Stanford Researchers ID the Brain Region Activated by Pokémon

BY KER THAN

STANFORD, CA -- If your childhood involved countless hours spent capturing, training and battling Pokémon, there may be a wrinkle in your brain that is fond of images of Wobbuffet, Bulbasaur and Pikachu.

Stanford psychologists have identified preferential activation to Pokémon characters in the brains of people who played Pokémon videogames extensively as kids.

The findings, published online in the journal Nature Human Behavior, help shed light on two related mysteries about our visual system. “It’s been an open question in the field why we have brain regions that respond to words and faces but not to, say, cars,” said study first author and former Stanford graduate student Jesse Gomez. “It’s also been a mystery why they appear in the same place in everyone’s brain.”

A partial answer comes from recent studies in monkeys at Harvard Medical School. Researchers there found that in order for regions dedicated to a new category of objects to develop in the visual cortex – the part of the brain that processes what we see – then exposure to those objects must start young when the brain is particularly malleable and sensitive to visual experience.

Gomez reasoned that if early childhood exposure is critical for developing dedicated brain regions, then his brain – and those of other adults who played Pokémon as kids – should respond more to Pokémon characters than other kinds of stimuli. And since the Pokémon characters from the games look very different from objects we typically encounter in our daily experience, visual theories make unique predictions about where activations to Pokémon should appear.

“What was unique about Pokémon is that there are hundreds of characters, and you have to know everything about them in order to play the game successfully. The game rewards you for individuating hundreds of these little, similar‑looking characters,” Gomez said. “I figured, ‘If you don’t get a region for that, then it’s never going to happen’.’’Once funded, Gomez recruited adults who had played Pokémon extensively as children. He found 11, including himself and Michael Barnett, the lab manager at the time and a co-author on the study.

When the test subjects were placed inside a functional MRI scanner and shown hundreds of random Pokémon characters, their brains responded more to the images compared to a control group who had not played the videogame as children.

“I initially used the Pokémon characters from the Game Boy game in the main study, but later I also used characters from the cartoon in a few subjects,” Gomez said. “Even though the cartoon characters were less pixelated, they still activated the brain region.”

The site of the brain activations for Pokémon was also consistent across individuals. It was located in the same anatomical structure ­– a brain fold located just behind our ears called the occipitotemporal sulcus. As best the researchers can tell, this region typically responds to images of animals (which Pokémon characters resemble).

“I think one of the lessons from our study is that these brain regions that are activated by our central vision are particularly malleable to extensive experience,” Grill-Spector said.

The new findings are just the latest evidence that our brains are capable of changing in response to experiential learning from a very early age, Grill-Spector said, but that there are underlying constraints hardwired into the brain that shape and guide how those changes unfold.

Like a skilled jazz player who spontaneously invents fresh melodies while still respecting the grammar of music, the brain is a master improviser that can create new activations devoted to Pokémon characters, but it must still follow certain rules – like those regarding objects preferentially viewed with our central gaze – about where these category-preferring activations can take place.

For parents who might look to the study as proof that videogames can leave a lasting effect on the brains of impressionable children, Grill-Spector said that our brains are capable of containing multitudes. “The visual cortex is made up of hundreds of millions of neurons,” she said. “We have the capacity to encode many, many patterns in that stretch of cortex.”

Gomez also noted that all of the Pokémon-playing test subjects grew up to be successful adults. “I would say to those parents that the people who were scanned here all have their PhDs,” Gomez said. “They’re all doing very well.”

Ker Than is with Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences.