Saving Education Through Games Addiction

Indeed, action video games have the potential to be used in the treatment of ADHD, just like Ritalin. "There's no evidence to suggest that playing video games causes ADHD. There is evidence to suggest that being given video games can reduce your attention in the classroom - but so does being given a pony, though no-one's done studies on ponies. The link is that children with ADHD have trouble with attention and one hypothesis is that because there's insufficient dopamine being generated in their rewards system. That's why we give them Ritalin, as it actually increases their stimulus-specific dopamine uptake. A video game can sort of do the same thing, and doesn't involve drugs." It's not just pupils with ADHD that could benefit from this Ritalin, of course - as a general cognitive enhancer it improves healthy people's ability to attend to stimuli as well.

Howard-Jones does advocate using games in the classroom, but is aware that the mechanisms employed thus far haven't always worked "Much of this learning game activity has been somewhat of a failure" he says. He thinks we need different sorts of games to turn this unique learning power into something useful and his research is focused on producing those sorts of games and testing them in classroom situations.

Small, bright screens are superbly good at blocking melatonin secretion, the chemical that makes you sleepy. So using technology, particularly games, near bedtime is going to disturb your sleep and prevent learning.

So Howard-Jones doesn't just advocate using games in the classroom; his research also provides lessons for how teaching should change on the basis of what gaming has shown us about the chemical pathways in the brain. Notably, dopamine release is maximised not by certain rewards or by wholly unexpected rewards, but by uncertain rewards, which produce a long dopamine tail from the moment of anticipated reward. "That may explain why a lot of situations in gambling and gaming generate a lot of motivation." Youngsters given the choice between a certain reward and a gamble that, on average, produces the same reward are more likely to go for the gamble - and boys much more than girls.

It seems strange that we'd have this attraction to uncertain reward; one would think that the brain would orient attention towards certain reward rather than uncertain reward, but Howard-Jones can point to an evolutionary explanation. "To explain something in evolutionary terms, we often have to go back to prehistoric practices hunter-gathering. Foraging behaviour can be totally modelled by the reward response, using neuro-computational modelling. On the other hand hunting means you have to sustain attention for a long time and the outcomes are very, very uncertain. We also find that this mechanism is more present in males than in females."

On this basis, Howard-Jones advocates the reintroduction of uncertainty into the classroom. "I do emphasise that is not something unnatural, it's everywhere. Everywhere you go, apart from possibly school, your rewards depend on not just your ability, they also depend on chance. That's important for your motivation." It's also important that it's not determined by the whims of an individual teacher; "It's very important that the randomness arises from some technological source, nothing to do with the source and their whims." Notably, unlike the current certain system, which produces uncertain results, Howard-Jones says that "during a learning game, we can predict learning."

Of course, there are apparent problems with this fundamental alteration of the structure of education. Notably, given the issues society already faces with addictive behaviours, encouraging them in the classroom seems problematic. "One of the things that people seem anxious about is that we're turning kids into pathological gamblers because suddenly they're not necessarily getting the point, they're winning the chance of getting the point. What we're forgetting is that real life has all sorts of uncertainty in it and what we've done in schools is try to take out all the uncertainty between the learning and the reward relationship. And that's something we've done because we've got a moral and just feeling about it, that it's right. But the neuroscience tells us something else - if they know something, they should only have the chance of winning the point."

Howard-Jones refuses to be drawn on how the increased certainty in schools over the past twenty years has affected education. Notably, given the discoveries of boy's preferences for gambling and uncertainty, the increased certainty in school curriculum's over the past 20 year might explain the increasing disparity between educational results for boys and girls, compared to the arbitrary and unjust days of older school systems. But Howard-Jones refuses to speculate on such matters.

What he will say is that there's simple advice about what he calls "digital hygiene" - that is, healthy use of computers, technology and games. Firstly, he talks about sleep deprivation and how it's connected to learning and memory. If your sleep is disrupted, simply put, learning is disrupted. Small, bright screens are superbly good at blocking melatonin secretion, the chemical that makes you sleepy. So using technology, particularly games, near bedtime is going to disturb your sleep and prevent learning. This is difficult, he jokes "as teenagers are biologically connected to their mobiles." He recommends that to improve recollection and sleep, we should stick to offline everyday wisdom - choose activites with obvious benefits, moderate those activities, try to restrict total screentime to two hours a day and schedule screentime so that it's healthy.

By turning the negative compulsion aspects of gaming into positives for education and providing a convincing critique of education from the point of view of neuroscience, Dr Howard-Jones is certainly striving to make positive use of gaming. Yet, It's not clear whether the wider gaming community will accept his conclusions on the addictive nature of games themselves, central to his educational thesis.

For more information on Dr Howard-Jones' research, visit neuroeducational.net or read his book Introducing Neuroeducational Research.