer screen to fight zombies, they need to concentrate for a long time and pay attention to all moving objects in the picture. Any movement may be an enemy attack. Action games often have high-definition and low-contrast pictures, which means that players have to work hard to find details in the not very bright color blocks.

A player playing a first-person shooter game.

In this situation, people are often in a highly tense state, and they will use their visual system to the extreme: their visual acuity will be significantly improved, their field of vision will be expanded, and they can automatically track several targets at the same time. The large amount of adrenaline and dopamine secreted makes the brain more plastic. Once adapted to this rhythm, the brain will maintain this visual ability that was originally only available under tense conditions and apply it to daily life.

But as to which aspect of the game stimulates people's visual potential, researchers have not yet come to an answer. These games that make people clairvoyant have common characteristics: they all have complex visual images and scenes; they all have a set of stimulus-feedback patterns to allow players to learn perception and become addicted; they are all high-speed, fast-paced games that keep people in a state of tension; they all have a lot of violent elements... It is difficult to tell which part of the game triggers the switch and pushes the human visual system to its limit - even the violent elements in the game may play a role.

But in any case, this discovery overturns a traditional ophthalmological concept: the visual system of adults is not plastic. For many years, people have believed that the human visual system has been fixed after adulthood, and there is no other way to change the vision of adults except using lens adjustment or eye surgery. However, the effect of action games on vision is still effective for adults, which means that our brain is more flexible and easier to shape than we think.

Professor Daphne Bavelier, who first started the game vision experiment, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver: "This series of experiments shows that the adult brain is still plastic and we can still use training to allow the brain to overcome certain sensory defects."

Better eyesight is not the only benefit of playing computer games. Gamers often have other extraordinary abilities, such as high concentration and quick reaction. In another experiment conducted by Daphne, she found that people who often play action games have more efficient parietal cortex, frontal lobe and anterior cingulate gyrus than ordinary people. These three parts control the direction of attention, maintenance of attention and allocation of attention respectively. At the same time, this group of people also reacted abnormally quickly to sudden accidents in simulated car driving, which means they are more likely to avoid traffic accidents.

But this does not mean that the more computer games you play, the better your eyesight will be - all the subjects in the experiment did not play games for more than 2 hours a day. Staring at the computer screen for a long time will still cause trouble to your eyes, such as headaches, blurred vision, myopia, etc. The little help that shooting games give your brain will not help you see the last row of the eye chart after playing games for more than ten hours all night.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.