Decease… Death… Die…

Adult brains are also better wired to notice errors in decision-making. While adults performed tasks that required the quick response of pushing buttons, their brains sent out a signal when a hasty mistake was made. Before 80 milliseconds had passed, adult brains had noticed the blunder, but teenage brains didn’t notice any slip-up.

An area of the teenager’s brain that is fairly well-developed early on, though, is the nucleus accumbens, or the area of the brain that seeks pleasure and reward. In imaging studies that compared brain activity when the subject received a small, medium or large reward, teenagers exhibited exaggerated responses to medium and large rewards compared to children and adults. When presented with a small reward, the teenagers’ brains hardly fired at all in comparison to adults and children.

So what does it mean to have an undeveloped prefrontal cortex in conjunction with a strong desire for reward? As it happens, this combination could explain a lot of stereotypical teenage behavior.

So, the area of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, and guilt is underused by teenagers.

The second video is “Empathy in adolescence: do video games produce violent behavior?”

Ed Bradley: “It is 360 degrees of murder and mayhem. Slickly produced, technologically brilliant, and exceedingly violent. And now it’s at the center of a civil lawsuit involving the murders of three men in the small town of Fayette, Alabama. They were gunned down by eighteen-year-old Devin Moore, who had played Grand Theft Auto day and night for months.”

Attorney Jack Thompson, a long time crusader against video game violence, is bringing the suit.

– You said that Devin Moore shot three people in the head because of the video game?

– What we’re saying is that Devin Moore in effect trained to do what he did. He was given a murder simulator, he bought it as a minor, he played it hundreds of hours, which is primarily a cop-killing game. It is our theory which we think we can prove to a jury in Alabama that but for the video game training, he would not have done what he did.

Along the way Moore had grabbed a set of car keys. He went out the door to the parking lot, jumped into a police cruiser, and took off. It all took less than a minute, and three men were dead.

– The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye in that police station, and that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in the police car, just as the game itself trained him to do.

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