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Tetris Study Reveals Dreaming's Role In Memory
Cy Guy was one of the legion who wrote with this news: "Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, released results of a study of amnesiacs who had played Tetris. Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve. Stickgold hypothesizes that dreaming uses the long-term memory area that the amnesiacs retained rather that the short-term memory areas of the brain that were damaged. More information on the study is available from this Reuters article, and Harvard Med School's Focus magazine." This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.
Remember, tetris is about realtime calculation, not about problem solving. I don't think this is suprising at all, really, because I don't see how dreaming about tetris can give you practice at it (since there is no set problem to solve) unless your dreams are really accurate ;), or speed up your thinking at the time you actually play it (see practice).
I don't think this experiment was well-chosen. It'd be more interesting with some more non-realtime strategic game, or something similar with set problem forms.
Then again, I've been rather interested in sleeping and dreaming and have observed some interesting things, such as the sleep transition period, and some dreams themselves. I've found that there isn't a point where you "fall asleep," it's much more of a stretch of time and change of consciousness where your thoughts about doing something become you actually doing it. It's like being able to remember intellectually the taste of chocolate, but a wall of consciousness slowly disappears and you really can taste it.
As you said, though, this isn't usually something you tend to remember.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Or possibly your falling triggered the dream sequence, and you woke up some time later.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Once when I downloaded Sokoban for my Pilot and was playing it a bit, I found myself dreaming of shifting boxes around a maze to clear a path. The weird thing was, the Sokoban dream was (in some incomprehensible way) a metaphor for some real-world problem or social conundrum.
"Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve."
Does this mean I will not improve?
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
I can remember dreaming about playing deathmatch.. it was really weird, because the 'map' was my school, but the dark red marine sprite was running around - but i recognised him as my mate Toby.
And when I saw Toby run under a bridge that I was standing on, I shouted in my dream, "You can't do that! Its not true 3D!"
weird.
- doctea
Wasteland... oh dead god, wasteland... i can honestly say that i played that game since the year it came out... and i am not proud to admit this, i *just* beat it july of this year. It was the only role playing game i've ever played, and i would play it in binges, and then forget about it for 2 years... i have had some *really* screwed up wasteland dreams. About being trapped in the Guardian Citadel, about having to deal with the Serpedroids, the Sewers, the red ryder BB gun with compas in stock...
Just this july i beat it, i had proton axes, i had the power armor, i had it all... and i beat it. i can honestly say, that i can die a happy man now.
If you do see someone you don't know, you did see them and your mind did store it, but you where aware of it.
Interesting assertion. The amount of research necessary to move your assertion past the mere hypothesis stage would itself be a rather daunting task. Know of any peer-reviewed journal papers that back it up?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Not only have I read during dreams, I have read in such detail that I once noted the magazine's date and article title so I could re-read it, and remembered the reading experience when I was awake without realizing I had dreamed it. I only realized it was a dream upon actually attempting to re-read it, and finding no trace of the article in the magazine.
Lao Tzu may have noted the conundrum centuries before I did, but I did experience it years before I heard of the Butterfly Dream.
Steven E. Ehrbar
MAKE THE MUSIC STOP! AAAGH!
(See, I was fine up until this story was posted. Then the Tetris music slammed back into my head at full volume. DAMN YOU. DAMN YOU TO HELL.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Does anyone ever remember actually reading something during a dream?
Yes, I've been able to read during dreams. But it is a strange type of 'reading'. I can only read in chunks, not a single word at a time. And the chunks are very ephemeral, no re-reading.
It is rare that this happens. Most times the words are just gibberish. But it has happened during the 'exam dream'. I'm no longer in school so I when I have this dream it is about a class that I haven't been attending and now have a test. I can read the question and start to answer but then the either the questions change or I realize in the dream that I'm no longer in school so I must be dreaming.
Everyone I've talked to about the 'exam dream' has had similar experiences (sans the bit about being able to read).
I've also played sports and I and those who I've talked about this with who played sports have the 'sports dream'. It goes like this. I'm playing soccer, the goal is open, but the ball is just out of reach. Friends who played baseball are trying to field the ball but it stays just out of reach. Football players have a passed ball stay just out of reach. The ball never gets by, it just stays out of reach.
