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Video games help focus on fine detail From: The Australian February 13, 2007 12:00AM Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size Print Email Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us Add to Facebook Add to Kwoff Add to Myspace Add to Newsvine What are these? PLAYING video games that involve high levels of visual action on a daily basis can improve your ability to see fine detail, a study shows. Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US have found that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month sharpened their ability to identify letters by about 20 per cent. "Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the university. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

PLAYING video games that involve high levels of visual action on a daily basis can improve your ability to see fine detail, a study shows. Researchers at the University of Rochester in the US have found that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month sharpened their ability to identify letters by about 20 per cent. "Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the university.

These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it," she says. "That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

And while the researchers found a strong relationship between video games and lower grade point averages, playing video games did not appear to affect math skills and had a positive relationship with visual-spatial skills. These skills – in which a child learns visually, by thinking in pictures and images – are considered the “training wheels” for performance in science, technology, engineering and math.

We know that music can alter your mood

. Films have been using musical scores for years to create the right mood for a scene. At times you hardly notice the music at all but you are very receptive to the mood being conveyed. So can we use music to put us in a "productive" mood?

Research seems to support such a claim. For example, a trial where 75 out of 256 workers at a large retail company were issued with personal stereos to wear at work for four weeks showed a 10% increase in productivity for the headphone wearers. Other similar research conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois found a 6.3% increase when compared with the no music control group.