In dorm rooms and bedrooms all over campus and across the country, a familiar scene unfolds every day: Groups of young (and sometimes older) adults huddled around a screen vigorously mashing their fingers into hand-held controllers.

You probably guessed it; whether it’s the next “Call of Duty,” “Halo” or “Mario Party,” video games have become a regular and almost inescapable part of life since Atari introduced “Pong” in 1972.

Though you may not realize it, when you guide your soldier through the barrage of an enemy assault, the millions of neurons in your brain are firing, too.

Kyle Mathewson, post-doctoral fellow at the Beckman Institute, has been researching the neural activity that occurs when completing a complex task, such as a video game, and the learning curve that accompanies doing something new.

“We don’t know that much still about how the brain works,” Mathewson said. “We know a lot about how the brain is working in really boring situations. So if you hear a single beep, and it’s a certain frequency, we know exactly what happens in the brain.”

But after your alarm clock goes off in the morning, the world around you is much more than beeps. Just by walking down the street, your brain is taking in and processing an enormous amount of information, just by navigating obstacles, reading signs, eavesdropping on conversations and avoiding awkward eye contact with the person coming toward you. Your brain sorts through all of these factors constantly throughout the day.

To begin to understand more complicated brain function, Mathewson, along with psychology professors Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton, measured brain waves of subjects learning to play a video game using electroencephalography, or an EEG.

For the past few decades, researchers focused on studying basic tasks completed in a laboratory, but Mathewson and the research team wanted to understand what the brain does in more complicated environments that better replicate day-to-day life. A video game, they concluded, was the best replica.

The game used in the study, “Space Fortress,” was created at the University specifically for experimentation and is somewhat like the old Atari game “Asteroids.” Although it is a far cry from modern video games, Mathewson noted this was necessary for an accurate study.

“When someone’s playing a complicated game, like “Counter-Strike,” there’s so much happening that you don’t know when they shot the bullet or got hit,” Mathewson said. “In this game, we have a lot more control over exactly when things are happening.”

The study focused on using EEGs to measure alpha waves, which are neural waves previously thought to be related only to functions like sleep and relaxation. But the study suggested that alpha waves also indicate how readily someone may learn to do a task. Specifically, they found that the more powerful the alpha waves, the less distracted a person might be.

“It’s almost like an off-switch so that you’re not paying attention to what’s going on around you, maybe so that you can focus on your thoughts or your internal feelings,” he said.

By looking at the brain waves’ pattern the first time a person played the game, researchers could predict how that person’s skills might progress in the long run.

“We did compare other different frequencies of brain waves and found that it was actually alpha (waves) … that were the most predictive of how fast people would learn to play the game,” Mathewson said.

Alpha waves were considered related to sensory processing and how the brain reacts to the outside world. This pre-existing notion is what makes the novel correlation between alpha waves and long-term improvement fascinating and somewhat unexpected. It is especially exciting that this may be a clue into how someone may perform over a longer period of time.

“No one would have predicted that the extent you have alpha waves that early in training would have any prediction on how fast you would learn,” Mathewson said. “Something about having that alpha didn’t just make them play better right then, it made them more likely to learn to play better faster.”

This neurological prediction of learning performance may one day be applied to real-life situations in which people need to learn certain tasks.

“You may be able to know something about how fast they might acquire the skills,” Mathewson said. “Maybe if you’re a coach of a sports team, at the beginning of the season you could measure the features of the people’s brains and then you would know who would need the most work and who you could spend a little less time on.”

Although this could be used to identify the highest performers, he doesn’t see that as the finding’s only purpose, noting that children’s education could be adjusted based on a student’s ability as measured by brain waves. Today, every school year is the same length for every student. But some high school students sit slumped in their desks, bored by the sluggish pace of a lesson, while others cannot match the pace of the course. If students could be organized into groups for faster- or slower-paced school years, maybe education could be adjusted to each student’s needs.

“I don’t see it as just a way to wean out the people that are the best, but also a way to target people that need a little bit more training,” Mathewson said.

Since the results of the study demonstrated the beneficial effects of boosted alpha, it seems that gaining more alpha may enhance students’ studying ability. Part of the research done at the Beckman Institute shows there are ways of accomplishing this. But Mathewson is quick to note that increasing any type of alpha does not surely increase learning and that some methods of increasing alpha are unpredictable.

Some people go to lengths such as listening to music that play beats at certain frequencies or watching flashing lights that have the same frequency as alpha waves in an attempt to improve brain function, although the method is far from proven, Mathewson said.

He added that another option people could participate in is a long-term training program, in which they are told regularly how much alpha they have over weeks or months to possibly change and improve those parts of the brain.

Although some of these ideas are speculative, a more reliable and tested way to enhance alpha waves is by being calm and relaxed.

Conversely, intently focusing on something will keep your alpha waves down.

Mathewson compared the brain to a muscle that can be improved by regular exercise.

“The reason you would get better (at these real world tasks), we would assume, is that you play some game and practice some of these skills, like responding really fast … or having to remember some items from the game for the next round. Doing that practice for a month exercises parts of the brain that do those things so they’re faster after the month,” he said.

Measuring alpha waves of players when certain tasks came up in the game could predict how well they might improve at these real-world activities. This may explain why “brain-training” tools may work for certain people. This research could be applied to improve those types of tools.

Mathewson next wants to repeat the study to confirm the findings. While we may not yet be at the point where we can determine exactly how to improve brain function and our abilities at certain tasks, researchers hope they may be able to do these types of tests in more complicated situations or games that can help us understand how the brain works day-to-day.