Level Up

Would your school benefit from a club where kids can play video games? Matthew Barr, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, thinks so. Barr recently asked 16 college students to play 14 hours of video games over eight weeks to study how it affected their brains. He discovered that the activity helped strengthen neurons—specialized nerve cells—in the brain related to resourcefulness, adaptability, and communication. Even when students played single-player games, their social skills improved as long as they were talking to other players at the same time. “Playing video games is like exercising your brain,” says Barr. “The more you practice using the brain, the stronger it gets.”