The maddeningly addictive tile-matching game Tetris is good for more than just whiling away the hours – it also can prevent PTSD, researchers say.
The video-game classic is still going strong after more than 30 years, mainly because of its simple goal of lining up and getting rid of more and more falling blocks, or Tetriminos.
It turns out that its immersive quality also makes it a therapeutic tool for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“We wanted to have a task that really tapped into visual memory. With Tetris, it’s the colors, shapes and movements that are very absorbing,” said Prof. Emily Holmes, an expert in psychology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the BBC reported.
“Other games in the lab, like pub quiz games or counting tasks, didn’t work. So we think it needs to be visual,” said Holmes, who has spent many years studying the game’s medical merits.
Gamers who spend hours gazing at the falling pieces end up seeing them also in their thoughts and dreams – a phenomenon dubbed the “Tetris effect,” which can ease the impact of traumatic events.
Her team at the University of Oxford gave Tetris therapy to 71 volunteer patients at John Radcliff Hospital suffering from shock after traffic accidents. They were asked to visualize their accidents and then play the game on a Nintendo console.
After 20 minutes, disturbing memories of the events stopped being formed.
“Our findings suggest that if you engage in very visually demanding tasks soon after a trauma, this can help block or disrupt the memory being stored in an overly vivid way,” Holmes said.
There is a roughly a six-hour window of opportunity after a traumatic event for such an intervention to succeed, she noted.
In the study, those who underwent Tetris therapy were far less likely to experience terrifying flashbacks of their crashes than those who did not receive the intervention.
Holmes said that if more extensive studies prove equally successful, Tetris could end up being a viable therapy in other hospitals.
“It would make a huge difference to a great many people if we could create simple behavioral psychological interventions using computer games to prevent post-traumatic suffering and spare them these grueling intrusive memories,” she said, Sky News reported. “This is early days and more research is needed.”
The study, which included Holmes’ Oxford colleague Lali Iyadurai, was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.