As a mom I’m always weighing the benefits to my sanity of letting the kids have more time on the Wii against the negative effects of video games with violence in them.  Sure, at this age it’s just Lego figures cartoonishly battling with light sabres, but it’s still battling.  I’ve heard it said that it’s no worse than the Road Runner and Looney Toons cartoons we watched as kids and we turned out alright, right?  (Uh…right?)

But still, wondering about possible consequences makes me feel like a responsible parent and so I do.  Last December Time Magazine came out with an article on this subject showing that the behavioral differences that have been observed in kids that play these kinds of games actually have physiological underpinnings.  The parts of the brain that deal with emotion, attention and inhibition are all less active after playing violent video games.  Luckily, this change didn’t seem to be permanent and after some time off from the games the study subjects regained most of the brain activity that had been lost.

This got me to thinking about returning war veterans.  These men and women have witnessed and participated in real violence and it makes sense to me that the human brain evolved a coping mechanism that reduced emotional activity as a way of getting through violent and stressful times.  But for individuals who are shipped off to war, or unwillingly find themselves in the middle of one, simply surviving the experience often means prolonged exposure to sometimes unimaginable violence.  Can those parts of the brain dealing with emotion be regained?  We all want that answer to be ‘yes’.  But I wonder if the repression of the 1950s had something to do with the men returning from WWI and WWII resuming their expected positions in society without ever really emotionally reconnecting to it.

But more importantly I got to wondering about how this research related to violent video games could be used to help the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  If witnessing and participating in violence disconnects us from our emotions and inhibitions, how can we reconnect?

This is the part where experiences collide in my brain.  Wondering about this got me to thinking about how a friend of mine once told me that one of the best ways to get her teenage son out of those frequent teen funks was to have him help in buying, making and distributing a bushel of baked potatoes with all the fixings to the homeless that gather on the front steps of our main library branch.  I think we can all remember how isolated and emotionally distraught and disconnected we can feel as teens.  But making the effort to help those less fortunate helped to reconnect this teen his community, pulled him out of his self-imposed isolation and lightened his mood.

I think we’re doing a much better job this time around with helping our veterans return to society both at the government and community levels.  Could this idea of service to others be a further path to full reintegration?  If observing violence decreases neural activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotion and inhibition, could observing kindness increase that activity?  If participating in violence further dampens the ability to emotionally connect, can engaging in kindness to others be the way to reanimate that activity? And if it is, how best to facilitate that?

But now my in-between time is gone and I must get to sleep.