How do you view yourself? (Image: Blizzard Entertainment)

As players who stay up all night fighting imaginary warriors demonstrate, slipping into the skin of an avatar, and inhabiting a virtual world can be riveting stuff. But to what extent does your brain regard your virtual self as you?

Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.

Disentangling how the brain regards avatars versus real individuals may help explain why some people spend large chunks of their life playing immersive online games, says Kristina Caudle, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, who led the study along with her adviser William Kelley.


“It’s hard to imagine from an outsider’s perspective what might drive someone to spend 30 hours a week immersed in a completely imaginary world,” she says. More than 11 million people play World of Warcraft each month.

Innocent or intelligent

Previously, researchers have observed that people easily adopt the persona of their virtual selves, for instance, by acting more aggressively when their avatars are tall than when they are short, irrespective of an individual’s height in the real world.

To probe what brain activity might underlie people’s virtual behaviour, Caudle’s team convinced 15 World of Warcraft players in their twenties – 14 men and 1 woman – who play the game an average of 23 hours a week, to drag themselves away from their computers and spend some time having their brains scanned using functional MRI.

While in the scanner, Caudle asked them to rate how well various adjectives such as innocent, competent, jealous and intelligent described themselves, their avatars, their best friend in the real world and their World of Warcraft guild leader.

Self-reflection

When Caudle’s looked for brain areas that were more active when volunteers thought about themselves and their avatars compared with real and virtual others, two regions stood out: the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. That makes sense as prior research has linked the medial prefrontal cortex to self-reflection and judgement.

Interestingly, however, there was “next to no difference” in the activity in these regions when people thought of themselves and of their avatar, says Caudle, who presented the results at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Caudle’s team also noticed key differences between how people thought about the virtual and real worlds, which must be a necessity for preserving your sense of reality. “Clearly you don’t think of your virtual self as your real self,” she says.

They found activity differed in a region called the precuneus, implicated in imagination. “It makes good sense to me if you’re thinking about things in a virtual world you might get [activation in] these areas,” says Caudle.

Better selves

In the future, Caudle hopes to study volunteers who spend less time playing World of Warcraft to see if there are differences in how their brains discriminate between real and virtual worlds.

It could be that people whose brain activity is more similar when thinking of themselves and their avatars are likelier to end up hooked, she says.

Liane Young, a social neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge is interested in what brain activity can tell us about our relationships to our virtual characters. “You have this control over your avatar such that you’ve created this better version of yourself. I wonder whether these neural processes support reasoning about our better selves in some kind of wishful thinking sense.”