Tetris for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

[Immelmann]

 

One of the more debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is the flashbacks that force those suffering from PTSD to relive the events that caused the trauma in the first place. There are drugs that can limit some of these problems, but they tend to have a global impact on memory consolidation, which may have unwanted side effects, like eliminating first-hand experience of the events, preventing both society and the people present from possibly learning anything from the experience. But a team of cognitive scientists have used some of the ideas of their field to suggest a mental activity that may block the consolidation of memories that trigger the flashbacks: playing Tetris.

 

The concept, which was first published in 2009, is based on our understanding of visual recognition and memory consolidation. The authors cite a number of papers that have demonstrated that performing visual cognitive tasks interferes with the system that handles visual imagery. Put another way, if you're busy solving a jigsaw puzzle, your ability to recognize a face will suffer. The relevant understanding of memory is that it takes about six hours for a memory to be consolidated, during which time the process of storing it can be interfered with.

 

Combining the two led the authors to propose that giving people a cognitive task that strains their visual system can interfere with the consolidation of visual memories, including the memories that reappear as flashbacks among those experiencing PTSD. They term the idea a "cognitive vaccine," since it blocks the later appearance of symptoms.

 

But what really captured attention was the spatial task they used: Tetris. In the 2009 study, they showed subjects film clips of traumatic events involving real-life suffering and death. After traumatizing them, the researchers provided a test group with the chance to play Tetris for a bit. Flashbacks to scenes from the film were reduced in the Tetris players compared to a control group.

 

In the new paper, they use two experiments that take the same general approach, and try to demonstrate that their cognitive model is right. In the first, they contrasted the effect of Tetris to a trivia game that does not tax the visual system that handles images. In contrast to the falling blocks, the trivia game actually seemed to increase the flashbacks the viewers experienced. They also inserted a four-hour delay in between the film and the game playing in order to start pushing their six hour time limit. Tetris remained effective in reducing flashbacks.

 

One of the more intriguing findings is that, while Tetris blocked involuntary recall via flashbacks, the players were still able to recall details of the film at the same rate as their peers when tested, so voluntary recall appears to remain intact.

 

It's important to emphasize that this is simply a controlled analog of PTSD. None of the participants were likely to be severely traumatized, and it's unlikely that the research would ever have been approved if they were. So, it's quite likely that the images associated with real-life experience of traumatic events would be much harder to interfere with. Still, if any reduction is possible, a few rounds of Tetris seems like a pretty innocuous, side-effect-free thing to try.

 

[Ars Technica]

 

Just thought it might interest some of you as much as it did me :)

[MephistoRacing]

λwesome way to test it lol. Actually no, kinda messed up. But I guess it's the only way to get results

 

This is quite interesting to me though, thanks for the post :3