the ability to control what you think and feel, even during extreme stress or pain
Games are famously, perhaps even notoriously, attention grabbing. Players frequently become so immersed, they lose track of time and seem to ignore everything and everyone around them. Parents and spouses of gamers often complain that it’s nearly impossible to tear their loved ones away from their favorite games. But could the highly immersive quality of good games actually be a clue to how our attention works—and how we can better control it?
In this chapter, we’ll look at video game research that reveals the power we have to prevent anxiety, depression, trauma, and physical pain, by learning to control our attention. Whether you struggle with any of these challenges currently, or you just want to increase your mental and emotional resilience, games provide the perfect platform for mastering life-changing attention skills. This chapter will show you the science behind attention control and teach you the practical, gameful techniques you can use to discover and develop your attention superpowers.
Nothing hurts more than a severe burn injury. Doctors describe it as the most intense and prolonged pain a human being can experience. Naturally, burn patients receive powerful drugs during wound care, most commonly morphine. But the drugs aren’t very effective at alleviating this uniquely excruciating pain. Medical researchers have spent decades searching for something better. Is there anything that can treat the most severe pain in the world more effectively than the traditional morphine approach?
Yes. And it’s a video game.
Snow World is a 3-D virtual environment created by University of Washington researchers to help patients undergoing treatment for severe burns. Patients are given a virtual reality (VR) headset to wear and a joystick for navigating a virtual frozen ice world. There are ice caves to explore, snowballs to throw, and a whole landscape of winter delights to encounter. Patients wear their VR headset and play this game during the most painful part of burn treatment, while their wounds are being cleaned and redressed.
Medical researchers have tested Snow World in clinical trials. Here’s what they learned: this VR game reduced pain by a whopping 30 to 50 percent. For the most severe burn patients, the game proved to have a bigger impact on their pain and overall suffering than the morphine they also received.1
Better yet, Snow World players were able to almost entirely ignore whatever pain did remain. They reported being consciously aware of pain only 8 percent of the time. Compare this with traditional burn treatment: even with the highest doses of opiates that can be safely administered, patients typically report spending 100 percent of treatment time thinking about their excruciating pain.
Simply by playing Snow World, patients discovered they were able to control what they were thinking and feeling an extraordinary 92 percent of the time. As a result, doctors have found that with the game, they can reduce the level of medication and dramatically improve pain management at the same time. And the benefits are more than psychological. When patients feel less pain, doctors are able to pursue more aggressive wound care and physical therapy—two factors that can speed up recovery and reduce medical costs. Most important, the patients feel more in control and suffer far less.2
How exactly did a video game create such a powerful change? In scientific papers describing the game’s positive impacts, Snow World’s inventors, Dr. Hunter Hoffman and Dr. David Patterson, attribute its success to a well-established psychological phenomenon: the spotlight theory of attention.3
According to this theory, human attention is like a spotlight. Your brain can process and absorb only a limited amount of new information at any given moment. So you focus on one source of information at a time, ignoring everything else. As a result, information everywhere competes constantly for your brain’s attention—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, thoughts, and physical sensations.
What does this have to do with pain? The signals from your nerves that cause pain are just one of many competing streams of information. It’s a particularly compelling stream. Your nerves are sending signals to your brain to let you know that you’re injured—which is pretty important information! It makes perfect sense that without conscious intervention, you’d be more likely to focus your attention spotlight on these pain signals than just about any other source of information.
But you’re not powerless against pain signals. In fact, if you learn to control your attention spotlight, you can actually stop your brain from spending its limited processing resources on pain signals from your nerves.
For burn patients, that’s where Snow World comes in. In order to prevent pain signals from turning into a conscious awareness of pain, patients need to swing their spotlight of attention somewhere else—and keep it there. How? By deliberately monopolizing all their brain’s processing power with as challenging and information-rich a target as possible. Games, and particularly virtual worlds rich in 3-D imagery, serve this purpose perfectly. They require so much active attention, the patient runs out of cognitive resources to process the pain.
This is exactly what scientists observed when they decided to study the brain activity of Snow World players using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technology allows researchers to see where blood is flowing in the brain—the more blood flow, the more active that region of the brain. In Snow World studies, fMRI footage showed reduced blood flow to all five regions of the brain associated with processing pain. This data revealed that players weren’t just doing a better job of dealing with the pain they felt—they were actively blocking the brain from dedicating resources to processing the pain signals.4 No cognitive resources, no pain.
This is the real breakthrough at the heart of the Snow World technique: the game isn’t merely a distraction from feelings of pain; it actively prevents conscious feelings of pain in the first place. And you can learn to use this technique in your own life.
You may never be in as much physical pain as a burn patient. But if and when you do find yourself in pain, you now know: You don’t have to pay attention to the signals from your nerves. You can choose to pay attention to anything you want. Even when you’re in pain, even when you’re suffering, you can control your attention spotlight and change your experience for the better.
And you don’t necessarily need a fancy 3-D VR headset to do it. Although advanced game technology makes it easier to commandeer cognitive resources, other studies on pain and gaming show that in less extreme cases, a simple handheld game—the kind you can play on your mobile phone or iPad—can also block pain signals effectively.5
Or if you prefer a nongaming solution, you can choose any challenging activity that successfully captures your full attention. Research suggests, for example, that knitting and crafting both require enough brain-processing resources to successfully reduce chronic pain.6 The key is simply to realize that you are in charge of your cognitive resources. If you don’t want your brain to pay attention to pain signals, give it something else to pay attention to instead.
Snow World is an important health care innovation—but it’s also much more than that. It’s a clear lesson in how much untapped power we all have over what we physically feel. Even when we’re in pain, even when we’re suffering, we can control our attention spotlight and change our experience for the better.
As you’ll see in the coming pages, this finding is repeated again and again in video game research: we have more power, more mental control, over what we feel, moment to moment, than we realize.
You have this power—and it comes from your ability to control your attention spotlight, and in doing so, to change what is happening
