By Ko Dong-hwan
Playing "Go," a board game created in China more than 2,500 years ago, improves cerebral function, sources reported, Sunday.
The discovery was confirmed by a research team led by Korean professor Kwon Jun-su from the Neuropsychiatry Department of Seoul National University Hospital.
Kwon's study was helped by 17 professional Go players (mean age 17, average years of playing 12.4) and 16 ordinary people having the same mean age.
After both groups took sufficient rest, their brains were studied using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The imaging system shows brain cell activity rates by detecting changes in the number of hemoglobin which carries oxygen throughout cerebral blood flow.
The result found that the professional Go players' brains had control of emotional and intuitive assessments that were more linked to each other, allowing them to perform a task in a more synchronized fashion.
Such a performance boost was derived from a more active "amygdale" and "orbitofrontal cortex," parts of the brain responsible for emotional and intuitive cognition, as well as the "parietal lobe" that calculates spatial data.
"The recent discovery proposes a new way of looking at human brains," said Prof. Kwon. "It supports the already existing hypothesis that repetitive, long-term tasks alter the brain's functional foundation."
Kwon's study was published in the October edition of "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience."
Playing "Go," a board game created in China more than 2,500 years ago, improves cerebral function, sources reported, Sunday.
The discovery was confirmed by a research team led by Korean professor Kwon Jun-su from the Neuropsychiatry Department of Seoul National University Hospital.
Kwon's study was helped by 17 professional Go players (mean age 17, average years of playing 12.4) and 16 ordinary people having the same mean age.
After both groups took sufficient rest, their brains were studied using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The imaging system shows brain cell activity rates by detecting changes in the number of hemoglobin which carries oxygen throughout cerebral blood flow.
The result found that the professional Go players' brains had control of emotional and intuitive assessments that were more linked to each other, allowing them to perform a task in a more synchronized fashion.
Such a performance boost was derived from a more active "amygdale" and "orbitofrontal cortex," parts of the brain responsible for emotional and intuitive cognition, as well as the "parietal lobe" that calculates spatial data.
"The recent discovery proposes a new way of looking at human brains," said Prof. Kwon. "It supports the already existing hypothesis that repetitive, long-term tasks alter the brain's functional foundation."
Kwon's study was published in the October edition of "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience."
