Chynna (China) just not exactly spelled right | Lvl 29 Trash Rat | ♎Rising ♑Moon ♋Sun ♊️Mercury, Venus & Mars | Local Bi & Ecchi Degenerate
She/her 🦀 ✨
The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.
The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.
That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.
And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.
Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.
Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.
London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.
The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.
If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.
Happy to announce that I've been able to sing an original song produced by @teddyloid for @honkaistarrail !
The song was so much fun to sing and it's a dream come true to work with Teddyloid! I hope you all enjoy the song!
https://t.co/IkGlVIfBzT
YouTube indie filmmakers are taking over the horror genre:
• Shelby Oaks by Chris Stuckmann
• Iron Lung by Markiplier
• Backrooms by Kane Parsons (coming later this year)
🎁Event With Rewards
Version 4.0 Trailer: "No Aha at Full Moon" | Honkai: Star Rail
Once upon a time in a paradise within the painted scroll, the vacant divine throne smiled, awaiting those who seek godhood to don their masks and entertain the masses. Amidst the scorching fires of the cosmos, the god is nowhere to be found, but THEY left a reward for those who desire Elation... "One Minute of Godhood".
English Voice:
March 7th — Skyler Davenport
Evanescia — Nathalie Ferare
Pearl — Cat Protano
Yao Guang — Ari Thrash
Dan Heng — Nicholas Leung
Sparxie — Lizzie Freeman
Himeko — Cia Court
Sparkle — Lizzie Freeman
Lygus — Blythe Melin
Ashveil — Blythe Melin
Follow this account and repost/quote this post to participate in the event
20 lucky winners will be randomly selected to receive gift cards worth approximately 25 USD.
Deadline: 2026/2/13 23:59 (UTC+8)
#HonkaiStarRail
IRON LUNG retakes the #1 spot at the domestic box office this Wednesday, making $1.7M.
It’s breaking $30M+ domestically this weekend, 10x its budget already!
‘IRON LUNG’ will be in theaters for another week, and Markiplier is planning a home release
“As far as getting it packaged up for a home release with DVD, Blu-ray, stuff like that - having it be purchasable digitally or rentable - that is all being worked”
Dear Markiplier,
please make a directors cut or behind the scenes of iron lung with your little camera in the corner reacting to it like a youtube video, that shit would be so funny and i WILL be watching
sincerely,
Trout Teeth