Anyone who played video games as a kid is intimately familiar with the lecture they got from any adult within earshot on how much time they spent sitting in front of a screen. Everyone’s got at least one adult in their life convinced that video games would rot kids’ brains, turning them into lazy, ultra-violent couch potatoes who spend their days eating greasy potato chips and guzzling teeth-rotting sodas. It’s an easy argument to brush off as you grow into an adult, but a new scientific study into the Pokemon games has posed a truly terrifying question: What if those adults were right?
Here’s How Playing Pokemon As A Kid Might’ve Altered Your Brain
Scientists at Stanford University are usually busy with big, world-changing experiments that don’t tend to make headlines. However, they recently published a new study where a collection of people who spent their childhoods playing Pokemon were put through a variety of brain scans. It turns out that spending your formative years with the early-gen games might have led to some pretty interesting changes in how your brain works.
Published in Nature magazine, the new study – conducted by Jesse Gomez, Michael Barnett, and Kalanit Grill-Spector from Stanford’s psychology and neurosciences departments – set out to see if there was a neurological difference between experienced Pokemon players and complete newbies. Researchers took 22 participants, aged 18 to 44, and split them into two groups. Half were self-reported as experienced Pokemon Trainers, and the other half were novice players. The experienced players were all met with the same three criteria:
- They had started playing Pokemon between the ages of 5 and 8 on the original GameBoy.
- They had continued playing the Pokemon franchise throughout their childhood.
- They had either continued playing Pokemon into adulthood or revisited the games at least once.
The novice group, by contrast, was made up of participants “who had never played a Pokemon game and had little to no interaction with Pokemon otherwise.” The aim of the study was to see if, because Pokemon is pretty unique-looking and featured heavily on small, pixelated screens in the early days, early Pokemon players had some kind of special ability to recognize Pokemon when presented with a collection of similar, non-Pokemon characters. And it turned out they did.
But How Did They Test It?
In order to get a peek inside the brains of the study’s participants, Stanford’s researchers put both the Pokemon veterans and the novices through a series of MRI tests. As part of the tests, the participants were presented with pictures of a Pokemon, an animal, a non-Pokemon cartoon, a human face, a human body, a word, a car, and a randomly selected corridor. All of the images were scrambled, like something you’d see in a CAPTCHA test, and the participants were asked to pick the Pokemon from the bunch.
To no one’s surprise, the experienced player group was much better than the novices at recognizing Pokemon over non-Pokemon, but the surprising part of the test came when the MRI results revealed that a specific area of the Pokemon game veterans’ brains lit up whenever they recognized a Pokemon sprite.
As for why the brain reacts the way it does when recognizing Pokemon – that’s the next question for researchers to answer. According to the results, though, the study has put forward the theory that “early childhood visual experience” – aka, looking at Pokemon as a kid – shapes the part of the brain that receives a visual stimulus and plays a hand in determining why your brain is organized the way it is when you’re an adult.
These new Pokemon-related findings mean that scientists could use this data to develop a new way to map how your brain responds to the things you see. This could help deal with things like dyslexia and face blindness, conditions caused by a roadblock in the path between your brain and your eyes.
So, to all the adults who warned their kids about this – yes, maybe playing Pokemon did rot our brains. But maybe – just maybe – it’s for the better.
