Playing Pokémon Probably Rewired Your Young Brain
A new scientific study has found the part of the brain where young Pokémon players remember all of their favorite Pocket Monsters.
Category : Pokemon
The effects of video games on the brain is a popular topic for scientists. Researchers regularly discuss the growing trend of video game addiction and whether violence in video games affect the brain.
Now, a recent study published in Nature claims that even Pokémon can lead to changes in how you process visual information.
For the study, researchers tested participants on their knowledge of Pokémon and divided them into two groups – those who were experts in Pokémon, and those who were not. The experts had all played the Pokémon games extensively between the ages of five and eight, and that childhood play was a critical factor under examination. The researchers’ theorized that it was this intense early exposure to Pokémon that might have lead to changes in the brains of the experts, but not the Poké-novices.
The participants were then individually hooked up to an fMRI scanner, which could monitor their brain activity on a moment-to-moment basis, and shown a large number of different images. These included faces, place, objects, words, and, importantly, images of Pokémon. The researchers were looking to see whether there was any difference in brain response to the Pokémon images between the experts and the novices.
Upon examining all of the scans, the researchers found that there were indeed differences. Specifically, when the experts were shown images of Pokémon, their occipitotemporal sulcus activated significantly. This response did not occur in the novices. The occipitotemporal sulcus is a fold in the visual cortex of your brain that is thought to usually deal with images of animals.
This difference in responses helped the researchers to provide evidence for a theory known as eccentricity bias. The theory states that the brain organizes visual information by sorting it according to where the images were first seen, be it in central vision (like Pokémon), peripheral vision (like the layout of a room), or a combination of both.
Pokémon, particularly the first generation of 151 creatures, were seen as ideal images for testing because they are all very small, and players of the games would have all been exposed to them in a similar way, via seeing them on a Game Boy screen held in their arms.
The findings of the study also strengthen the idea that the human brain can adapt to new information, particularly if you are exposed to it repeatedly at a young age, as the expert Pokémon players were.
According to lead researcher Jesse Gomez, this could prove useful in gaining further insight into problems such as face blindness and dyslexia, as they may come about ‘simply because of the way you look at stimuli. And so it’s a promising future avenue.’
For those who grew up hunting wild Pokémon in Johto, Hannoh, Kanto, or any of the other regions, you too may have developed this unique response to images of Pokémon. While the study has a relatively small sample size, it could lead to further research and advances in our understanding of the structure of the brain. The Pokémon adventures of the 11 experts could lead to more than a few gym badges – they could potentially change lives.
‘Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex’ was published in Nature. Jesse Gomez, Michael Barnett, and Kalanit Grill-Spector are the researchers who conducted the study.
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