Exposure to traumatic events can often come back to haunt people. Violent crime, car crashes, warfare: all of these bring with them the specter of long term psychiatric issues due to post-traumatic stress. Now a new study suggests that Tetris—yes, that Tetris—might be able to help with that problem.
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!
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has an incidence in the US of around eight percent, although this figure is significantly higher among returning combat veterans and those who live in violent neighborhoods. As the name suggests, it stems from experiencing or viewing traumatic stress, such as that involving death or violent injury, and manifests, among other symptoms, as vivid flashbacks, putting the sufferer back at the scene.
Although we are developing a number of therapies for PTSD, the most effective ones, such as cognitive behavior therapy, are best suited for patients weeks or months post-trauma. And that's where Tetris comes in. A group of researchers at the University of Oxford have been looking at ways to limit the onset of the disorder, by interrupting the brain's memory processing immediately after a traumatic event.
Their work, published in PLoS ONE, builds off a pair of findings. First, the brain has limited resources, and secondly, work on memory consolidation suggests that there is a six-hour window within which disruption of that consolidation is possible. Put another way, there's only so much your brain can do at once, and if you distract it within that six-hour window, you can prevent the memory being fully formed.
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 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.
The authors suggest that the brain's ability to lay down the foundations of PTSD get interrupted by having to use the same pathways to concentrate on playing Tetris, and that the game might be used as a "cognitive vaccine" in the early post-trauma period by emergency services. Does this mean we'll see Gameboys added to EMT kits along with the bandages?
PLoS ONE, 2009. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004153