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Adults who played Pokémon video games extensively as children have a region of the brain that responds preferentially to images of Pikachu and other characters in the series. This is what researchers at Stanford University discovered in a recent study. The study results, published online in the journal Nature Human Behavior, provide new insights into how the brain organizes visual information.
The study was very small. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to get a live look at the brains of just 11 Pokémon enthusiasts who have now become adults. During the scan, participants were shown pictures of Pokémon characters as well as many control images, including animals, nonsense words, and non-Pokémon cartoons.
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Unlike the humans in the control group, the Pokébrains had a brain region that clearly responded to the images ofPokémonresponded, but not to other things. What's more surprising, however, is that it involves the ventral temporal cortex, which has to do with visual perception.
The authors of the new study were inspired by previous neurological research in monkeys, which suggests that there are specific regions of the brain that develop based on early, frequent and consistent visual stimuli. The Stanford researchers wondered whether this was also true in humans. Pokémon fans proved to be perfect test subjects, as most began playing at age 6-7.
The theory suggests that early childhood exposure is necessary to develop certain brain regions and that our brains change at an early age in response to experiential learning. The results are evidence that the human brain is malleable and support a theory called “eccentricity distortion or retinal eccentricity.” It suggests that factors such as the size of the images and whether we view them in central or peripheral vision determine which region of the brain will respond.
