Dr. Poppy Crum

you know, some of Samford's top athletes.

I've had a number of their top athletes go through my course.

And it's always focused on, OK, there's some aspect of human performance I want to dissect, and I want to really amplify the sensitivity or the access to that type of learning in a closed-loop way.

just for anyone that isn't familiar with the role or the history of gaming in the neuroscience space, you know, there's been some great papers in the past.

Take a gamer versus a non-gamer, just to start with, someone self-identified.

A typical gamer actually has what we would call more sensitive, and this is your domain, so you can counter me on this anytime, but, you know, contrast sensitivity functions.

And, like, a contrast sensitivity function is, you know, ability to see things

edges and differentiation in a visual landscape.

They can see faster and they're more sensitive to that sort of differentiation than someone who says, I'm not a video game player or self-identifies that way.

Well, you're spot on because then you take someone who, that self-identified non-gamer, make them play 40 hours of Call of Duty and now their contrast sensitivity looks like a video game player and it persists.

You know, go back, measure them a year later.

But, you know, 40 hours of playing Call of Duty and I see the world differently, not just in my video game.

I actually have foundational shifts in how I experience the world that give me greater sensitivity to my situational awareness, my situational intelligence.

Yeah.

Yeah, because that's a low-level processing capability.

I love intersecting those when you can.

But what's even, I think, more interesting is you also – and these were some – this was a great study by Alex Puget and Daphne DeBellier where it's not just the contrast sensitivity.

It's let's go to that next level where we were talking about Bayesian, like, probabilistic decisions where things aren't deterministic.

And for a video game player – and I can train this –

They're going to make the same decisions as a non-video game player in those probabilistic inferential situations, but they're going to do it a lot faster.