NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

Super Mario 64 is not an easy game to navigate. In it, the player works through a labyrinth of different levels accessed through portal-paintings in a central hub of Peach's castle. Its mechanics and layout are complex enough that groups of players have spent years competing with one another to find the quickest way through the game's mazes and challenges. To beat it, players have to use their spatial memory to remember how to navigate through the game's stages levels.

What they found was that people in the groups that played Super Mario 64, in both studies, had an increase in grey matter in their hippocampus. The results, West was careful to point out, don't mean that Super Mario 64 is a cure for Alzheimer's but rather that there's a realistic chance that playing games that test our spatial memory could help preserve or even restore grey matter in healthy adults as they age, helping cut down their risks of neurological decay later in life, something he calls a "cognitive intervention."

"At this point, we simply have a proof of concept," West said. "We don't really have the data to show that this is the case yet." [...]

In clinical settings, advances in video game technology could also make researching and applying these techniques much easier. Roger Anguera is the director of interactive media at Neuroscape, a neuroscience center at the University of California, San Francisco, that focuses on using "cutting edge technologies" to assess people's brains. Anguera's specialty is virtual reality, which is widely seen as the future of video games. One of the most practical applications of VR, Anguera says, is in simulations and games that precisely target and train the parts of the brain that West's Super Mario 64 studies focused on. In one simulator, Anguera uses VR and motion-tracking to create an immersive VR "neighborhood" that patients can walk around in and observe. The subject is given 10 minutes to explore the neighborhood, taking note of landmarks and "errand" locations, like a coffee shop or post office. Then, Anguera spawns their digital avatar in a different location and asks them to complete a task, like picking up a coffee or delivering a letter, and then tracks how efficient their path is around the environment, adjusting the complexity of assignments and neighborhoods to test the subject's recollection.

"The game will constantly adapt its difficulty to how well you're doing, so that it's always pushing you," Anguera said, but unlike Super Mario 64, it allows researchers to control every variable and tailor the subject's experiences, keeping them challenged but not overtaxed in order to improve the brain's plasticity and vigor. Neuroscape works with patients and participants of all ages, but the core idea behind its therapies could have dramatic effects on how we deal with age. Dr. Adam Gazzaley, Neuroscape's founder and executive director, said that he sees interactive experiences like Anguera's closed-loop, adaptable video games as a way to change our brains for the better without relying on molecular-based therapies like drugs.

"We think it's going to be an entirely new type of medicine," Gazzaley said. Experiential treatments, he said, are ideally preventative care rather than cures but, if applied correctly as we age, could drastically increase our quality of life.

"All of it is on the table as far as I'm concerned," Gazzaley said. "Depression, dementia, the host of cognitive impairments that are associated with aging as well as the other factors of purpose and loneliness also have potential for solutions with this approach."

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