The curious thing about these dreams is the indeterminate nature. In the baseball dream you don't field the ball, but you don't not field the ball. It just stays out of reach.
Steve M
A similar thing happend to me with code. When I was in grad school working on a problem late into the night I would occasionally dream about the problem.
Local regions of the code would be correct, but the code elsewhere would change, but like your equations, the code would change in correct ways locally, although globally it wouldn't work.
I actually solved a handful of problems this way. Including a partularly troublesome one in a formal lingo class.
Steve M
From the Reuters story: They said people with amnesia who played the popular computer game Tetris dreamed about the images it invoked, but could not remember actually playing the game. And, unlike people with normal memories, they never really got any better at the game. This shows that when the brain is filing away the memories it needs to keep, it has to go through a series of steps, and dreaming is a manifestation of one crucial step, Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) in Boston, who led the study, said.
Far from showing that dreaming is a crucial step, this would seem to show that dreaming is irrelevant.
If dreaming were important we would expect the dreamers to improve. Yet they did not.
big ears' comment above about amnesics having functional procedural memory would seen to support this interpretation.
Steve M
When I was taking a lot of math in college I had a dream about wrestling an equation like it was a snake. As the shape of the snake changed, the symbols that it was composed of appeared to adapt in mathematically correct ways.
Very strange.
Thank you for not thinking.
I've experienced far worse than the tetris dream. It's been over 7 years now, and I'm still recovering. I've told others, and now I'm telling you: You don't know true horror until you've dreamed in QBasic.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Back when I first started playing Doom, I would go until four in the morning. I would go lie down, and in that odd state between waking and dreaming, I would see walls, columns, rooms...never any antagonists, just the 3-D textured environment moving around in my head.
As another Cognitive Scientist, I agree that the results do seem contrary to what we know about amnesia.
I'd need to read the actual study though, because the article doesn't specify whether the patients had anterograde or retrograde amnesia. A patient with anterograde amnesia who, by definition, is unable to remember post-tramatic events or form new memories, does improve at skill tasks almost as fast as an unaffected person.
Someone with retrograde amnesia shouldn't show any difference in being able to learn Tetris, as long as they hadn't played before the trauma.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
As the article says, people didn't actually dream they were playing the game. They dreamt about falling blocks.
I've frequently had dreams about games, usually myself being in the game, rather than playing it.
-Ben
This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.
And yet, just like the amnesiacs, you do not get better at it. You trying to tell us something here timothy?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I also had Ultima IV dreams, Pools of Radiance, and Bard's Tale Dreams.
i think i played too many RPG games as a kid...
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You just needed to tell the compiler to Do What I Mean...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The first class I took in digital design as a freshman -- you know, when you first learn things like Grey code and NAND gates and spend your time breadboarding with TTL chips -- once involved some really hairy bit patterns.
My roommates told me one morning that I had spent a couple minutes reciting strings of binary in my sleep, finishing with, "It just won't add up!"
I have no recollection whatsoever. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I loaded in Quake and played for the first time in years yesterday. When I went to bed that night, I couldn't get any images to sit still in my head - they were all "jumping" like you when running around in Quake and moving around like crazy. This was before I even fell asleep. I had to keep opening my eyes to get things to settle down.
My dreams were just as bad. Made for a crappy night of sleep.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
See, you THINK that dream makes no sense, but your brain is trying to tell you something, man.
Picture this: a tray that fits into a 5 1/4 drive bay... probably two bays, actually, but that's OK, everyone needs a full-tower case anyway. You drop a potato into the tray, wait ten minutes or so while your hash brown program does its thing, and voila... gnu browns!
This is such an amazing idea. I'm telling you, your brain is goddamn smart. I bet we can get some VCs interested in this. I mean, c'mon, who wouldn't love a pile of fresh hash browns right about now...
(This is what happens when I don't get enough sleep and I skip breakfast...)
I remember reading that one of the reasons for sleep, was so that the glial cells in the brain could recharge their stores of energy (the brain uses more energy than can be supplied to it by the bloodstream, so the glial cells provide the extra energy required).
Perhaps the reason that the REM sleep is postponed until later in the sleep cycle, is to give those glial cells a chance to recharge (since I would imagine that the REM sleep probably burns a fair amount of energy in at least parts of the brain).
