A very serious video game addiction in South Korea

I just returned from a week spent talking with therapists and educational specialists in Seoul, South Korea.  As in visits to many places in the world, it is exciting to see the enthusiasm that therapists have for applying our brain training tools to help children and adults who struggle—even while they have not really been adapted to meet the special challenges that an arise for an individual operating in a language that is so different from ours.  They’ve seen it work, over and over again; more than 30,000 children have already been trained using Posit Science and Scientific Learning brain training software. Still, in the nation of Korea, brain training tools cannot begin to impact a special national problem that is altering the brains of millions of Korean children, for the worse.  That problem is an addiction to computer gaming.  “Oh sure, you old fogey”, I can hear some of you say.  “How can playing computer games be a true addiction?” The government of Korea estimates that about 680,000 children between the ages of 10 and 18 are “addicted” to videogames.  This is clearly a gross UNDERestimate.  The average Korean child in this age range spends more than 20 hours/week playing action videogames on a computer or phone.  In the US, 2 hours/day is argued to be the addiction threshold.  By that standard, more than half of Korean children can’t live within them.  Since this problem is even worse in male than in female children, the substantial major...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain Science Featured Video games Source Type: blogs