This Is Your Brain On Pokémon

Back in 1996, Jesse Gomez memorized over 150 Pokémon by sight while playing the Nintendo Gameboy version of the popular anime. Little did he know that Gomez’s geeky point of pride would become the basis for a clever experiment 23 years later, that looks at how the brain processes new types of visual information.

As a neuroscientist at Stanford University researching the neural pathways inside the visual cortex, Gomez took fMRI images of brains of adults (including his own) who had and had not played Pokémon as kids. The images showed a striking contrast between the Pokémon experts and the novices. The brains of those Pokémon aficionados universally lit up in a specific subregion, the occipitotemporal sulcus, or OTS, while the OTS remained relatively inactive in the brains of people unfamiliar with the Pokémon monsters.

Although several studies had previously shown that developing brains dedicate entire regions to process word forms, faces or shapes, Gomez’s study was one of the first to show that other forms of information produced a dedicated zone as well. Additionally, the experiment showed that the pixelated, small-screen animations of the Pokémon combined with the game players intense focus on the characters had a large role in determining where the visual information was processed in the brain.

In the future, Gomez and his lab would like to see if the research could apply to certain therapies to help both Pokémon masters and neophytes alike. By studying these visual information pathways, Gomez hopes it may one day lead to a better understanding, and perhaps treatment, of disorders, such as dyslexia or dysgraphia.