Covered in The New Scientist News is a story about Klaus Mathiak at the University of Aachen in Germany, who conducted an interesting study.

Thirteen men had their brain’s scanned by MRI, while they played video games. During violent periods in the game, there were definite shifts in the parts of the brain that were “lit up” vs the non-violent periods of play.

These findings matched findings when subjects were exposed to simulated violence or imagining aggressive encounters.

Since it’s we can’t monitor the brain in real live violent encounters it’s difficult to say that the brain sees video games violence as real violence, but it would seem that way, to some extent. I don’t think that this study links video game violence to players later committing real world violence either, but it would appear that video games might be a reasonable way of training the mind to deal with real-world situations. (Although you’d better back up that some physical training as well.)

Hat-tip to Question Technology