Do you want to safeguard your memory as you age?
Play computer games! Especially first-person shooters, like a game from the “Doom” series or “Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 or 4.” That’s from researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands. They found people who played for at least 5 hours a week out-performed non-gamers on tasks related to working memory. The reason? Because first-person shooters require players to react quickly, adapt on the fly, and pay attention to both visuals and sounds, all of which grow areas of the brain linked to perception, visualization, and language. And the more those areas are stimulated, the faster your synapses fire, which helps protect and improve memory storage and retrieval.