If you can still name every one of the original 150 Pokémon from its silhouette, that skill may be written into your visual cortex. A 2019 brain-imaging study found that adults who played the Game Boy games as young children have a patch of cortex that responds more strongly to Pokémon than to faces, animals, cars or words.
Who ran the study
The work was led by Jesse Gomez, then at Stanford, with Stanford neuroscientist Kalanit Grill-Spector and Michael Barnett. It appeared in Nature Human Behaviour in May 2019 under the title “Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex.”
How the experiment worked
The team compared two small groups of adults: 11 people who started playing Pokémon between roughly ages 5 and 8 and came back to it later in life, and 11 people who had little or no experience with the games.
- A knowledge check first. The experienced players had to prove they really knew the characters by naming them.
- Then the scanner. Everyone lay in an fMRI machine while viewing the Gen 1 Pokémon mixed with other image types, including faces, animals, cartoons, bodies, words, cars and hallways.
In the experienced players, a region called the occipitotemporal sulcus lit up more for Pokémon than for the other categories. The novices showed no such preference. The effect was consistent enough that the researchers could spot it in individual brains, not only in group averages.
Why Pokémon made a good test
Neuroscientists have long wanted to know what decides where the brain stores a new visual category. Training children on an unfamiliar set of images for hundreds of hours would answer it, but no one can ethically run that experiment.
Gomez realised a generation of kids had already run it on themselves. The original Red and Blue games gave every player the same thing:
- The same small, pixelated sprites on a tiny screen.
- The same viewing distance, with the Game Boy held close to the face.
- Hours of repeated exposure during the years when the visual system is still forming.
That uniformity made childhood Pokémon play a ready-made training dataset.
What it tells us about the brain
The result supports a theory called eccentricity bias. It holds that where an image lands in your field of view, in the sharp centre or the blurry periphery, and how large it appears, helps decide which part of the cortex learns to handle it. Game Boy sprites are small and are looked at head-on with central vision, and the Pokémon-responsive region sits in cortex that favours central vision. Face-recognition areas sit in similar territory, which fits: we also look straight at faces.
In other words, it was not the creatures’ shape or cuteness that decided where they were stored. It was how children looked at them.
What it means for collectors
Nothing in the study measured card collecting, so it says nothing about value. It does offer one plausible reason why Base Set and other Gen 1 cards hold such a pull on buyers who grew up in the late 1990s: those images were learned during a window when the brain was still deciding where to file new categories. For some of that generation, the scans suggest Charizard, Blastoise and Venusaur occupy their own corner of the visual cortex.
The follow-up question
Gomez has suggested the same approach could be applied to sound. Each Pokémon has its own cry in the games, so a future study could look for a matching “Pokémon region” in the auditory cortex of people who heard those cries thousands of times as kids.