Heh recently I started playing FF8 - and once again i remembered why i don't play many games. I start to dream about them (esp when a 6 hour session of sitting there after work playing is the last thing that I do before bed)
Its really weird - normally I don't dream much. However when I play for long periods, I almost always dream about it.
The only other thing that has had that much of an effect on my dreaming is reading. Sometimes reading a good book before bed will REALLY do some weird things (of course, when i noticed this I was reading the Illuminaus! Triology)
As for waking up...only had the alarm clock thing once. I was walking into a hotel and the person at the desk suddenly opened her mouth and started singing...then I went upstrairs and someone else was doing it...same song... and it was in spanish!
Then I woke up and heard the radio blaring o/~ I am carlos santana o/~
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I was in college when the tetris craze first started. I realized I was playing it far too much when I started dreaming about playing Tetris. I very rarely remember my dreams, so I figured it was significant that I remembered this one.
I quit cold turkey and haven't really played much since.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
These kinds of dreams seem to be universal constants; I think they are related to the "showing up at work/school naked" dreams. Dreams where there is a sense of being completely unprepared or unable to complete a given task. I wonder what exactly our minds are trying to cross reference with those...
At the start of sleep, you spend most of the time in the Stage 1-4 sleep, where your body tries to get the physical effects of the day flushed out. (rest physically).
Every 90 minutes you go back from the stage 4 sleep into REM sleep, which lasts upto 10 mins at start. After about first 4 hours of sleep, you start to spend more of those 90 minutes in REM and less in stage 2-4. By the time you are ready to wake up from the 8 hour (supposed best number of hours to sleep) sleep, you start to spend almost 45 minutes at a time in the REM sleep, seeing those cool dreams you rememember in the morning.
This is all I can remember from my intro Psych course.
maybe I just code too much but often I'll have weird mixed dreams where real life things happen, as I see the code for those things to happen..
for example:
wife: "could you do the dishes?"
me: "sure. boolean dishesclean=dishWasher.start(dishes);"
the weird part is that I don't type it in or say it or anything, it just appears overlaying the rest of the dream.
This finding seems to be generally consistenty with previous theories of the function of sleep and dreaming. Basically, the idea is that sleep and dreaming occurs to provide the brain an opportunity not only to rest, but to sift, sort, and integrate information that is gained throughout the day. That's why when you work intensely at something for hours, it's likely to appear in dreams.
Most people dream about sex and drugs in college
Well, the sex can be replaced with Tetris (imagine the 4-stick is a penis). Now you're left with Tetanus On Drugs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Every did DMT playing tertris [sic]
No, but I have done virtual DMT playing Tetris. (It's called Tetripz.) I decided to replicate the experience in open source, and the result was TOD: Tetanus On Drugs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
a 330 KB Tetris clone called Tetanus On Drugs. It's one of the few Tetris clones with a framerate. The included exe is for DOS, but it includes GPL'd source and recompilation instructions for Windows and Linux.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if Tetris itself could simulate the drugs itself? It'd probably be a bit like Tetanus On Drugs for DOS and Linux.
Will I retire or break 10K?
a lawsuit against ... for infringing on their computer game Tetris.
The ironic thing is that this actually happened. A cloner got a nastygram about "Bedtris" infringing on the TETRIS® trademark; it was changed to Bedter. A followup letter accused the cloner of infringing on look-and-feel copyright.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Didn't the Tetris Company try to sue clone developers such as Pin Eight Software?
Will I retire or break 10K?
a game of tetris that I had to solve that was simply out of control.
Psychedelic Tetris dream? Did it look anything like Tetanus On Drugs?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Play Tetanus On Drugs. It's a Tetris clone for Linux, DOS, and Windows that (poorly) simulates the effect of hallucinogenic drugs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You need a bigger challenge: playing Tetris under the influence.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One intersting thing, is if you are deprivated of sleep for an extended amount of time (ie. more than a couple days), when you finally do get to sleep, your REM will come in shorter terms, last longer and be of higher "quality".
