If you’re familiar with the research on the cognitive benefits of video games, you can probably skip this one. If not, here’s a good way for you to spend the next 18 minutes, and maybe break a few preconceptions you might have about the usefulness of gaming. Daphne Bavelier talks about how playing action video games like Call of Duty and Black Ops can improve various cognitive capacities.

I was particularly surprised by these two interesting facts on gaming in general:

• The average age of a gamer is 33 (makes sense — in the 80s, games were played almost exclusively by kids. How old are those kids now?)
• One month after the release of COD: Black Ops, the game had been played for 600 million hours. That’s 68,000 years.

There are a few problems with this research though, which I discussed here.