Nicholas Carr on the Cognitive Effects of Video Games

Grand Theft Attention: video games and the brain:

What the evidence does show is that while videogaming might make you a little better at certain jobs that demand visual acuity under stress, like piloting a jet fighter or being a surgeon, it's not going to make you generally smarter. And if you do a whole lot of it, it may well make you more distracted and less able to sustain your attention on a single task, particularly a difficult one. More broadly, we should be highly skeptical of anyone who draws on video game studies to argue that spending a lot time in front of a computer screen strengthens our attentiveness or our memory or even our ability to multitask. Taken as a whole, the evidence, including the videogaming evidence, suggests it has the opposite effect.