My LEGO Nexus Organization

Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related

BROOKLYN, NY—Nearly 50 percent of 26-year-old paralegal Philip Jenkins' encoded long-term memories involve button combinations, game-playing experiences, and spatial-cognitive maps of various levels and worlds from Nintendo's line of video-game consoles, a team of neuroscientists reported Tuesday.

The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the Charlotte Hornets 82-81 in NBA Jam: Tournament Edition.
Enlarge Image Nintendo

Jenkins makes room for new Wii tennis–based memories by eradicating moments from his high school graduation and a 1994 trip to a local aquarium.

Although these percentages are only slightly above the average for males in Jenkins' age bracket, McCarroll said that the memories most closely associated with the interactive gaming systems can be accessed far more quickly than any of his memories involving school, work, or family.

"It takes Mr. Jenkins 4.33 milliseconds to retrieve the memory of holding his newborn sister for the first time, but just 1.09 milliseconds to retrieve the memory of knocking Pikachu off the Sector Z platform with Donkey Kong's 'ground pound' maneuver in Super Smash Bros.," McCarroll said. "In fact, the only school-related memory he is able to review as vividly as the underwater-bomb-defusing level of Nintendo Entertainment System's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is his first day of college, which was spent playing multiplayer GoldenEye 007 with his roommates."

According to an fMRI of Jenkins' brain regions during the process of memory recall, his parietal lobe registers the same amount of activity when he hears the word "mother" as it does when he hears the words "Banjo Kazooie."

"Due to sheer repetition in his peak synaptic years for processing new information, every neural strand in Philip's basal ganglia is embedded with the Konami Code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start," McCarroll said.

Nintendo-based memories are also among Jenkins' most frequently retrieved, researcher Dr. Francis Holbrook said. A series of recent tests suggest that when Jenkins accesses stored information in response to visual or mental cues, he is most likely to remember his family's trip to Disney World, followed by the time he beat the dreaded Stage 57 on Bubble Bobble without losing a life, the first time he rode a bike, the exact route he made Bo Jackson run to defeat his friend Jason Whitner at Tecmo Bowl, hiding underneath his covers while his parents fought noisily in the adjoining room, and the locations of the three warp whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3.

"On Friday, we showed Mr. Jenkins a series of images meant to elicit memories of times of great pain and confusion in his life," Holbrook said. "The first two events that came to the fore of his psyche were an incident in late 2000 when the screen froze just as he was about to set a new 'best lap' record on Wave Race 64, and his great-grandmother's funeral."

Holbrook also suggested that as much as 17 percent of Jenkins' cerebellum capacity may be filled with motor-coordination skills of the various Nintendo system controllers, including the Power Glove, the Power Pad mat, and the special joystick issued by Capcom for the Super NES edition of Street Fighter II.

Some researchers have theorized that the amount of space Jenkins' brain allocates for Nintendo-based memories has resulted in damage to or the complete loss of his non-Nintendo-based memories. They note that although Jenkins cannot remember his father's cell phone number (415-547-6823) off the top of his head, he can recite without hesitation the password that allows you to view the credits in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (106-113-0120).

In a parallel study, a team of Columbia University behavioral psychologists suggested that Nintendo-related feats and accomplishments also account for approximately 75 percent of Jenkins' self-esteem.

"Unsurprisingly, Mr. Jenkins' self-perception draws from the most important moments in his life, and is framed largely by the time he hit a game-winning grand slam with Saul in NES's Little League Baseball to help the New York team win the tournament," Dr. Gary Nordstrom said. "It is not uncommon for men his age to measure themselves by their greatest athletic achievements, and this is without a doubt Mr. Jenkins'."

The findings also revealed that about 60 percent of Jenkins' repressed memories may involve Nintendo. In a Rorschach inkblot test administered to him, Jenkins compared a series of amorphous shapes to a bird eating its young, his mother brandishing a broadsword, and the entire cast of characters from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.

 :o :o :o

That... is just epically frightening.

O_o...

Thank god I'm not addicted to video games...

Ouch.
You never know...
Dats why I don't have a Nintendo.

Whoa...that reminds me of that part of Paper Mario: TTYD when the Shadow Queen cast darkness across the world xP

While I admit that's pretty...unsettling, I'm probably actually WORSE than him. I have a video game moment for everything.

Thats just sad, really sad.
Epic fail.

