Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, and fine motor control.
The study was led by Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She gave 23 adults a Nintendo DS and told them to play Super Mario 64 for at least 30 minutes a day for two months. A control group played nothing. MRI scans taken before and after showed that the Mario group had measurable increases in grey matter in the right hippocampus, the right prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum, and the increases were not found in the control group.
The hippocampus is where the brain stores spatial maps. Super Mario 64 is a game built entirely around navigating three-dimensional space, jumping between platforms, remembering which doors lead where, and building a mental model of a world that does not exist. The brain treats a virtual world the same way it treats a real one: it maps it, stores it, and grows to accommodate it.
The prefrontal cortex handles planning and strategy, which the game demands constantly. The cerebellum handles timing and coordination, which every jump requires. The brain was not just entertained. It was being trained, and the tissue responded the same way muscle responds to a weight: it got bigger.
Kuhn said the results suggest that video game training could be used as a therapy for conditions where these brain regions are reduced, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related brain shrinkage. The prescription is a plumber in a red hat, 30 minutes a day. https://t.co/8hKZMvh8VN
Empezar un podcast me ha hecho aprender mucho sobre audio y vídeo, si bien el reto más grande para mí es ser constante, no deja de emocionarme ver el crecimiento orgánico del canal 🫶 Sobre todo cuando se trata de un tema algo nicho 😅 https://t.co/3xHkCQ7O3P
According to Apple's website, the company has rolled out a lot of existing features to additional countries, cities, and languages. Here is a list of them all. https://t.co/9wLVOltQNx
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon says the AI industry is "gambling with our lives." He tells Anderson what he finds "most scary is if AI is used to make itself more intelligent" and warns these companies are "compelled to race toward building a deadly technology."
Pokémon Red & Blue are probably the most technically impressive games ever made relative to the hardware they ran on.
A thread on assembly code, memory limits, and the engineering black magic that built the biggest media franchise on earth 🧵
#Oncosalud no es una aseguradora, sino un programa que ofrece planes oncológicos. Sus afiliados pagan mensual o anualmente para atenderse en las clínicas que señala la empresa. Ante las recientes denuncias contra Oncosalud, recordemos qué debería incluir un seguro oncológico. 🧵
@TheAppleDesign I dont think people understand just how freaking safe apple pay is.
It generates a unique card that is locked down for that transaction. It expires in seconds after you activate it and is immune to skimming. It is a genuine feat of engineering that is insane
BREAKING: Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all.
They just memorize patterns really well.
Here's what Apple discovered:
(hint: we're not as close to AGI as the hype suggests)