Tetris Reduces PTSD; Pub Quiz Makes It Worse
Researchers look into video games' effects on flashbacks
By Give 'em Health / William Weir
November 10, 2010|12:00 p.m.
The old-school video game Tetris has proven to be effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder by reducing flashbacks of traumatic memories.
That's the finding of a study out of Oxford University, published this week in PloS ONE.
For the experiment, the researchers had 60 subjects watch a movie with images of traumatic injuries, an established method of studying effects of trauma.
For 30 minutes after the film, 20 of the subjects played Tetris for 10 minutes. For the Nintendo-deprived, Tetris is a puzzle game in which players try to fit falling blocks of varying shape in the most space-efficient manner. Another group of 20 subjects played Pub Quiz, a video quiz game. The third group of subjects did nothing.
The Tetris players had significantly fewer flashbacks of the film than either of the two groups. Oddly, the subjects who played Pub Quiz had significantly more flashbacks than the other two groups.
The researchers conducted a second similar experiment, except the games were played four hours after watching the film. This experiment produced similar results.
So why is Tetris so soothing, and why would Pub Quiz exacerbate bad memories?
The researchers note that the brain is separated into two channels: the sensory and the conceptual. Traumatic images are perceived largely by the sensory channel — that's why car crash victims often don't have coherent memories of what happened. Because the Tetris game emphasizes the sensory part of the brain, it competes with the traumatic images.
As for Pub Quiz, it plays to the part of the brain that makes sense of experiences. Therefore, they competed with the subjects' ability to analyze the images they saw, making their post-movie experience more traumatic.
