TED TALK

Daphne Bavelier: The brain under the influence of the video games

Watch the TED Talk conference and answer the following questions with
T (true) or F (false). Justify the false answers.
1. Ninety percent of adults play video games.

2. The average age of a gamer is 8 years old, not 33.

3. After a month of release of the game “Call Of Duty: Black Ops”, it

had been played for 68,000 hours worldwide.

4. People who don’t play a lot of action games have better vision
than those who indulge into playing videogames like 5, 10 or 15
hours per week.

5. Daphne’s lab is considering to develop games for patients with low

vision and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better.

6. According to Daphne, it has been proved that playing action games

doesn’t lead to attention problems.

7. When we do brain imaging, the three brain networks mentioned

by Daphne are much more efficient in people that play action
games.
 8. A multimedia-tasker is a person who is able to be engaged with
listening to music at the same time as he/she is doing search on
the web and chatting on Facebook with his/her friends.

9. Mental rotation is a target shape task in which Daphne presents to

people four different shapes being all of them a rotated version of
these shapes.

10. Daphne’s challenge is taking brain scientists to come and to get

together, people that work in the entertainment software industry
and publishers in order to release a video game that promotes
positive effects on people with special needs or difficulties.

TED TALK

Daphne Bavelier: The brain under the influence of the video games

VOCABULARY

Read the sentences (1-10). The words in bold are used in the TED Talk. First guess the
meaning of the words. Then match the words with their definitions (a-g).
 1. 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 Shapespeare.

2. The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video
games like 5 hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week.

3. If you move your eyes, you’re doomed.

4. 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….

5. …those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal
at multitasking.

6. You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really
good.

7. So that’s really the crux of the research.

8. Playing video games for many hours on end perform.

9. They don’t play 10 hours of action games in a row.

10. These are not people that usually meet every day, but it’s actually doable, and we are
on the right track.

a. Capable of being done

b. Extremely bad or severe

c. Happening one after the other without interruption.

d. Doing something continuously

e. To allow oneself the pleasure of doing something.

f. Bad or adverse fate.

g. An adjective meaning “automatic”

h. An adjective meaning “based on instincts or emotions”

i. To allow oneself the pleasure of something.

j. The central or most important point

k. Moving or able to move with great speed. Quick to act or respond.

WRITE YOUR ANSWERS BELOW:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.