Baduk, proved to affect on brain development!

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Från Haijins blog:

I've translated an article on DailyMedi the medical web site.
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Baduk, the game generally enjoyed in East Asian countries such as Korea, has been proved its significant effect on brain’s structural development by a domestic research team.

The team of Professor Kwon Jun-Soo of Seoul National University’s department of Neuropsychiatry announced that they have discovered the positive relationship between long-term Baduk training and both brain’s functions and brain’s structural development by screening images of brain on 14 July.

The research, implemented with Korea Baduk Association, compared professional players and prodigies who have been studied Baduk more than 10 years to ordinary people in terms of brain’s functions and structure.

This research used the latest Neuroimaging technique, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).

The research team discovered that a group of Baduk experts’ brains are highly developed in the interrelation between various areas compared to ordinary people’s brains by analyzing the result of DTI.

These various areas constitute the major cerebral structure, which controls concentration power, functional memorization, implemental power, problem-solving power and so forth. This research suggests that in Baduk experts’ brains the information delivery between those functions happens more effectively.

Especially the development of the white matter areas of substructure temporal lobe that observed in the group of Baduk experts is a typical feature of masters who were trained in one certain field for a long time.

Whereas ordinary people store information one by one, experts absorb the whole pattern of the information in temporal lobe.

That is to say, Baduk experts are able to use patterns stored up in the specialized memory storage more effectively and strategically through the long term training that they underwent in order to obtain an extremely developed ability in Baduk.

Also, Baduk experts’ brains are more developed in the circuit of cortex substructure or temporal lobe in right-brain, which mainly controls nonverbal spatial and temporal information.

The research team assumes Baduk experts also got trained by repetitive Baduk training to manage spatial and temporal information in order to use them faster and more efficiently.

In addition, the result that shows the white matter areas of right-brain is more developed than that of left-brain implies the major subject of Baduk is related to spatial feature.

Prof. Kwon says, “I expect the result of this research to contribute to revealing in depth about human brain’s functions and structures.” He continued, “Based on this, we may help the progress of educational brain development and studies in treatments for perceptional disabilities as well.”

The team of Prof. Kwon is currently analyzing specialized memorization and neuropsychology by using Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in order to clarify the effect of long term Baduk training on functional brain development.

Meanwhile, the result of this research will be posted in August volume of Neuroimage the prominent magazine in Neuroimaging studies.


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