Tetris cures war

I thought it was only good for killing time. But no, Tetris is precisely the opposite of the trauma that combat inflicts on the human psyche. If you or your loved one is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it may well be that it's because there isn't a Tetris game in your home.

I'm not kidding about this. As reported in Ars Technica, researchers at Oxford have found that a heady Tetris jones works as a kind of cognitive vaccine to the horrible effects of PTSD. Working with subjects who have recently undergone deeply traumatic experiences of the sort that may later induce PTSD, the Oxonian game therapists have found that playing a lot of Tetris right after some serious shit goes down in your life will keep you from getting freaked out later on.

On the face of it, Tetris seems like such a simple game. You move blocks around on a screen to complete lines, all to a catchy Russian-inspired MIDI melody. But the game's simple appearance belies the complexity within; playing Tetris is an involved visuospatial task that utilises the pathways in the brain associated with visual memory. It's strong stuff too; I'm sure many of you are familiar with the sensation of seeing tetrominos in your head after a long Tetris session. Indeed, this phenomenon has been clinically documented!

[snip]

Since PTSD flashbacks involve a strong visuospatial component, distracting those pathways from their trauma with another activity might be expected to interfere with the condition. And that's just what they discovered.

The [Oxford research] team used an experimental model that involved showing volunteers a short (12-minute) film of traumatic scenes of real life injury and death, a well-established experimental analog for PTSD. After a 30-minute interval (chosen as it's the average wait in an ER in the US), the subjects then either played 10 minutes of Tetris or sat quietly. Following this, they kept a diary for the next week in which they recorded any flashbacks to the film. The Tetris-playing group reported significantly fewer flashbacks both during the 10-minute task, and across the course of the week, than those who spent the 10 minutes sitting quietly.

When I started off my day this morning, I had no idea what the heck a "tetromino" even was! Now I realize that their presense in my brain may be the only reason why I'm even socially functional these days!