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JESSE GOMEZ: During childhood we have what
we call the critical window.
Basically as soon as you open your eyes,
until about maybe the age of 10, your brain
is motivated to have brain cells become
dedicated or very sensitive to things that you look at a lot.
Things like faces, we look at faces a lot.
We have to recognize numbers.
In school, we learn to read words.
If you can predict where in the brain
that something from the outside world
encodes it into information that means that you can probably
take kids and show them something new
and find out where in the brain it was represented.
But there's no way I'm going to get ethical approval
to bring kids in, have them learn
like a new visual stimulus.
It would take years.
But I realized that the 1990s had already done it.
The Pokemon game, which came out in 1997 in America, you know,
if you don't get a brain region for that,
then there's like no hope.
So, yeah, that's basically where it started.
My name is Jesse Gomez.
I have a PhD in neuroscience.
And I'm interested in studying brain development, how
the brain gets to it's kind of ideal adult state
from childhood.
And so by figuring out what's different between children
and adults, you can figure out what the building blocks
are for important aspects of our perception, our cognition.
The other important thing is that you can also now study
how it is now developed.
And so we can potentially come up
with remedial strategies for helping kids
with learning disabilities to overcome whatever is going on.
Usually by the time you're five your brain is mostly
fully grown.
But there's a lot of fine-scale changes that take place.
We think there are changes happening inside of the cortex.
There seems to be tissue growing.
You can think of it kind of like a garden
where you have some plants.
But over time, you might have like more complex branches
that grow.
The visual cortex is very fun in my opinion.
And we use it for a reason.
Basically, the image of the world
gets projected onto your retina.
And then that image is essentially
carried to your brain and maintains its shape.
So if you were looking at like a big letter A,
you would see the letter A, basically an activity
on your cortex.
We call that a retinotopic map.
And then it turns out your brain has many of these visual field
maps.
And this image gets processed in each map going forward.
And then you enter a part of the brain we
call high level visual cortex.
And there what you find are clusters
of cells that seem to process important objects,
like faces or words; things like books, or mugs, or something.
Things that you don't necessarily
have to perceive fine-grained differences between one
type or another, we don't think you get a brain region for.
We think in terms of developing a brain region,
and being really fast and efficient,
that's something that has to happen in childhood.
And the big question for us is, how does it change in response
to experience?
And are there important differences between people?
The region in your brain involved in reading,
we called the visual word form area.
In some labs, they scanned adults who were illiterate,
who never learned to read.
And they don't have that brain region.
So that was pretty definitive evidence
that you get a brain region for something that you've
learned from childhood.
Pokemon came in because I saw a paper come out a few years ago.
Marge Livingstone had taken some baby monkeys.
And they basically saw like Tetris figures on a screen.
These monkeys developed brain regions in response
to these new stimuli, which was really cool.
That proved that you could probably
take kids and show them something new
and find out about where in the brain it was represented.
The more and more I thought about Pokemon,
the more I realized that they were
like a perfect foil for the monkey experiment in 1997.
They released the Gameboy game.
That was perfect because Pokemon are really small
and they all look very similar.
And so there's a Pokemon up here,
that you look at, that you have to recognize and figure out
what type is it, what level is it,
which Pokemon should I use to fight against it?
the Pokemon would always appear in the same spot.
Kids held them at, like, pretty much the same distance.
And so that was a very important part of one
of our visual theories, is because they
have consistent input, that's what
leads to those different brain regions specializing
for a stimulus.
"Catch them all" is the whole, like, model of the franchise.
And so it was really built into the cartoon show,
into the trading cards of the game,
for you to recognize all these characters.
And so there was a lot of I guess
motivation for the brain to store all of this information.
SPEAKERS: Who is that Pokemon?
JESSE GOMEZ: Koffing, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Magnemite-- oh, ah,
Groudon, Staryu, Psyduck, Dragonite, Mewtoo, Chansey,
Charizard.
That's a Digimon.
[LAUGHTER]
I was an early Guinea pig given that I
knew that I was someone that was confident,
had had a lot of experience.
So I didn't see it in my brain.
And that would have been a pretty early nail in the coffin
I think.
So basically when you have increased activity in one brain
region, there will be an influx of oxygenated blood.
And so we can detect that with fMRI.
I saw this brain activity in a part
of the brain that wasn't overlapping with other stuff.
So I scanned more people.
Basically, we scanned a group of adults
who started playing when they were
kids and a group of adults who never played the Pokemon game.
What we found essentially was that not too far away
from where you have parts of your brain
that recognize faces, inside of this kind of little valley
in here called the occipital temporal sulcus, that's
where we saw pieces of the brain that responded preferentially
to Pokemon more than any other visual stimulus in those people
who had played it when they were kids.
In the control subjects, that part of the brain
didn't respond more than any other stimulus.
The study suggested, at least by the age of nine or 10,
your brain is still sensitive to visual experience in terms
of developing a potentially new representation for a stimulus
that you become an expert with.
And the other thing is for Pokemon
we think that the image that the Pokemon makes on your retina
is very tiny.
It's only a degree or two.
That's why we predicted the information is
kind of preferentially processed on the lateral side here.
So that's useful for us because then it
gets us closer to how the brain is operating
and so we can understand what's going
wrong during like a deficit of some sort.
The brain is very plastic.
It's very responsive to experience.
And if anything, it's very interesting.
And it suggests that our brain can
respond to more experience than what we're potentially
giving it.
So, yeah, I don't think video games have done anything bad.
If anything, it shows that our brain is capable of much more
than we originally thought it was.
LUKE GROSKIN: Hi, there.
This is Luke Groskin, video producer for Science Friday.
Thanks for watching.
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