Brain Scans Reveal A 'Pokemon Region' In Adults Who Played As Kids (theverge.com) 48
"By scanning the brains of adults who played Pokemon as kids, researchers learned that this group of people have a brain region that responds more to the cartoon characters than to other pictures," reports the Verge.
"More importantly, this charming research method has given us new insight into how the brain organizes visual information." For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were "experienced" Pokemon players -- meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults -- and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokemon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants' brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokemon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokemon than to these other images. For novices, this region -- which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images -- didn't show a preference for pokemon.
It's not that surprising that playing many hours of Pokemon as a kid would lead to brain changes; looking at almost anything for long enough will do the same thing. We already know that the brain has cell clusters that respond to certain images, and there's even one for recognizing Jennifer Aniston... The results support a theory called "eccentricity bias," which suggests that the size of the images we're looking at and whether we're looking at it with central or peripheral vision will predict which area of the brain will respond.
"More importantly, this charming research method has given us new insight into how the brain organizes visual information." For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers recruited 11 adults who were "experienced" Pokemon players -- meaning they began playing between the ages of five and eight, continued for a while, and then played again as adults -- and 11 novices. First, they tested all of the participants on the names of pokemon to make sure the pros actually could tell a Clefairy from a Chansey. Next, they scanned the participants' brains while showing them images of all 150 original pokemon (in rounds of eight) alongside other images, like animals, faces, cars, words, corridors, and other cartoons. In experienced players, a specific region responded more to the pokemon than to these other images. For novices, this region -- which is called the occipitotemporal sulcus and often processes animal images -- didn't show a preference for pokemon.
It's not that surprising that playing many hours of Pokemon as a kid would lead to brain changes; looking at almost anything for long enough will do the same thing. We already know that the brain has cell clusters that respond to certain images, and there's even one for recognizing Jennifer Aniston... The results support a theory called "eccentricity bias," which suggests that the size of the images we're looking at and whether we're looking at it with central or peripheral vision will predict which area of the brain will respond.
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I don't think marbles belongs in that list. An often unreliable source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] traces marbles back to the Romans and the middle ages.
Why pokemon? (Score:3)
I don't see what this has to do with Pokemon: Is there any reason to believe this isn't simply showing whether or not people recognise images from their childhood in general?
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Because this was sponsored. The Pikachu movie is just out.
Unlikely. But I would guess that the researchers figured it would drum up some interest in their work by tying the timing to the release of the Pikachu movie. Which may help with securing additional funding.
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Good points there. Unfortunately the summary and article seem to be so Pokemon obsessed that they lose sight of what the point of the study is.
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I can haz click? I can haz bait? I can haz pokeburder?
Because catchy title? (Score:2)
Because "Pokemon Brain Region!" title sounds much more catchy in the mainstream press than "Boring university study has confirmed that if you have trained a lot to recognise X visually, eventually a small region of dedicated neurons will be seen firing when you again rocognize X even years later, as predicted by most current models of neurology and neuropsychology, thus confirming validity of those models. Yay, science! It works!" which is closer to what probably the underlying study is (too lazy to check
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whether or not people recognise images from their childhood in general?
I thought it was about recognizing cartoon-style images.
Jennifer Aniston region was always there (Score:2)
I don't know about Pokemon, but I'm pretty sure the part of my brain that responded to Jennifer Aniston was there and waiting before I ever saw her. Right next to the Jennifer Love Hewitt neuron.
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I don't know about Pokemon, but I'm pretty sure the part of my brain that responded to Jennifer Aniston was there and waiting before I ever saw her. Right next to the Jennifer Love Hewitt neuron.
Those neurons are somewhat... lower down.
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They have to be, since they create a connection between the neckbeard and the gritsack.
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No, what it means is that if you utilize some creature for resources, even a fake creature and fake game resources, your brain has a region that detects that.
People who didn't have a history of utilizing these fake animals just saw them as "something I'm not utilizing for resources."
They succeeded at differentiating between that and "car I don't use," but they also seem to have jumped pretty darn far from there to the conclusions, without bothering to test "car that belongs to me" or "fruit tree in my back
Wait what??? (Score:2)
Why would this be the "Pokemon region"? Wouldn't it be the "recognition/recall region"? Or perhaps even the "happy region", presumably you are happy to see a pokemon if you are into that stuff? Is this detective Pikachu sponsored "research"?
ZX Spectrum (Score:2)
And I have a Pssst [wikipedia.org] region in my brain!
I use it whenever I move in a crowd to evade the bugs^h^h^h^hpeople in it.
Jennifer Aniston region? (Score:2)
Probably more like Jennifer Aniston's nipples region.
Who owns Pokemon? (Score:2)
Does the Pokémon Company (Nintendo et al) own the franchise or does it belong to the billion people who dedicated a section of their brain to it?
This is the sort of question that people who try to preserve pop culture run into. The legal code is pretty clear that the trademark and copyright owners have exclusive use of almost everything. And so far fair use doesn't seem to cover private collectors or self-described cultural preservationists, so we see folks getting nastygrams from Pikachu lawyers when
Flawed study (Score:2)
See why this kind of experiment is flawed [lisafeldmanbarrett.com], in a blog post by the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship winner in neuroscience [psychologicalscience.org].