Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, and fine motor control.
The study was led by Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She gave 23 adults a Nintendo DS and told them to play Super Mario 64 for at least 30 minutes a day for two months. A control group played nothing. MRI scans taken before and after showed that the Mario group had measurable increases in grey matter in the right hippocampus, the right prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum, and the increases were not found in the control group.
The hippocampus is where the brain stores spatial maps. Super Mario 64 is a game built entirely around navigating three-dimensional space, jumping between platforms, remembering which doors lead where, and building a mental model of a world that does not exist. The brain treats a virtual world the same way it treats a real one: it maps it, stores it, and grows to accommodate it.
The prefrontal cortex handles planning and strategy, which the game demands constantly. The cerebellum handles timing and coordination, which every jump requires. The brain was not just entertained. It was being trained, and the tissue responded the same way muscle responds to a weight: it got bigger.
Kuhn said the results suggest that video game training could be used as a therapy for conditions where these brain regions are reduced, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related brain shrinkage. The prescription is a plumber in a red hat, 30 minutes a day. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24166407/
https://x.com/anishmoonka/status/2099672047735414940?s=20
If you played Pokemon as a kid, your brain built a region specifically for recognising Pokemon characters, and it is still there. A 2019 study at Stanford, published in Nature Human Behaviour, scanned the brains of adults who played the game before age eight and found a dedicated patch of visual cortex that lights up for Pikachu the way another part lights up for faces.
The researcher, Jesse Gomez, was himself a childhood Pokemon player, and he recruited 11 adults who had played the original Game Boy games as children and 11 who had not. When both groups were shown images of Pokemon characters inside a brain scanner, the experienced players showed strong activation in a specific fold called the occipitotemporal sulcus. The non-players showed almost no response there.
The reason the brain carved out a region for Pokemon comes down to how the game was played. A child staring at a small Game Boy screen is looking at tiny characters in the centre of their field of vision, hour after hour, during the years when the visual cortex is most willing to be shaped. The brain treats those hours the same way it treats hours of looking at faces or reading words: it builds a dedicated processing region for whatever it sees the most.
The finding confirmed a theory called eccentricity bias, which predicts that the size and location of an object on your retina during childhood determines where the brain will store it. Small, central objects end up in a different part of the cortex than large, peripheral ones, and Pokemon characters, viewed on a tiny screen held close to the face, landed exactly where the theory predicted.
Your childhood Game Boy is still inside your skull. The hours you spent catching them all built a piece of your brain that is there right now, waiting to recognise a Charmander. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31061489/
https://x.com/anishmoonka/status/2099656947909922990?s=20
