I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster.
This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games.
When we say video games, most of you think about children.
It's true.
Ninety percent of children do play video games.
But let's be frank.
When the kids are in bed, who is in front of the PlayStation?
Most of you.
The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults.
(Laughter) So video [gaming] is pervasive throughout our society.
It is clearly here to stay.
It has an amazing impact on our everyday life.
Consider these statistics released by Activision.
After one month of release of the game "Call Of Duty: Black Ops," it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide, right?
Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra?
So what we are asking in the lab is, how can we leverage that power?
Now I want to step back a bit.
I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games.
(Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right?
And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, "Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies?"
I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare.
Right?
Most parents would find that great.
Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health.
It's not, and binging is never good.
But I'm going to argue that in reasonable doses, actually the very game I showed you at the beginning, those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior.
There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right?
You're all bombarded with that.
I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab.
What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain.
And so I'm going to take a few examples from our work.
One first saying that I'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse.
That's a statement about vision.
There may be vision scientists among you.
We actually know how to test that statement.
We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is.
Well, guess what?
People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens, have normal, or what we call corrective-to-normal vision.
That's okay.
The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week.
By that statement, their vision should be really bad, right?
Guess what?
Their vision is really, really good.
It's better than those that don't play.
And it's better in two different ways.
The first way is that they're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter, and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses, you can actually do it with just your eyesight.
The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray.
Imagine you're driving in a fog.
That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident.
So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better.
Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse.
Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability.
Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab.
I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so.
I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me.
I'm going to show you colored words.
I want you to shout out the color of the ink.
Right?
So this is the first example.
["Chair"] Orange, good.
["Table"] Green.
["Board"] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red.
["Horse"] DB: Yellow.
Audience: Yellow.
["Yellow"] DB: Red.
Audience: Yellow.
["Blue"] DB: Yellow.
Okay, you get my point, right?
(Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard.
Why is it hard?
Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color.
How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older.
What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster.
So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.
Actually, those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world.
This is something we use all the time.
When you're driving, you're tracking, keeping track of the cars around you.
You're also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving, right?
In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again.
You're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces.
These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter.
Most kids are happy.
It's actually recess.
But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat.
Everybody begins to move around, and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn't.
So I'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid.
It's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes.
You can track, you can track, and then when it stops, and there is a question mark, and I ask you, did this kid have a coat or not?
Was it yellow initially or blue?
I hear a few yellow.
Good.
So most of you have a brain.
(Laughter) I'm now going to ask you to do the task, but now with a little more challenging task.
There are going to be three of them that are blue.
Don't move your eyes.
Please don't move your eyes.
Keep your eyes fixated and expand, pull your attention.
That's the only way you can actually do it.
If you move your eyes, you're doomed.
Yellow or blue?
Audience: Yellow.DB: Good.
So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention.
That's what we just did.
Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention, which is what is shown in this video here.
That's for you guys, action video game players.
A bit more challenging, right?
(Laughter) Yellow or blue?
Blue.
We have some people that are serious out there.
Yeah.
(Laughter) Good.
So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behavior, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain, and we do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention.
So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention.
The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict.
Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games.
This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain.
You all know about multitasking.
You all have been faulty of multitasking when you're driving and you pick up your cellphone.
Bad idea.
Very bad idea.
Why?
Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident.
Now, we can measure that kind of skills in the lab.
We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have.
That would be a little costly proposition.
But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure, to millisecond accuracy, how good they are at switching from one task to another.
When we do that, we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good.
They switch really fast, very swiftly.
They pay a very small cost.
Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking.
What is multimedia-tasking?
It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends.
That's a multimedia-tasker.
There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely wilkersonjack@example.org.
When we measure them in the lab, they're really bad.
Right?
So these kinds of results really makes two main points.
The first one is that not all media are created equal.
You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games.
They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.
Even within video games, I'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games.
Different video games have a different effect on your brains.
So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game.
The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight.
I showed that to you already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, those action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etc.
Here, what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test.
So you show them their data, you show them they are bad and they're like, "Not possible."
You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really good.
That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain.
Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health.
There are some very poor uses of wine.
There are some very poor uses of video games.
But when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health.
There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy.
So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients.
Now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients, we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform.
I'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game, I can actually change your vision for the better, whether you want to play that action game or not, right?
That's the point of rehabilitation or education.
Most of the kids don't go to school saying, "Great, two hours of math!"
