Besides attentional blink, there are many more very interesting effects of videogames on the brain. Again, imagine yourself looking at a screen. There is a circle on the screen, and various shapes can appear on it like numbers around a clock.

Your task is to hunt for a diamond that appears on the circle. Sometimes, the diamond is the only thing that appears, in which case the task is trivial, and sometimes there are other shapes that appear around the circle to make it harder. In addition to this, there is sometimes an additional distractor shape that shows up either inside or outside of the circle.

Your brain can't help but pay attention to this distractor, and interestingly, if the distractor is a diamond, it actually will help you find the diamond on the circle more quickly. If the distractor is not a diamond (e.g. a square or a circle), it will slow you down.

When the task becomes difficult (many other objects on the circle along with distractors), the diamond-shaped "helpful distractor" actually loses its effectiveness. Interestingly, this only happens in nongamers. Videogame players are still sped up by same-shape distractors and this happens no matter how hard the task is.

A reasonable explanation for this is that videogame players have higher attentional capacity. It seems that there’s less of an attentional bottleneck.

Attentional blink is an interesting phenomenon first described in 1992. Generally, it's about spotting salient and important items in a rapid sequence of other objects. The specific task that's used in an experiment would be where the subject is looking at a screen, where a bunch of black letters pop up and disappear in sequence. Once in a while, a white letter pops up, and a certain (short) amount of time after the white letter, an X may or may not pop up as well.

So the white letter notifies you that the X might pop up soon. If the X pops up immediately after the white letter does, your percentage of seeing it will be higher than average. This is due to an aspect of attentional blink called "lag one sparing." There's no super conclusive explanation for this, though it's thought that the brain releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine after the meaningful stimulus (the white letter), the effects of which last for around 100ms and allow the X to be processed together with the white letter.

However, if the X appears between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds after the white letter, many people miss it. The visual system "blinks" after the relevant white letter stimulus and is blind to the X popping up.

A real-world example of attentional blink would be if you're driving outside, with many objects whizzing past you, and you have to respond quickly to a ball rolling onto the street. As you shift your attention and bring the ball to your conscious awareness, there's a half-second gap in which you might miss a child running out after that ball.

Studies, chiefly those done by Shawn Green during his graduate studies in Daphne Bavelier's lab, have shown that video game players have a much shorter attentional blink than nongame players. This is really interesting because it suggests that these fundamental phenomena are trainable and changeable by playing fast-paced computer games.

Now this is sort of the reciprocal of what people traditionally think of as educational games. Instead of learning material from games, we’re playing games to train our own visual skill, attention, enumeration skill, and so on. So it goes both ways - neuroscience can be used to design better games, and games can also be used to affect our own brains.