There was a lot of talk about the potential of video games to affect the health of an older person's brain back when Brain Age first came out. Now thanks to the stimulus bill, researchers at NC State and Georgia Tech are taking a more serious look at the power video games might have to keep elderly brains exercised - but they're not studying Brain Age.
Instead the study is focusing on the Wii game Boom Blox, because its "novelty, attentional demand and social interaction may be manipulated by the researchers." The study's ultimate goal is to figure out first what characters a game might possess that could give your grandma's brain a good workout, then figure out how to encourage developers to design a game that would deliberately help old people think better.
This is seriously cool stuff, especially when you consider that a lot of retirement and nursing homes now host Wii systems anyway. It would also require teaching old people that more games exist than Wii Sports, which appears to be a long-overdue lesson in some houses.
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