So that's really the crux of the research, and to do that, we need to go one more step.
And one more step is to do training studies.
So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation.
Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again you're going to do the task, to look at this shape.
Study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present to you four different shapes.
One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape.
I want you to tell me which one: the first one, second one, third one or fourth one?
Okay, I'll help you.
Fourth one.
One more.
Get those brains working.
Come on.
That's our target shape.
Third.
Good!
This is hard, right?
Like, the reason that I asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing, right?
It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games.
Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one, we then force them to play 10 hours of action games.
They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row.
They do distributed practice, so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks.
Then, once they are done with the training, they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task.
So this is work from a colleague in Toronto.
What they showed is that, initially, you know, subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age.
After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually perform better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training.
That's really, really important.
Why?
Because I told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation.
We need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting.
Now, at this point, a number of you are probably wondering well, what are you waiting for, to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia, for example?
Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge.
There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects, and that's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation.
There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist.
That's the chocolate side of the equation.
The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food.
Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli?
None of you.
(Laughter) And you probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling, hmm, you know, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging.
So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate, a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognize but are still working on your brains.
And we're working on it, but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together, people that work in the entertainment software industry, and publishers, so these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track.
I'd like to leave you with that thought, and thank you for your attention.
(Applause) (Applause)
My journey away from violent extremism began 22 years ago, when I denounced racism and left the American white supremacist skinhead movement that I had helped build.
(Cheers and applause) I was just 22 years old at the time, but I had already spent eight years, from the time I was 14 years old, as one of the earliest and youngest members and an eventual leader within America's most violent hate movement.
But I wasn't born into hate; in fact, it was quite the opposite.
I had a relatively normal childhood.
My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-1960s and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where they eventually met, and opened a small beauty shop.
Right after I was born, things got a little bit more difficult.
They struggled to survive with raising a young family and a new business, often working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, taking on second and third jobs just to earn a meager living.
And quality time with my parents was pretty nonexistent.
Even though I knew they loved me very much, growing up, I felt abandoned.
I was lonely, and I started to withdraw, and then I started to resent my parents and become very angry.
And as I was growing up, through my teenage years, I started to act out to try and get attention from my parents.
And one day, when I was 14, I was standing in an alley, and I was smoking a joint, and a man who was twice my age, with a shaved head and tall black boots, came up to me, and he snatched the joint from my lips.
Then he put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eyes, and he said, "That's what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile."
I was 14 years old, I'd been trading baseball cards and watching "Happy Days" -- I didn't really know what a Jew was.
(Laughter) It's true.
And the only communist that I knew was the bad Russian guy in my favorite Rocky movie.
(Laughter) And since I'm here baring my soul with you, I can reveal that I did not even know what the word "docile" meant.
(Laughter) Dead serious.
But it was as if this man in this alley had offered me a lifeline.
For 14 years, I'd felt marginalized and bullied.
I had low self-esteem.
And frankly, I didn't know who I was, where I belonged, or what my purpose was.
I was lost.
And overnight, because this man had pulled me in, and I had grabbed onto that lifeline with every fiber of my being, I had gone from "Joanie Loves Chachi" to full-blown Nazi.
Overnight.
I started to listen to the rhetoric and believe it.
I started to watch very closely as the leaders of this organization would target vulnerable young people who felt marginalized and then draw them in with promises of paradise that were broken.
And then I started to recruit myself.
I started to do that by making white-power music.
And soon, I became the leader of that infamous organization that was led by that man in that alley who recruited me that day, who was America's first neo-Nazi skinhead and who had radicalized me.
For the next eight years, I believed the lies that I had been fed.
And though I saw no evidence of it whatsoever, I didn't hesitate to blame every Jewish person in the world for what I thought was a white, European genocide being promoted by them through a multiculturalist agenda.
I blamed people of color for the crime and violence and the drugs in the city, completely neglecting the fact that I was committing acts of violence on a daily basis, and that in many cases, it was white supremacists who were funneling drugs into the inner cities.
And I blamed immigrants for taking jobs from white Americans, completely neglecting the fact that my parents were hardworking immigrants who struggled to survive, despite not getting help from anybody else.
For the next eight years, I saw friends die, I saw others go to prison and inflict untold pain on countless victims and their families' lives.
I heard horrific stories from young women in the movement, who'd been brutally raped by the very men they were conditioned to trust, and I myself committed acts of violence against people, solely for the color of their skin, who they loved, or the god that they prayed to.
