Mori, a cranial nerve specialist at the Tokyo Nihon, made an EEG study of 240 people between the age of 6 and 29.

He found that people who played video games regularly had less frontal lobe beta brainwave activity compared to ordinary people in an active cognitive state.

What's more alarming is Mori's observation that in terms of EEG profiles, a video gamer is akin to people suffering from heavy dementia.

For people who use video-games as "dummies" to keep their very young preoccupied, there's the choice between quietude and their young one's frontal brain area.

Professor Ryunta Kawashima of Japan's Tohoko University observed the brain activity of teenagers playing a Nintendo game. Massaging this area hourly, daily, will only stimulate vision and movement, but the frontal area that controls behaviour and rational decisions is neglected.

Children steeped in Nintendo mania may have issues with self control. The part of the brain that video-gaming stimulates is the amygdala, the part connected with emotional arousal.

What the violent content of the video-game does is stimulation of the brain's arousal centres, doing little to the cortical areas involved in perception and thinking.

This information is important when you're thinking of the pruning phase in the child's teenage years.

That's when the brain decides to keep its important parts and drops the rest; and once those "unimportant" connections are dropped in adolescence, they'll probably go forever, they give way to cognitive powers that you will remain in your adult years.

These neural connections are important, says Dr Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Health in the US.

"Our cognitive abilities are so shaped and it is hard to alter them once they are formed".

It is impossible of course to keep children from computers, their mobile phones and their video-gaming, but the keyword is control.

Children should separate themselves from gadgets now and then keep their hold on those traditional skills.