The Gamer’s Brain Is Not Playing Around: Action Video Games Boost “Where” Pathway Connectivity, Says Study
Monday, April 7, 2025.
Turns out your kid fragging zombies at 3 a.m. might be quietly reorganizing their visual processing system.
A neuroimaging study published in Brain Sciences has revealed that action video game players—those FPS-twitch-reflex, split-second-strategy types—have significantly enhanced structural and functional connectivity in the dorsal visual stream, also known as the “where” pathway of the brain.
That’s the part that helps you locate your coffee mug, catch a frisbee, or aim a plasma rifle in a 360-degree combat arena. Tomato, tomahto.
Researchers found increased dialogue (functional connectivity) and stronger highways (structural connectivity) between the left superior occipital gyrus and the left superior parietal lobule—regions crucial for tracking motion and guiding spatial attention.
In gamer terms, it’s the brain circuitry that makes you better at not dying.
A Tale of Two Visual Streams
The human brain—bless its gelatinous little soul—divides visual labor between two main pathways: the dorsal stream and the ventral stream.
The dorsal stream, a.k.a. “where,” shoots upward from the primary visual cortex to the parietal lobe. It’s your internal GPS, good for tracking moving objects and planning actions in space.
The ventral stream, or “what,” moseys on down to the temporal lobe, helping you recognize faces, identify bananas, and admire the subtle differences between Helvetica and Arial.
Together, they give your eyes meaning, depth, and the ability to keep you from walking into traffic while texting.
Why Action Gamers? Why Now?
Lead author Kyle Cahill and colleagues wondered if the demands of fast-paced video games—rapid scanning, twitch reactions, decision-making under pressure—might stretch the dorsal stream in useful ways.
And so, like any group of respectable neuroscientists armed with an MRI machine and enough grant money, they gathered 28 gamers and 19 non-gamers to compare their brains.
Gamers (mostly male, mostly 20 or 21 years old) clocked in at five or more hours per week on action titles like First-Person Shooters, Real-Time Strategy, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, and Battle Royale games.
The control group? Let’s just say their thumbs weren’t getting much cardio—fewer than 30 minutes a week of gaming over the past two years.
What the MRI Saw
Every participant had their brain scanned with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while researchers zoomed in on the dorsal and ventral streams.
They used fancy software (DSI Studio 2022.08.0, for the completists among us) to map how the brain’s wiring looked and how its regions talked to each other during a moving-dot discrimination task—basically a high-speed “which way is this dot cloud drifting?” challenge.
Gamers not only performed faster on this task but also showed increased functional connectivity between those key dorsal stream nodes. And the structural connectivity—meaning the actual axon highways between regions—was more robust too. In short: their “where” pathway wasn’t just active. It was fortified.
Structural vs. Functional: A Quick (But Hopefully Not Boring) Primer
Structural connectivity is the physical stuff—white matter tracts, axons, the actual roads between cities in your brain.
Functional connectivity is the traffic—patterns of coordination and information flow, even between regions not physically wired together.
The action gamers had more of both. More roads. More traffic. Less hesitation when asked, “Which way did the dots go?”
Causation or Correlation: The Classic Neuroscience Shrug
Of course, there’s the classic chicken-and-joystick question.
Do action video games cause enhanced dorsal stream connectivity, or are people with superior visual-motor wiring naturally drawn to these games?
Maybe they were born ready for combat. Maybe Halo made them that way. The study can’t say for sure.
But the evidence is intriguing. As the researchers wrote:
“These connectivity changes in the dorsal visual stream underpin the superior performance of action video gamers compared to nongamers in tasks requiring rapid and accurate vision-based decision-making.”
Which is a more polite way of saying: your brain, when gaming hard, is doing squats.
Final Thoughts: Is Gaming Mental Gymnastics?
There’s something undeniably poetic about the idea that high-stakes digital warfare—dodging bullets in Call of Duty, rallying troops in StarCraft, pulling off 360-no-scopes in Fortnite—is not just time-killing escapism but might be reshaping the scaffolding of your mind.
Of course, before we rush out and install PlayStations in classrooms, we should remember: correlation is not destiny.
Brains are plastic, but they’re also tricky, mysterious beasts. Still, it’s worth noting that not all screen time is created equal.
As for the parents worried that gaming is melting their child’s brain—well, maybe it’s melting it into something faster.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
Reference
Cahill, K., Jordan, T., & Dhamala, M. (2024). Connectivity in the Dorsal Visual Stream Is Enhanced in Action Video Game Players. Brain Sciences, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14020234