Forget the Pokédex, our brains contain a ‘rich cognitive map’ of Pokémon

It’s hard to overstate the worldwide popularity of Pokémon. For over 25 years, the beloved monsters have evolved to fit into many facets of popular culture, such as anime, video games, trading card games, and even McDonald’s. Pikachu and friends became the defining characteristic of an entire generation of kids who grew up loving the series. Here at Polygon, we tend to analyze the games ourselves and think about what it’s like to play them. But science also allows us to understand how playing Pokémon affects the actual growth and development of the human brain.

Jesse Gomez is an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and actually a real life Professor Oak. At Princeton he conducts research in cognitive neuroscience and brain development. While continuing his work as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University School of Medicine, he conducted a study published in Nature’s journal Human Behavior in 2019 that identified a brain region that seemed to be particularly fond of Pokémon – and it was only activated when you grew up playing the game. His work doesn’t just have implications for longtime Pokémon fans; now Pokémon helps Gomez understand important questions about brain development. In a recent phone call with Polygon, Gomez told us more about his research and what it could mean for those of us who love Pokémon.

Gomez, who told Polygon that Bulbasaur is his favorite Pokémon, said he’s always been interested in brain development. He explained to Polygon that the parts of our brains that read words or recognize faces appear in the same area of ​​everyone’s brain, and that has always amazed him. Prior to his studies, Margaret Livingstone’s lab at Harvard conducted a study in which monkeys were trained to read Helvetica letters and tetrominoes (the blocks of Tetris), which led to the monkeys developing new brain areas to recognize those letters and pictures. Gomez wanted to replicate that study in humans, but that proved difficult because it can be difficult to get kids to learn new things over the years. Enter pokemon.

When introduced in the United States in 1998, both the Pokémon games and the anime explicitly instructed children to “catch them all” and reinforced other learning through commercial bumpers which asked children to identify Pokémon based on their silhouette. Gomez couldn’t necessarily teach kids something new and then see how it affected their brains, but he could see how another learned activity – playing Pokémon – had affected their brain development.

“In many ways it was a kind of perfect ‘in the wild’ science experiment, training an entire generation of people in new visual stimuli,” he said. “So I thought, if you don’t get a region [in the brain] before that, if you were taught that in your childhood, what would you get a region for?

So Gomez and his colleague Michael Barnett set up a study in which 11 subjects were placed in an MRI scanner and showed images of the original pixelated art of Pokémon from Pokemon Blue And Red next to images from the anime. One group had a lot of experience with the games and show, the other group did not. Gomez and his colleagues found that seeing Pokémon activated a certain brain region in those who had played and watched Pokémon as children. In addition, the activated brain region was exactly the same in all participants who loved Pokémon as a child.

Polygon asked Gomez if the experience of playing Pokémon might be different for those who grew up with the games given his findings. In response, he said that those who play Pokémon should have access to a wide range of knowledge beyond just a Pokémon’s name. Depending on how deep you get into the game, you’ll need to know the type, optimal type matchups, and a variety of stats.

“There’s all this meta information attached to it that somebody with context will have instant access to,” Gomez explained, “And so they have a really rich cognitive map of how they’re all related to each other and interacting with one of them. another, that someone who comes in clearly needs a lot of time to learn.

To this day, Pokémon has an appeal that very few franchises have ever achieved. Right now, there are other great games with similar gameplay that a person could spend their time on, including games that can be stronger than Pokémon in some areas. Still, many eventually return to Pokémon’s time-tested formula. Polygon asked Gomez if his findings could possibly explain the series’ enduring popularity.

“I don’t know how far this is based on science, right? But I imagine if your brain has developed some kind of circuitry to help you recognize and categorize these things to some degree, it will be more satisfying for you to deal with them because you brain spent time developing, in this case maybe visual hardware to render them in a richer way than […] any other stimulus that you have had no experience with. And so it’s potentially more rewarding.

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo

“There have been a few experiments that have shown that faces and words are very magnetic, in terms of the look in the eyes – like they just get your attention and no one ever tells you to look at them, but you just do. It’s probably because the brain has used such a huge amount of hardware to process this important ecological information, and so inherently seeks out that information when it’s available, etc. That would be my guess – is that Pokémon are no exception. we may be immediately attracted to it, we want to process it, and then for people who may not have had enough experience and development yet [that part of their brain]it’s just a cartoon character and it’s not inherently interesting.

Gomez works from a cultural context, in that he played the games as a child during the “Pokémania” peak of the late 1990s and early 2000s. During this time, many parents were concerned about the negative effects of Pokémon; publications such as Time magazine described children’s involvement in the series as an “addiction.” Gomez says work like his can assure parents that, as far as his research shows, Pokémon don’t rot kids’ brains.

“Their brain certainly represented more information than the average person, because in addition to all those other categories, such as words and faces, they have a representation for an extra one. So I think it at least shows that the brain is capable of more than what we are currently throwing at it.”