"Video [game] mayhem enlivens decision making"

You can find the full text here, but the gist of this article is that playing video games - specifically first-person shooters - makes you smarter:

Action-game players get tutored in detecting a range of visual and acoustic evidence that supports increasingly speedy decisions with no loss of precision, the scientists report in the Sept. 14 Current Biology. Researchers call this skill probabilistic inference. “What’s surprising in our study is that action games improved probabilistic inference not just for the act of gaming, but for unrelated and rather dull tasks,” Bavelier says.

The University of Rochester Brain and Vision Lab's research on the subject can be found here. Their elaboration on the effects: 

The skills found to be enhanced by action video game training, so far, include low-level vision (enhanced contrast sensitivity function), various aspects of attention (ability to monitor several objects at once, to search through a cluttered scene, to detect an event of interest in fast-forwarding video), more complex task constructs (multi-tasking, task-switching) and, finally, a general speeding of perceptual processing.

This work illustrates how skilled performance in a variety of processing domains can be enhanced by a single training regimen. Practical implications of this finding, such as vocational training (e.g., for laparoscopic surgeons) or clinical rehabilitation are being investigated.