I stockpiled weapons for what I thought was an upcoming race war.
I went to six high schools; I was kicked out of four of them, one of them, twice.
And 25 years ago, I wrote and performed racist music that found its way to the internet decades later and partially inspired a young white nationalist to walk into a sacred Charleston, South Carolina, church and senselessly massacre nine innocent people.
But then my life changed.
At 19 years old, I met a girl who was not in the movement, who didn't have a racist bone in her body, and I fell in love with her.
And at 19, we got married, and we had our first son.
And when I held my son in my arms in the delivery room that day, not only did I reconnect with some of the innocence that I had lost at 14 years old, but it also began to challenge the very important things that drew me to the movement to begin with: identity, community and purpose -- things that I had been struggling with as a young boy.
And now, I struggled with the concept of who I was again.
Was I this neo-Nazi hatemonger, or was I a caring father and husband?
Was my community the one that I had manufactured around me to boost my own ego, because I felt self-hatred for myself and I wanted to project it onto others, or was it the one that I had physically given life to?
Was my purpose to scorch the earth or was it to make it a better place for my family?
And suddenly, like a ton of bricks hit me, I became very confused with who I'd been for the last eight years.
And if only I'd been brave enough to walk away at that moment, to understand what the struggle was that was happening inside of me, then maybe tragedy could have been averted.
Instead, I did compromise.
I took myself off the streets for the benefit of my family, because I was nervous that maybe I could go to jail or end up dead, and they would have to fend for themselves.
So I stepped back as a leader, and instead I opened a record store that I was going to sell white-power music in, of course, because I was importing it in from Europe.
But I knew that if I was just a racist store selling racist music the community would not allow me to be there.
So I decided I was going to also stock the shelves with other music, like punk rock and heavy metal and hip-hop.
And while the white-power music that I was selling was 75 percent of my gross revenue, because people were driving in from all over the country to buy it from the only store that was selling it, I also had customers come in to buy the other music.
And eventually, they started to talk to me.
One day, a young black teen came in, and he was visibly upset.
And I decided to ask him what was wrong.
And he told me that his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
And suddenly, this young black teenager, who I'd never had a meaningful conversation or interaction with, I was able to connect with, because my own mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I could feel his pain.
On another occasion, a gay couple came in with their son, and it was undeniable to me that they loved their son in the same profound ways that I loved mine.
And suddenly, I couldn't rationalize or justify the prejudice that I had in my head.
I decided to pull the white-power music from the inventory when I became too embarrassed to sell it in front of my new friends.
And of course, the store couldn't sustain itself, so I had to close it.
At that same time, I lost nearly everything in my life.
I used it as an opportunity to walk away from the movement that I'd been a part of for eight years, the only identity, community and purpose that I'd really known for most of my life.
So I had nobody.
I lost my livelihood because I closed the store.
I didn't have a great relationship with my parents, even though they tried.
And my wife and children left me, because I hadn't left the movement and disengaged quickly enough.
And suddenly, I didn't know who I was again, or where I fit in or what my purpose was supposed to be.
I was miserable inside, and I often woke up in the morning wishing that I hadn't.
About five years in, one of the few friends that I had was concerned about my well-being, and she came to me and she said, "You need to do something, because I don't want to see you die."
And she suggested that I go apply for a job where she worked, at a company called IBM.
Yeah, I thought she was crazy, too.
(Laughter) Here I was, a closeted ex-Nazi covered in hate tattoos.
I didn't go to college.
I'd been kicked out of multiple high schools multiple times.
I didn't even own a computer.
But I went in, and somehow, miraculously, I got the job.
I was thrilled.
And then I became terrified to learn that they'd actually be putting me back at my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice, to install their computers.
This was a high school where I had committed acts of violence against students, against faculty; where I had protested out in front of the school for equal rights for whites and even had a sit-in in the cafeteria to try and demand a white student union.
And of course, as karma would have it, within the first couple of hours, who walks right by me but Mr. Johnny Holmes, the tough black security guard I had gotten in a fistfight with, that got me kicked out the second time and led out in handcuffs from the school.
He didn't recognize me, but I saw him, and I didn't know what to do.
I was frozen; I was this grown man now, years out of the movement, and I was sweating and I was trembling.
But I decided I had to do something.
And I decided I needed to suffer under the weight of my past, because for five years I had tried to outrun it.
