7 Surprising Insights About Super Mario
Far from rotting your brain, games like Super Mario may promote mental fitness.
Posted July 7, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Unlike other popular brands from the 1980s, Super Mario has endured, with more iterations of the game offered continually. Like other forms of video games, Super Mario commands various cognitive and motor skills, thus contributing to brain plasticity.
Super Mario has inspired a corpus of psychology research. Here are seven interesting findings from studies involving everyone’s favorite mustachioed plumber.
The authors suggested that the video game training could be used to counteract known risk factors for mental disease, such as a smaller hippocampus and prefrontal cortex volume in post- traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative diseases.
He wrote, “The study positions Super Mario as an ethnically ambivalent figure, capable of engaging a global audience through the use of familiar yet vague stereotypes, not only tied to Italian-ness but also to ‘Mediterranean-ness’ and ‘Latin-ness.’”
Many fans also think that Mario was always a plumber, although he was a carpenter named “Jumpman” in Donkey Kong (1981). The character wasn’t presented as a plumber until the release of Super Mario Bros (1985), as indicated by the underground pipe theme in the game.
Pass observed that older siblings often assume the “player one” position in families, and younger siblings can thus feel like Luigi—overshadowed and desiring their own limelight.
“Yet as we become more mindful consumers of media, we can choose how to frame these narratives. We can celebrate and support the ‘Luigis’ in our lives, offering them chances to excel on their own terms. Meanwhile, recognizing the ways that the ‘Marios’ of the world might inadvertently dominate spaces can encourage them to share the limelight,” Pass concluded.
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Naveed Saleh, M.D., M.S. , attained a medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine and a master's degree in science journalism from Texas A&M.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.