No matter who you are or where you're from, people all over the world love to play games. Today, many people love spending their time playing video games. Whether it's variety games at your favorite online casino, grand sci-fi online gaming battles, or your favorite fantasy role-playing game, there are all kinds of gaming options for you to enjoy. 

Many people primarily think of gaming as a way to escape and have fun, but did you know that many games also help you improve your critical thinking and problem-solving skills?

Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of gaming on your brain and how you can more consciously use video games to improve your cognitive abilities.

The Benefits of Gaming on Your Brain

People understand that play is important for developing brains, particularly in children. Play can help people learn various skills, including attention, creativity, language, memory, math, and social skills, and it also plays an important part in people's emotional development. You can even play games to improve critical thinking. 

But does the same apply to video games?

It turns out that gaming does offer you many benefits, including better critical thinking and problem-solving skills. HealthyGamer, an organization founded and run by Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia, MD MPH, published the article “Video Games Make You Smarter: Backed up by Research.” This article shares a variety of studies that demonstrate how video games can make you smarter through the improvement of various skills, including some areas that are less obviously connected to traditional intelligence than others.

Here are some of the ways gaming can positively influence your brain that were highlighted in the HealthyGamer article.

Improves Focus, Attention, Response Time, and Predictive Accuracy

A study titled “Learning, Attentional Control, and Action Video Games” found that action video games improved attentional control, or more simply put, helped players better focus on specific objects in the game world. The study also found that gamers had faster and more accurate responses, although this was because the gamers were more able to predict a specific outcome accurately.

Increases Gray Matter in the Brain