You Could Have a Region of Your Brain Dedicated to Recognizing Pokemon

Researchers at Stanford University have discovered that people who played Pokemon as children in the 90s might share a small region of their brain where all of that information is held, according to a new study.

As reported by Ars Technica, a recent paper published in the scientific journal Nature (and an accompanying YouTube video if you prefer that to reading a whole academic essay) breaks down the results of an experiment that compared the brains of people who played “a lot of Pokemon in their childhood” around 1995 to 1998 with people who don’t know Pokemon at all.

When shown images of Pokemon from the original GameBoy game mixed in with other stimuli, a specific region of Pokemon players’ brains lit up consistently in response to Pokemon. That means that the information is stored in the same part of the brain across all (or at least most) people who had that similar experience.

The researchers partly attribute this to the consistency of how people that age were playing Pokemon at the time, with the Game Boy being very small and a child’s arm-length being a relatively similar distance to their face. Researcher Jesse Gomez explained that “if you look at Pokemon, they’re very small and you use your central vision, so they land in a part of the center of your retina.”

He compared that to when you look at something like the room around you, which will go across more of your retina. “Because they have different locations on your retina,” Gomez continued, “they have different locations in your brain, and it turns out that the Pokemon region emerges in a part of your brain that responds to information from the center of your retina.”

While the fact that Pokemon players share some grey matter is amusing, this isn’t all just fun and games. The study makes progress toward actually figuring out how the human brain is wired and why is stores information the way it does, which in turn could be used to help people with visual deficiencies.

Gomez further explained that the “finding suggests that the very way that you look at a visual stimulus, like a Pokemon or words, determines why your brain is organized the way it is. That’s useful going forward because it might suggest that visual deficits like Dyslexia or face-blindness might result simply from the way you look at stimuli, and so it’s a promising future avenue.”

For a less academic take on Pokemon, be sure to watch our review of Detective Pikachu and let us know which part of your brain lights up from doing so in the comments below.

Tom Marks is IGN's Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker, and his brain was glowing this whole time. You can follow him on Twitter.

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