Also in your term of sleep deprevation (when you are wake and deprivated of sleep), you mind will "know" it needs REM sleep to clear your inbox, so it tries to "trick" you into it, this is why you hear or see things that aren't real after a couple days sleep deprivation.
This things you hear or see that aren't real are nothing more than "hard drive files" loading into "RAM" so your "CPU" can cross-reference and determine where to "store" your current "cache" onto "disk". When you are loading, writting files, you have to open them, during this time you may expeirence so "unwanted" effects.
Basically this unreal voices and visions are REALLY _REAL_, they are nothing but REAL memory "blocks" coming into the current mind. They aren't real to everyone else, but they are REAL in the sense they are REAL memories.
That is why, you will never see anyone you don't know in your dreams. If you do see someone you don't know, you did see them and your mind did store it, but you where aware of it. Like if you look into a 1000 person crowd, you see "all" of them, but your "current" aware mind doesn't bring the current image of everyone to your "stack".
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Same thing used to happen with me after marathon Doom sessions. It's a sad commentary on how much I let computers assimilate me that I found it really amusing. Strangely enough, I don't remember actually dreaming of it once I did fall asleep...
--
If my mind takes that long to purge it's inbox, I'm getting too much mail.
This must explain why I dream about sex so much... I haven't gotten any in so long, that it's moved to my long-term memory, instead of my short-term.
Thank goodness I am not the only person that dreams about tetris. I thought I was some sort of freak or something. I often dream that I am part of the falling blocks, and I fall along with them. What is really weird, is sometimes I will wake up on the floor, appearently fallen from my bed. Now what I would like to know...is if my dream caused me to roll off my bed, or if the entire dream occured once I was in the air on the way to the floor...
After some reading and discussion with my friends, I found out that more of your brain is being utilized during dreaming than during the day. That is why everything can seem so real. Dream reality is more real than regular reality because our mind thinks it is. Not only that, but and entire 6 hour dream sequence can take place in a matter of minutes or seconds.. This proves that our brain works about 300 times harder when we reach REM sleep than when we are awake. Some weird stuff.
The anti-salmon
What I find most interesting about the article is that it says
People in both groups reported that, as they fell asleep, they dreamed about images of blocks falling and rotating, as they do on the computer screen when the game is in progress. They did not actually dream about the game itself.
I remember that when I used to play tetris (well actualy Hextris) in college way too much that I DID dream about the game.....
I remembered deleting rows
I remembered running out of space and eventualy losing the game
And worst of all I would remember that as usual I had failed to beat my girlfriend's high score...
-jon
It's pretty funny actually, I get the same thing while cramming for final exams. The night before the exam I usually end up having a nightmare about solving problems, and I never, ever get them right (sometimes I wonder if my dream problems even have correct answers!). I always do good on my exams though. Maybe it's just my brain compiling all my problem solving techniques!
UBU
No wonder so many people are so good at those Lara Croft games.
Dont you worry. Soon enough you'll met a tall stranger, who will fit nicely by your side, and then him, you and everyone else at your side will disappear.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
I remember when I was hooked on X-Com Apocalypse once. When I started involuntarily getting confused about people in real life moving around when they shouldn't have movement points left, I stopped playing.
;)
Games can be dangerous
Please explain this "sleep" concept everyone keeps writing about. What is this "sleep"?
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
That's nothing. I once played Civilization (the original) so long that when I looked away, the whole world was pixellated. I couldn't tell what time it was because the Settlers wouldn't quit irrigating the clock...
___ CmdrTHAC0 ___
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
When I worked for Walmart, I would dream about UPC symbols because I was a stockperson for awhile. When I took calculus in college, I constantly dreamed about math. And now, I dream about programming and routing. Sometimes when my alarm goes off and I'm still tired I'll dream it's a bug in the code and I have to fix it, or that it's a router beeping and I need to make route changes to fix it.
Then I'll mumble something about it to my girlfriend and she thinks I'm on crack. I work too much.
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It's calleed letting your subconcious solve problems. Remember, your subconcious can go right on thinking while your concious brain is sleeping or otherwise engaged. I used to be into meditation when I was in college, and I would use this technique to help me organize the vast amounts of research I did into a coherent structure for a paper. I would go into meditation, instruct my subconcious to work on a problem, and a few days later, sit down and write out a perfect outline, or bang out a great short-paper. or whatever. I got pretty good at it. You may think this is bullshit. But it worked. Great.
