Forget the Pokédex, our brains contain a ‘rich cognitive map’ of Pokémon

polygon.com:

It’s hard to overestimate the global popularity of Pokémon. For over 25 years, the beloved monsters have evolved to fit lots of facets of popular culture, like anime, video games, trading card games, and even McDonald’s. Pikachu and friends became the defining feature of an entire generation of kids who grew up loving the series. Here at Polygon, we tend to analyze the games themselves and reflect on what it’s like to play them. But thanks to science, we can also understand how playing Pokémon influences the actual growth and development of the human brain.

Jesse Gomez is an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and basically a real-life Professor Oak. At Princeton, he researches cognitive neuroscience and brain development. While pursuing his work as a Ph.D. student at Stanford University School of Medicine, he led a study published in the journal of Nature Human Behavior in 2019 that identified a brain region that appeared to be especially fond of Pokémon — and it only activated if you grew up playing the game. His work doesn’t just have implications for longtime Pokémon fans; now Pokémon is helping Gomez understand important questions about brain development. In a recent call with Polygon, Gomez told us more about his research, and what it might mean for those of us who have grown up loving Pokémon.

Gomez, who told Polygon his favorite Pokémon is Bulbasaur, said he had always been interested in brain development. He explained to Polygon that the parts of our brains that read words or recognize faces appear in the same region of everyone’s brain, and that’s always puzzled him. Before his study, Margaret Livingstone’s lab at Harvard conducted a study that trained monkeys to recognize Helvetica