I am guessing this happens to some degree in all gamers...

Sort of spam, try to stay on topic please. ;)

Okay, I read it a second time, and maybe I'm not worse than this guy. I don't know the Konomi Code, and I know my mom's and dad's cell phone numbers well. But seriously...I know he's bad, but I'm probably only like 15 percent better. I still remember the entire sequence of the first time I fought King Goomba in Paper Mario, and I can clearly remember what I said when I got my Wii.

Ok yes, I'm probably a little scary. But I will agree this guy is in bad shape mentally O_o

Well, it gives us all a chance to improve our odds of becoming like that guy. Pay attention to important things, have balance in our lives, moderation in all things, and avoid becoming like him.

I used to be a bit like that...  I barely play any games now.

DT: Even if you're worse, at least you realize it ;)

No life, anybody? =P

Thankfully, I'm not that bad. ::)

PRobably. I can hardly recall some of childhood memories. Either they were replaced or buried, or I blocked them from my mind for some reason.

Whoa, that's alot of memory dedicated to Nintendo, I'm addicted to video games, fortunately, other things have managed to obliterate it.

-I don't think I'm that close to being that guy though :P.

I'm sadly addicted to video games. I have many times thought about the fact that I'm wasting my life, but have never been able to quit (Or slow down, I'm not giving them up entirely. I spend too much money on them to quit.)

After reading that, I'm motivated.

-Canama

that is... pathetic. luckily i am not addicted to video games and remember things like my parents phone numbers. i do know some people like that...

That's bad. But, I'm the same way, except with books. Ask me anything about a book I've read, and I can tell you word for word what it says.

Wow. And I memorize our numbers so my friends can call me and we can text. It's not pathetic.

Kit, how could the loss of a lifetime of memories to a video game be anything less than pathetic??

No, that is. But not the memorizing phone numbers.

No one said memorizing phone numbers was pathetic.. I think you misread. :)

*re-reads* Well at least I didn't over-react this time. :D

Now I'm glad about my mom prevents me from playing for a certain amount of time. If there is a very good moment, then I'll just photograph it instead of leaving it to my memory. 

The odd part here is that I can easily memorize my parent's, but not mine. O_o

Even so, at least 98% of my memory is devoted to my life.

sorry for confusing you kit. i memorize a few phone numbers. i meant to say he could remember a code for an old game rather than his dad's phone number.

I don't even know my own cell phone number. I never have seen it anywhere.

But anyone who I'd ever have any reason to call does, so I'm happy.

Edit: Waitaminute, this is just an article from The Onion. It's fake! It's a joke!

-Canama

The Onion? OMG!!! Wow, I love The Onion, they're hilarious. But OMG, can't believe we thought it was real...XD

I got kinda suspicious after a while, it sounded so farfetched, especially the use of brain components (I'm only a kid, but I definitely don't think they used them right)... I put the title of the article into Google, and found that it was an Onion article, word for word.

And Brooklyn, NY... As a video game nerd, I can tell you that that is Mario's home in the old cartoons and instruction manuals of original games. It's too perfect.

I feel stupid for being fooled at all.

-Canama

(http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif)(http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif)(http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif) Pretty good, huh?? (http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif)(http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif)(http://images.zaazu.com/img/laughing-smiley-male-smiley-laugh-smiley-emoticon-000288-large.gif)

You KNEW!? lol, that was good...well done MsRR! Well done... XD
P.S. Where do you get all these cool emoticons?

Wow, Thats just pitiful... One more of Gods great creations down the drain....

it is fake mæster x

you do realize msrr if someone else did something like this you would be very upset.

Lighten up dude. I thought it was funny. :P

*Smashes head through nearby tv for not noticing the sheer insanity of the article*

I thought about it for a while afterword. After a few minutes, I realized, wait a minute, that sounds absurd!

-Canama

@ kit: no it is just that msrr overreacts when people do stuff like that to her and i don't like hypocrisy.

i knew when they said some stuff was somewhat average it was probably fake.

O_O It was fake? I got pwned...-_-

Nice one MsRR. xD You've been outdoing Blade with your pranks lately...

I think you're the one overreacting, it was funny. ::)

The reason this was so believable is because just about everyone who read it has gotten drawn in by a game to the point that they found this article to be possible.  Have any of you watched a pre teen get lost for half a day in a game?? Or been lost in a game?? 
I have seen kids who let games take over their lives.. glued to a DS all day  while their friends and classmates are out playing soccer, riding bikes, having lives. How far from that is this?

