All the better to see you with
Sitting on your backside every night playing video games might have an upside.
Sure you'll no doubt gain a few pounds, put at least you'll be able to see the small print in the takeaway menu better.
Games with lots of action, such as first-person-shooters, increase a player's real-world vision, according to research in Nature Neuroscience.
The ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray has long been thought to be an attribute of the human visual system that cannot be improved.
But not now - Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has discovered very practiced action gamers become 58 per cent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast.
Normally this kind of difference is only available through glasses or eye surgery.
Bavelier found playing your Xbox or Wii trains your brain to process visual information more efficiently - and contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well a person can see.
This builds on her earlier work which showed games decrease visual crowding and increases visual attention.
So maybe the next generation will not need glasses. Just a fork-lift truck to move them. And they'll have an insatiable blood-lust.
Weird Science Factoid: The average person expels flatulence 14 times each day. Just eight to go today then.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
Has it also been proven that gaming results in humans forgeting language skills and resorting to grunts as a means of communication -especially in tbd's?