Study: If You Played Pokémon in the 1990s, a Small Part of Your Brain Could Still Be Dedicated To It
Pallet Town. Mt. Moon. Fuchsia City. Cinnabar Island. Indigo Plateau.
For many, many gamers of a certain age, those locations (and more) are a deeply embedded part of their childhood, as they represent some key places in the seminal 1996 video games Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue.
(The games were first released in Japan under the “Pocket Monsters” name — Poketto Monsutā in Japanese — before coming stateside as “Pokémon” in 1998. The renaming was due to a potential copyright conflict with the popular toy line “Monsters in My Pocket.”)
Few games have been as historically significant as those two original Pokémon games, and it’s easy to see why based on a simple factoid: As many places have noted throughout the years, such as The Hill, Pokémon is the most valuable media franchise in the world.
As of 2021, the Pokemon franchise has brought in over $100 billion in revenue — a mind-boggling figure that undersells the fact that Pokémon has had new mainline games come out in late 2022.
Now, obviously, it’s not just the video games that make Pokémon so popular. The cartoons, the movies, the toys and the trading cards all contribute to that lofty revenue total.
But all of that still began with two humble — and often imitated — games on the woefully underpowered Nintendo Gameboy.
So it totally makes sense those seminal Pokémon games have a place in the minds of countless gamers.
Only now, it appears those early childhood memories of Pokémon may be even more deeply embedded than anyone could’ve imagined.
Researchers at Stanford University published a paper in 2019 in the scientific journal Nature that examined the difference in brain activity between children who played lots of Pokémon in the 1990s with people who had no clue what Pokémon was.
You can watch Stanford’s video essay on the complicated topic below:
As the video game and entertainment website IGN explained in layman’s terms, childhood Pokémon players consistently had the same part of their brain light up when given a mix of visual stimuli that included those original Pokémon.
That strongly implies that certain types of information are stored in the same part of the brain, regardless of the individual.
Co-author Jesse Gomez “recruited 11 Pokémon experts for his experiment (mean age 29.5 years), along with 11 Pokémon novices who had never played the game, for comparison,” Ars Technica further explained. “While undergoing fMRI, the subjects were shown images of faces, animals, cartoons, bodies, words, cars, corridors, and Pokémon.
“The Pokémon experts responded more strongly to images of the Pokémon characters than the control group.
“When they analyzed the data, Gomez et al. found that, as hypothesized, there was a new region of the brain that formed in the subjects, dedicated to recognizing Pokémon characters, in the same location across the Pokémon-playing subjects. According to Gomez, this supports a theory called ‘eccentricity bias.’
“It holds that it’s the way we look at visual stimuli—specifically, whether we use central or peripheral vision—and how much of our visual field a given object takes up, that determines the location for a dedicated brain region for that stimulus.”
All said, this study could be the very beginning of understanding the human brain a bit better, which could go a long way to explaining certain, more crazed, Pokémon fans.
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