The Interface Is the Curriculum

In a study published in 2019, researchers put adults who had played Pokémon extensively as children into an fMRI scanner. When those adults looked at Pokémon, a particular part of their visual cortex responded selectively, in a consistent location across the experienced players. The novices didn't show the same pattern. (Gomez, Barnett, and Grill-Spector's study compared eleven experienced players with eleven novices. The selectivity appeared in the occipitotemporal sulcus. The authors connected its location to the shared visual conditions of childhood play: small sprites, viewed centrally, on a Game Boy.) This wasn't evidence that Pokémon players have identical brains. The finding concerned functional responses to familiar images, not shared anatomy or personality. I keep thinking about the screen. Those children encountered the same little images through the same constrained piece of hardware, over and over, while learning which distinctions mattered. That makes me wonder about all…