Quote: “A still-unpublished study from his lad compared the cognitive impact in young people of twenty minutes of running on a treadmill with twenty minutes of playing sports-style video games at a similar intensity. Running improved test scores immediately afterward. Playing the video games did not.”
Questions: What made them even think to compare running with video games? Why was there a marked difference between the two? Aren’t you basically performing the same actions and movements in both?
Comments: I thought the comparison between these two forms of ‘exercising’ was pretty interesting. That someone would even think to look at the similarities and differences between the two struck me as kind of weird. The results make sense, though – you can imagine that the negative effects necessarily associated with playing video games could outweigh the positive ones of aerobic exercise. In addition, the exercise that you are probably getting through video games wouldn’t be as intensive as simply running on a treadmill, because you’d have to be stopping in between screens, and focusing on the gameplay rather than the workout.
