Relationships fall apart for all sorts of reasons, most of which are as old as life itself. Video games, however, have been taking more and more heat for their relationship-wrecking potential. Not that this is anything new; males are often accused of not paying enough attention to their partners (especially by hacknied sit-com writers). The distractions might change, but the behavior doesn’t — add video games to the list of things men would rather do than develop intimacy.

The idea that video games hold a special facination for dudes is an idea only as old as Spacewar. And the numbers do suggest that there are far more male gamers than female ones. Still. An MRI study?

For the study, the researchers took a group of 22 young volunteers — half men, half women — and had them play a game as an M.R.I. machine looked at what was happening in their brains. The study found that in the men, there was much more activity in the mesocorticolimbic system.

There are important conclusions we can draw from this experiment. Mainly, we can be pretty sure that average retail price of M.R.I. machines has dropped.