So, yeah.. laugh.. but never forget it.

Oh you had me fooled big time MSRR, That was a good prank... ::)

I never said it wasn't. =P

@MsRR-Like I said, I'm probably worse than him. So yes, I have been glued to a DS more than him. Even if him is nonexistent. =P

If I still had my Ds I probably would be the same, I had the castle of Bowser memorized.

OK.. lets take this one step further.. if none of this bothers you guys, then that means you'd be OK with someone running the country in 15 years who's memory is over half video games??  Or performing delicate surgery on your firstborn child??  Or Flying t he plane your family is on??  No wonder we are falling so far behind the rest of the world without a fight!

I play soccer and all that stuff. I only play video games about twice a month for 2 hours at most, but typicaly an hour. :o And I have a Wii and Xbox-360.

It is a sad footnote that if a gradeschooler got an A and beat a game in the same day, when asked how their day was, the game would likely come first.

@someone like that having a career-Yeah, I don't think someone like that would hold his job that long. =P And it's not like I can't focus on other things. I'm still a straight A student, and I've probably played over 300 hours of video games in the past 12 months.

@Grades thing-well yeah, someone can get an A every day. But it's not likely you'll beat a video game every day.

i usually get an A every day. and school comes second for me (after religion).

DT does have a point. What if you're a horrible gamer, but get great grades, and for once beat a game that you could never beat, in the same day you got that grade? ;)

Anyway, to the main article, I thought that seemed a little weird, but I think I've heard weirder, so... But I got it when I found out it was fake. And the Brooklyn reference never really kicked in at first, so that has to point to something. =P

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/23/pilots-should-have-had-warning-airport-approach/

I think we ought to be worried enough as it is. :P Hopefully the pilots you talk about will have played flight simulators. It's because Xbawx Live degrades the American public only after TV.

She was just making an example,I don't think it actually HAPPENED. ;)

But yeah, those pilots were TOTALLY asleep. End of story. =P

That story gave some pretty good fake examples...it really was somewhat believable.

Hey don't be hating on Xbox live.

Can't help it when the large amount of 11 and under kids who scream into mics dominate it.  :P

I've had the same problem with that while playing PS3 though.

And then there's this that "." posted in CTAM:

(http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/song-chart-memes-video-games.jpg)

i found that graph and posted it in ctam. i should get some credit msrr. D:

i do play pokemon and gta...

Heey, that's not....actually that is true. O_o

I don't get how Pokemon has to do with selfi...

I get it now... -_-

And I have to agree with DT on this one... O_o

I agree with those two ^

I thought I left my Pokemon days behind me, yet I still have a whole box under my bed with the stuff.

I guess the key is balance..

is isn't just kid's that are staring at a computer/ds all day. though pokemon isn't that bad. and i posted it originally as a joke; therefor, i should get credit for finding the grph D=

it could be a grandmother that has been on a forum for 240+ hours

You did get credit for the graph... *points to post where graph is*

I saw that!It is 100 hours, and often I am doing other things at the same time...

i hoped you would say something like that. i got around 4 days for accidently leavin my computer on, out of my 8 days >.>

thank you for giving me credit =)

at least you have irl friends.. *doesn't mention name*

I gave you credit the first time you asked.. :D

i didn't see it >.>

though i originally posted it as a joke, not to be taken seriously.

bump.. since the Onion was mentioned in CTAM

(not sure what the onion has to do with this)

This is only 'scary' if interpreted that way.

The article is from The Onion. ;)

this is what I get for not reading topics at 12 in the night

town fool here everybody come for the laughs stay for the inevitable stupidity

LOLZ.. it was over 20 posts before anyone figured it out...

...but really, I'm sure at least 70% of my knowledge is from fiction. The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter make up at least 20%. Add in every other book I've read, and movie I've watched (I can recite every camera angle, musical piece and line of dialogue from multiple movies), the Bionicle saga, and only THEN do we get to video games. I know where almost every corner of every map from CoD and Ghost Recon, not to mention Deus Ex. Oh yeah, and all the songs I've memorized.

So, basically, the Onion is one of the best sources, not for news, but for cultural truths.

again i wish this site had a like button. that was a wonderfully well said post KF. :)

We have this
 <3 and  :clap:

and agreed.