If You Play Pokemon For Too Long, Part Of Your Brain Actually Gets Permanently Rewired

Pretty much everything you do growing up can have a lasting impact on your brain, if you do it enough anyway. The same goes for video games too, which scientists claim can change everything from your memorisation skills to reaction time.

Now, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania claims that video games don't just change you, they can literally situate themselves in your brain.

Michael Barnett is a self-proclaimed childhood Pokemon addict, having played hundreds of hours of the Gameboy title. He says he and a former Stanford colleague Jesse Gomez were discussing an older study from 2014, which observed how the brains of infant macaques responded to letters, cartoons, and Tetris pieces.

"We were joking around and said, 'Wouldn't it be funny if we essentially played the role that the monkeys did,'" Barnett said in a statement. So the two designed their own experiment, but instead of Tetris pieces they decided to use character designs from the original Pokemon games.

"As children we had extensive experience playing Pokemon, hundreds of hours," Barnett explained. "Everyone played on the same Gameboy device, which has the same screen, and kids' arms are roughly the same length. It was like this unintended but well-controlled experiment."

Basically, they were using the popular Nintendo games to figure out whether visual regions in the brain are consistent across different people. In layman's terms, whether the same regions of a brain light up when looking at a person's face. This has been previously shown to be true with faces, but not other images like cars. So perhaps, they realised, it has something to do with the amount of exposure to the image at hand.

For the study, the researchers recruited 11 Pok¨¦mon veterans. They were adults who started playing between ages five and eight, and who could recognise and name all 150 of the original Pocket Monsters, and even continued playing into adulthood. There was also a control group of 11 people that had never played the popular games.

Gomez explained that, being able to identify the images of these Pokemon and the abilities they were capable of was rewarded in the game. So ideally, a kid having played this for hundreds of hours should have developed a region of their brain tied to it. "I figured, if you don't get a region for that, then it's never going to happen," she said.

For the study, the participants were asked to a number of things like naming 40 randomly selected Pok¨¦mon and viewing images of them, all while being scanned for brain activity.

Their findings implied that, for the Pokemon experts, the regions of their brains stimulated for these tasks was in the visual cortex, and yet didn't overlap with areas known to activate for other things like faces, places, or words.

Basically, Barnett and Gomez believe this means your retina plays a huge role in organizing your brain. "As you become an expert with a stimulus-in this case, Pokemon-the average size of that image on the retina may determine where in the brain you'll develop a specialized region for recognizing it," Barnett said.

The two still believe there is so much more to uncover. Their next step, they say, is have Pokemon newbies periodically scanned as they continue to play the games. They hope to in this way determine how much experience a person needs with a stimulus in order for their brain to then be hardwired to it.