A couple of years ago I heard that researchers had studied the brains of people playing video games and found that when people first started playing a video game, their brains were all “lit up” as they went about learning the game, but once the game was learned, their brains were as dead as a coma patient.

In his book “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell writes about a kid’s show called “Blues Clues” which uses repetition to create stickiness. To paraphrase, children don’t watch a television show when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored, rather they watch when they understand and look away when they are confused.

I like to play new video games. I can’t begin to count the number of video games that I have played halfway through. For me, it feels like a tipping point — I suspect its when my brain has “learned the game” and the reason I initially enjoy the game is for that thrill of cognitive friction. Its probably the same trait that leads some engineers into entrepreneurship and other engineers into Fortune 100 data processing departments. For every one of me, there are a dozen kids out there that play FPSs and MMORPGs for months on end.

I like my new iPhone. For me, it is rife with great user interface ideas that break with existing paradigms. They are intuitive, but unlike many other phone UIs I have used (and designed) they are not obvious in the classical use of the word. They need to be discovered. But once you start living in this new world (paradigm?), it becomes increasingly easy to discover new mechanisms and extract more value out of the experience.

The iPhone is successful in creating new paradigms that excite the brain. And like Blues Clues, these new paradigms are by-and-large used consistently across applications, making the entire environment quickly feel familiar and yet new at the same time.

But like a new video game, at some point I will have absorbed the newness and will be looking for a new thrill. I can feel it coming already. This is the danger of a closed device (and Safari widgets aside, the iPhone is a closed device) for someone like me. But for every one of me, there are probably a dozen Blues Clues kids lining up for a familiar experience.

For others out there, I think it would be wise to rip out a page from video game design, take some risks, and add some fun into their user experiences. I think its one of the keys to acquiring new customers and capturing the next quartile of mobile data subscribers.