Tetris to prevent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder flashbacks

Category: Neuroscience Psychology
Posted on: January 11, 2009 10:00 AM, by Ed Yong

You've just been in a horrific car crash. You're unharmed but the vividness of the experience - the sight of a looming car, the crunching of metal, the overwhelming panic - has left you a bit traumatised. You want something to help take the edge off and fortunately a doctor is on hand to prescribe you with... Tetris.

Yes, that Tetris. According to Emily Holmes from the University of Oxford, the classic video game of falling coloured blocks could prevent people who have suffered through a traumatic experience from developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As ideas go, it's practically the definition of quirky, but there is scientific method behind the madness.

Every traumatic experience flips a mental hourglass that runs out in about six hours. After that time, memories of the original event become firmly etched in the brain, greatly increasing the odds that the person will experience the vivid, distressing flashbacks that are the hallmark of PTSD. But the brain, powerful though it is, only has so much processing power available for laying down such memories. If something can be done soon enough to interfere with this process, the symptoms of PTSD could potentially be prevented.

Tetris, it seems, makes an ideal choice for that. To position its rotating blocks, players need good "visuospatial skills" - they need to see, focus on, and act upon the positions of different objects, all at high speed. These are the same sort of mental abilities that provide the foundations for flashback images.

Holmes's idea is that playing Tetris after a shocking event would take up the same mental resources that would normally be used to consolidate future flashbacks. In doing so, the notoriously addictive game could act as a "cognitive vaccine" against PTSD and provide an ironic example of a video game actually being good for you...