Analyzing the brains of adults who played Pokémon as kids, researchers found that this set of people possess a brain area that is stimulated markedly more by cartoon characters than to other varieties of pictures. This research methodology has further furnished us unprecedented profundity into the brain’s organization of amassed visual information. This generality is crucial to the neurological study.

In the first stage of the experimental trials, they quizzed all of the participants on the names of pokémon to make sure the poke-connoisseurs surely knew their Dodrios from their Dugtrios. Henceforth, they scanned the participants’ brains while showing them photographs of all the original 150 pokémon, in sets of eight, amongst other images, like those of animals, dung, cars, words, galleries and other toons. Among experienced players, a particular region responded definitively and consistently strongly to the images of pokémon than those of other objects or things. For such subjects, who were uninitiated in the myriad terminologies of poke-logy, this region, the occipitotemporal sulcus which is frequently responsible for processing animal images, didn’t exhibit a preference for pokémon over other animals.

Usually, children, as their brains are still pliable, are rigorously taught to recognize a new visual stimulus and then it is observed as to which brain region reacts to it. Study co-author Jesse Gomez, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was inspired by this type of research on monkeys. But “it seems a little bit unethical to have a kid come in and trap them for eight hours a day and have them learn a new visual stimulus,” Gomez says. Teaching a new visual stimulus is an arduous and fastidiously-controlled procedure. It is to be ensured that all test subjects are subjected to the very same picture with the fairly exact same brightness and viewed from the same distance of viewing, and it needs to be recurrently impressed upon their minds, warranting repeated viewing.

“I spent almost as much time playing that [1990s original Game Boy Pokemon] game as I did the reading and stuff, at least for a couple of years when I was six and seven,” Gomez says. For everyone in that generation, they all saw the same images (static black-and-white pokémon), and most of them poised the device about 12 inches away from their eyes, thus constituting an ideal empirical trial, fulfilling all prerequisites.

These inferred findings substantiate a hypothesis called “eccentricity bias,” which proposes that the dimensions of the pictures one is looking at and whether one is looking at it with central or peripheral vision will determine which area of the brain will respond to the relevant stimulus. This particular region is associated with people looking directly at an image. Since everyone obviously played their games, gazing at it with their central-most vision, this requisite was ticked off.