I'd tried to make new friends and cover my tattoos with long sleeves, and I wouldn't admit it because I was afraid of being judged the same way I had judged other people.
Well, I decided I was going to chase Mr. Holmes out to the parking lot -- probably not the smartest decision that I made.
(Laughter) But when I found him, he was getting into his car, and I tapped him on the shoulder.
And when he turned around and he recognized me, he took a step back because he was afraid.
And I didn't know what to say.
Finally, the words came out of my mouth, and all I could think to say was, "I'm sorry."
And he embraced me, and he forgave me.
And he encouraged me to forgive myself.
He recognized that it wasn't the story of some broken go-nowhere kid who was going to just join a gang and go to prison.
He knew that this was the story of every young person who was vulnerable, who was searching for identity, community and purpose, and then hit a wall and was unable to find it and went down a dark path.
And he made me promise one thing, that I would tell my story to whoever would listen.
That was 18 years ago, and I've been doing it ever since.
(Applause) You might be asking yourself right now: How does a good kid from a hardworking immigrant family end up going down such a dark path?
One word: potholes.
That's right.
Potholes.
I had a lot of potholes when I was kid.
We all had them -- you know, the things in life that we hit that invariably just kind of nudge us off our path, and if they remain unresolved or untreated or not dealt with, sometimes we can get dangerously lost down pretty dark corridors.
Potholes can be things like trauma, abuse, unemployment, neglect, untreated mental health conditions, even privilege.
And if we hit enough potholes on our journey in life, and we don't have the resources or the help to navigate around them or to pull us out, well, sometimes good people end up doing bad things.
One such person who had potholes is Darrell.
Darrell is from upstate New York.
He had read my memoir, and he was really upset about the ending.
You see, I'd gotten out of the movement and he was still in.
And he emailed me and he said, "I didn't really like the way that turned out."
And I said, "Well, I'm sorry."
(Laughter) "But if you want to talk about it, we could certainly do that."
And after a couple of weeks of going back and forth with Darrell, I learned he was a 31-year-old military veteran who had been injured and was really angry about not being able to go to Afghanistan to kill Muslims.
And one day on the phone, he told me that he had seen a Muslim man in the park praying, and that all he wanted to do was kick him in the face.
I flew to Buffalo the next day, and I sat down with Darrell, and I asked him, "Have you ever met a Muslim person before?"
And he said, "No!
Why the hell would I want to do that?
They're evil.
I don't want anything to do with them."
I said, "OK."
So I excused myself, and I went into the bathroom and I took my phone out in the bathroom, and I Googled the local mosque, and I called them very quietly from the bathroom, and I said, "Excuse me, imam, I need a favor.
I have a Christian man who would really love to learn more about your religion."
(Laughter) "Do you mind if we stop by?"
Well, it took some convincing for Darrell to go, but finally we got there, and when I knocked on the door, the imam said he only had 15 minutes left for us, because he was preparing for a prayer service.
I said, "We'll take it."
We went in, and two and a half hours later, we came out after hugging and crying and, very strangely, bonding over Chuck Norris for some reason.
(Laughter) I don't know what it was about that, but that's what happened.
And I'm happy to say now that Darrell and the imam, you can often find them at the local falafel stand, having lunch together.
(Applause) You see, it's our disconnection from each other.
Hatred is born of ignorance.
Fear is its father, and isolation is its mother.
When we don't understand something, we tend to be afraid of it, and if we keep ourselves from it, that fear grows, and sometimes, it turns into hatred.
Since I've left the movement, I've helped over a hundred people disengage from extremist movements, from white supremacist groups -- (Applause) to even jihadist groups.
And the way I do that is not by arguing with them, not by debating them, not by even telling them they're wrong, even though, boy, I want to sometimes.
I don't do that.
Instead, I don't push them away.
I draw them in closer, and I listen very closely for their potholes, and then I begin to fill them in.
I try to make people more resilient, more self-confident, more able to have skills to compete in the marketplace so that they don't have to blame the other, the other that they've never met.
I'd like to just leave you with one last thing before I go.
Of all the people I've worked with, they will all tell you the same thing.
One, they became extremists because they wanted to belong, not because of ideology or dogma.
And second, what brought them out was receiving compassion from the people they least deserved it from, when they least deserved it.
(Applause) So I would like to leave you with a challenge: go out there today, tomorrow -- hopefully every day -- find somebody that you think is undeserving of your compassion and give it to them, because I guarantee you, they're the ones who need it the most.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)