Scientists Show Aging Zerg Rushes Your Brain Earlier Than You Think
So when will your leet video gaming skills start to deteriorate? If you’re reading this instead of screwing around on Instagram, they probably already have, along with your response times in general. Sorry, but it’s all downhill from here. Joseph J. Thompson, Mark R. Blair, and Andrew J. Henrey from Simon Fraser University recently studied the response times of people from adolescence to middle age using, obviously, StarCraft II, and found that the peak age for mental reaction times is a lot earlier than most people think. Or, in the blunt terms of their findings: “cognitive decline begins around 24.” The scientist recruited more than 3,000 StarCraft II players of varying skill levels between 16 and 44 and studied logs of their games. StarCraft II, they found, was the right fit for their experiment because mastering the intense real-time strategy game requires both quick thinking and quick physical reaction times. The results were not pretty for older gamers. The researchers measured what they described as looking-doing latency, the time from when a player