Jörn Diedrichsen leans over a keyboard, adjusting settings for a game of Pac-Man that will soon run inside an fMRI scanner at Western University in London, Canada. The maze-chasing classic isn’t just for fun—it’s a tool to map how real brains adapt in real time. For decades, brain scans have relied on stillness and simple tasks: look at a shape, press a button. But life isn’t like that. We’re always moving, predicting, reacting. Now, thanks to a bold new project, scientists are capturing the brain in motion—playing, learning, and adjusting.
The Digital Brain Project, backed by Meta, brings together researchers from around the world to build one of the largest open datasets of human brain activity ever made. At its heart is a simple idea: if we want to understand the brain, we need to study it doing what it evolved to do—navigate complex, changing worlds. That’s where video games come in. By having people play immersive games like Pac-Man inside scanners, neuroscientists can watch how the brain shifts during a continuous loop of prediction, action, and feedback.
Diedrichsen and his colleague Jody Culham, Canada Research Chair in Immersive Neuroscience, are leading this shift. Their labs have developed over 60 different tasks that participants can do while being scanned, pushing the brain into many different states. Unlike traditional resting-state scans, which capture random brain fluctuations, this multitask method actively explores a wider landscape of thought and behavior. One key insight: when someone plays Pac-Man, their brain is engaged in a 'closed loop' with the game—predicting ghost movements, adjusting direction, learning from mistakes. When researchers compared players to people just watching the game or moving a controller without effect, the brain activity was completely different.
The games being used aren’t off-the-shelf titles. They’re built from the ground up with rich 3D environments and first-person avatars, designed to challenge perception, decision-making, and motor control. Even classic tasks like kart racing are included, not for nostalgia, but as precise tools to measure how the brain adapts when the environment changes unexpectedly. Every turn, every collision, every near-miss lights up new neural pathways.
This approach could transform how we understand brain function—helping decode everything from learning and attention to disorders like ADHD and autism, where prediction and adaptation often go awry. And because the data will be openly shared, scientists everywhere can explore it. The brain’s complexity may finally be met with a method complex enough to match it.