Adults who have played 'Pokemon' on Game Boy have special brain regions

Adults who have played Pokémon as children have "Pokémon regions" specialized in their brain that respond more to digital characters than those who have never played the game, reveals a new study.

University of Pennsylvania PhD student Michael Barnett and former Stanford colleague Jesse Gomez, both passionate about Pokémon, detailed their findings in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

The project idea was born when the two men discussed an article about letters, cartoons and Tetris pieces evoking the brain regions of a young macaque, according to a press release from the University of Pennsylvania. .

"We joked and said," Would not you be funny if we basically played the role played by the monkeys? "" Said Barnett, a third-year graduate student.

Except this time, instead of tetris pieces, they used first-generation Pokémon characters appearing in the original red and blue versions of the game.

"When we were kids, we had a lot of experience playing Pokemon, hundreds of hours. Everyone has played on the same Game Boy camera, which has the same screen, and the kids' arms are about the same length, "added Barnett. "It was like this involuntary but well-controlled experiment."

The couple brought together 11 "experts" – who had started playing Pokémon between 5 and 8 years old and had revisited it at least once in adulthood – and 11 novices who had not no experience of Pokemon practice.

Participants were asked to name 40 randomly selected Pokemon characters, and then to view a series of images including faces, animals, and words, as well as the characters they had come to love.

With the help of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, the researchers were able to observe which brain region was the most active.

For Pokémon experts, occipitotemporal sulcus, a part of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain known to treat animal images, was found to be more responsive to Pokémen than novice noodles.

The completion of the study was a nostalgic experience for researchers – while Pokémon was 23 in February – but both researchers also gained important insights into how the brain works.

"Nowadays, Pokémon does not look like the original graphics of the Game Boy, so it's a trip back in time, and that has yielded some interesting results," Barnett said in his release. "Our message is not that video games are changing your brain. Everything changes your brain. "