Could virtual reality speed up learning?

Does swinging a lightsaber help us learn? New research from Florida Atlantic University and Brown University found that movement dramatically helps with certain kinds of complex learning. The research was published in the journal Science Advances https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed4003. Interested in more science involving video games? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  Hey, everyone. Emily Kwong here with a favor to ask you. Can you share this episode of Short Wave with at least one friend? Taking time out of your day like this helps us in a big way. OK, here's the show. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. OK, Wana Summers, Ari Daniel, I have gathered you here today to talk about some of the latest and greatest in scientific journal studies this week. I know you're so excited.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I am.

• 0:41Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I want to start out by discussing video games. Do you game?

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Well, growing up, Emily, we didn't have any video games in our house. But every now and again, I'd get a chance to play at one of my friends. And I remember, once I got to try out this amazing game involving Mickey Mouse in some beautiful enchanted land, I was hooked and I tried inviting myself back over just to play again.

• 1:06Emily Kwong?

  I could see young Ari just making a bid for this. Wana, what about you?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I love video games. Loved them as a kid, still love them now. I am mostly into role-playing games. I really love Fire Emblem Three: Houses. It's got to have a fun little story behind it. And so that's kind of more my bag.

• 1:23Emily Kwong?

  That's befitting of a journalist such as yourself. Needs a narrative.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I need a narrative.

• 1:26Emily Kwong?

  Need a narrative. OK, so games have really grown in the last decade. There are, of course, the mainstays, the controller-based games, where you're moving things with your little fingers, pressing the X button, smashing the X button to make your character jump. But there's a growing game industry that works very differently. Are you familiar with VR games?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Familiar as in the concept? I mean, you have that headset, you explore a 3D world with your whole body. I haven't played a ton of them, though.

• 1:50Emily Kwong?

  You might really like it. It is very physical. And science has taken an interest in VR games. I have a study for you today that's trying to figure out if these kinds of games help with certain kinds of learning. Like, maybe they're educational in addition to being fun.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  It's the first time I thought about seeing if there's a video game to help navigate bureaucracy. I always needed help with that.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  No shortage of that in our lives.

• 2:12Emily Kwong?

  That's what you want to learn with your one precious life.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  It's true. I probably actually would just look to see if there's a Mickey Mouse sequel.

• 2:19Emily Kwong?

  Childhood dream fulfilled. OK, well, we also have a surprising finding from the world of memory for you today. And we're going to put a final nail in the Halloween season coffin with a space mystery involving zombie discs.

• 2:35Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from BetterHelp. Your brain has limited storage, so why is it still holding on to that embarrassing moment from years ago? BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, you can still get 20% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/NPR. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance. This message comes from Angie. When it comes to home projects, it matters who you hire.

• 3:28Speaker 04

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• 4:07Emily Kwong?

  OK, Wana, our gateway into the science today is video games.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Loving this already.

• 4:13Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, we're going to jump through the portal. And this game has a little bit to do with lightsabers.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  OK, now you've really got me. Please tell me that there's some sort of scientist lightsaber battle in a lab somewhere.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  If only allow me to illuminate, Wana. OK, so the idea for this study, published in the journal Science Advances, came from Luke Rosedahl, now based at Florida Atlantic University. During the COVID lockdown, Luke was playing a lot of virtual reality video games.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Oh, those are the ones where players put on a headset that totally covers their eyes and then they're plunged into this 3D environment, right?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Bingo. It's a game that requires your whole body to play. And at the time, Luke was studying the striatum, a region of the brain that controls both motor movement and decision-making. And while gaming, he wondered if there was some unexplored link there. Could big movement help people figure out how to sort things, what's known as category learning?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  That's an interesting question. How do you try to figure it out?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  In the lab, Luke got a bunch of participants to put on VR goggles. They were then showed striped objects, and the stripes were a different angle and thickness. And as the game went along, participants learned how to categorize the stripes, how to sort them into one bucket or another.

• 5:31Emily Kwong?

  And while some participants pressed buttons to learn, others did much bigger motions, like swinging a lightsaber to hit the stripes or punching a response box in front of them. And the difference in their learning was dramatic.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  With the larger movements like punching, people learned somewhere between four and six times faster, which is just absolutely incredible.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  That is a huge difference. But this was just for sorting stripes in a lab, right? I mean, as we all can attest, the real world is a lot more complicated.

• 6:00Emily Kwong?

  So much more. But if VR can be used to teach people how to categorize stripes, maybe it can be used in more complex training scenarios, say, help TSA agents sort bags or radiologists sort mammograms, though a lot more research would need to be done to make that dream a reality.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Right, OK, next topic. You mentioned that it's about the part of the brain that's involved in long-term memory.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Your recall is impeccable, Wana. So the brain area we want to talk about today is the amygdala. Generally, it's associated with emotions like fear. But a growing body of research has found the amygdala also plays a big role in forming some long-term memories.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  How'd they figure that out?

• 6:38Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, the scientists studied people with epilepsy, who recently had electrodes implanted in various parts of their brains. And then the scientists asked these participants to play a memory game and measured how often individual neurons turned on during that task.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  We can listen to a very, very small number of individual brain cells out of billions, and we can gain insights into that person's mind and thinking.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  This is lead researcher Yuli Rutis-Hauser at Cedars-Sinai and Caltech. He told us they could watch amygdala neurons firing in someone's brain when they were looking at a picture, maybe of a house or a person's face. And the more those neurons lit up, the more likely people were to remember the image later. Basically, how active a brain cell was predicted whether a person remembered an image later.

• 7:30Speaker 07

  That's pretty cool, that you can look at a person's brain activity and predict what they're going to remember and what they're going to forget.

• 7:36Emily Kwong?

  Denise Kai, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai who wasn't involved with the work, says this is the first time scientists have shown the amygdala in humans could be a kind of control center for visual memory formation, independent of emotions.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  OK, so help me understand. Big picture, how does this type of long-term memory formation fit in with the other ways that the brain makes memories?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  It puts the amygdala on the map as a control center of how some memories form in humans. Denise says this idea has been around in rodent models for a while, but knowing it happens in humans could lead to a way more detailed understanding of how memory works.

• 8:11Emily Kwong?

  And potential treatments for disorders that affect memory, like Alzheimer's or epilepsy. Doctors could potentially target this region to try to prevent memory loss, for example. The research was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  OK, I love Halloween. It is my favorite. I am not ready for it to end, so I'm excited for us to find...

• 8:28Emily Kwong?

  Me either.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm excited for us to finally get to this next Halloween-themed portion of the roundup.

• 8:33Emily Kwong?

  Greatest time of the year. You got it, Wana. OK, so we are going to turn our attention to objects in the universe that produce X-rays, things that are scorching hot, says University of Alabama astronomer Jimmy Erwin.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  We're talking hundreds of thousands to millions of degrees.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Such blazing temperatures can arise due to super-high gravity or explosive forces. So studying X-rays offers a window into the dynamics of extreme cosmic phenomena.

• 8:59Emily Kwong?

  OK, so NASA's Chandra Telescope has been gathering X-ray data like this from nearby galaxies since 1999. And Jimmy and his PhD student Mustafa Muhibula looked back at the data within a range that's largely been ignored, the very lowest-energy X-rays. And they were stunned when they found 84 new sources of these X-rays spread across half a dozen galaxies.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  I was initially thinking this could be digital artifacts, that they can be real. But they were. The results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So do they know what was producing all these X-rays?

• 9:35Emily Kwong?

  They have ideas. The researchers believe the sources are systems involving something super-dense, like a black hole that's stealing material off a nearby star, like a vampire, Jimmy says.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  Instead of stealing blood, they're stealing material from a companion star. And as that material spirals in towards the compact object, it gets heated up to really high temperatures, giving us this hot X-ray emission that we see.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Another system that could give rise to the low-energy X-rays could be two black holes orbiting one another, pulling matter off a star, a situation where you get a kind of doughnut-shaped void, which was recently named a zombie disk.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Ooh, so we're getting vampires and zombies here. You guys are getting real Halloweeny on me today.

• 10:17Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, very Halloweeny, and it's very exciting. Kristin Dayg at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Western Australia, who was not involved in this research, is a fan.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  I never would have guessed that these sources would be there. And so we can come up with these amazing new discoveries that change our understanding of how we do science.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And these cosmic vampires and zombie discs, do they tell us anything else about the universe?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Unclear, but one possibility is some may detonate violently into a kind of supernova that astronomers can use to measure how quickly the universe is expanding.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:51Emily Kwong?

  Wana, thank you for spending some time with us today. It's always great to see you.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Great to see you, too.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  You can hear more of Wana on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 11:04Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Berly McCoy and Jason Fuller. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Hannah Glavna and Robert Rodriguez were the audio engineers. I'm Ari Daniel.

• 11:16Emily Kwong?

  And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 11:29Speaker 00

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  This message comes from Angie. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years. For everything, from minor repairs to major remodels, find reviews, pricing, and booking at angie.com or on the Angie app.