More than 30 years after its release, Tetris is still making news. Yes, it has become the go-to game of long car rides and commutes to work, but there is now another reason why the popular game of organization is in the headlines. Scientists say that playing Tetris can block flashbacks of traumatic events, lowering the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to The Independent.
Emily Holmes, a professor of psychology, was the lead researcher of the study in which 56 people were exposed to video containing distressing events. The next day the group of people were shown still photos of the footage they watched the previous day.
"After any event, there is a window of about six hours where memories are consolidated and cemented in the mind," Holmes explained
They were then split into two groups, as one group spent 12 minutes playing Tetris while the other group sat and did nothing for the same amount of time, according to The Daily Mail. All of the participants were then asked to keep a journal for seven days, marking any occasion when they had intrusive memories from the videos they saw. The group that played Tetris experienced 51 percent fewer memories of the distressing footage.
Visual processing seems to be the key when factoring in "bad memory erasing," or as Holmes calls it, "cognitive blockade." Although 51 percent of the the group that played Tetris after the films and photos had still remembered what they saw, they were not having the triggered flashbacks that often result in Post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Huffington Post.
"Think of it like hand washing. Hand washing is not a fancy intervention, but it can reduce all sorts of illness. This is similar - if the experimental result translates, it could be a cheap preventative measure informed by science," Holmes said.