I don't recall any of the books I read, but I was SERIOUS about it. I meditated daily for 20 minutes. I should get back into that. It was fun.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Actually the mind does more than just watch. There has been some recent research on mind - brain interaction. When we go to sleep there is some part of us that some refer to as the 'mind' that stays awake or alert. If the parts of the brain are the hardware, the mind is the operating system. It monitors our bodily systems and does some of the housekeeping chores while we sleep. There has been lots of research on biological clocks and why some people seem to be able to wake up before their alarm goes off. The big question was how does the mind communicate with the body? Recent research indicates that the mind uses the stress reaction as a way to wake up the body. Stress hormones 'arouse' the body systems like breathing, blood pressure, heart rate etc.
Researchers confirmed this in lab tests. They had two groups of test subjects wired in a sleep lab. The first group were told that they were to be woken up at 8:00AM. At 07:30 they noticed that levels of stress hormones started to gradually increase and by 08:00 reached a peak. In the second group, the subjects were also told that they were to be woken at 08:00 but instead were woken at 06:00AM. Prior to waking the subjects stress hormones levels were low but immediately after being woken unexpectedly the stress levels rose dramatically to peak levels.
What is still unclear is whether dreaming is caused by stress hormones or are used by the mind to induce the stress reaction.
Whatever the function of dreaming is, it doesn't require us to remember. Not remembering dreams is like dubbing tapes with the volume turned down," he explains. "The underlying process still gets carried out.
I would have to disagree with the author on this point. Many people remember their dreams. The trick is to write notes immediately after waking as the memory of the dream seems to fade quickly.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
all those funky starcraft dreams i've been having...
there he is zerglings, get him!
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
If you stay up for extended amounts of time, denying yourself REM sleep, the body forces REM "sleep" or REM funcation on the waking body.
This is why moderators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H crack addicts seems so "weird". There "inbox" is full and all the data from their "inbox" needs to be filed though REM sleep, without sleep for days (even weeks), the mind has to purge their "inbox" while the person is still wake. This is why they "see" or "hear" things that aren't real.
Also what is instersting, is that if you deny yourself REM sleep for an extended amount of time (like not sleeping ANY for days or weeks), then when you finally do sleep, the REM part of sleep will be "stronger" and last longer. A way for the mind to (apparently) catch up on REM sleep.
Also an intersting fact (err theogry, I don't remember who came up with this theogry), is that when they did a study on schizopheric (sp?) vs "normal" people, schizopheric indivauls had less REM sleep and for shorter intervauls. His theogry was that this "visions" and "voices" that schizopheric indivauls where expeirence was that the mind did "know" when the right time to induce REM sleep, and that schizopheric indivauls where suffering from a funcation in the brain that induce REM "sleep" at the wrong time. Also part of his theogry was that if you could force REM "sleep" on schizopheric indivauls when they where REALLY sleeping, that alot, if not most (but not all) schizopheric effects in the indivauls would be greatly reduced to non-exist.
He theogry is yet proven. It makes some sense.
Also, this is a fact (don't have a reference though) is that when you sleep, you rotate between "deep" and REM sleep, every 90 minutes or so you going into REM sleep for awhile, then back into deep sleep. This is repeated till you wake up. There isn't ONE REM sleep, but 2-5 during your sleep cycle depending on how long you sleep and other factors can have effects it, the length of it, or the quality of it.
What I want to do, is that REM sleep (to me atleast, this isn't a fact, just my BS) is simplair to an LSD trip. What I would like to test, if have some one (I would do it!) study and work like normal, but at night instead of 8 hours sleep, do 2 hours sleep and then take LSD for the other time. Do a before and after type of thing. Get some material, some subject, it doesn't matter what, lets say LISP or small talk. And in the "normal" (without LSD), find a way to judge how much one learns during this time. Then during the "trip" days find a way to judge how much one learns during the time.
Just wondering how LSD effect memory, since it appears (atleast to myself) to have like effect of those during REM sleep.
Actucally I just want to do LSD and play teteris and call it "research".
"No I am not freaking out man, holy crap, I am Jesus Christ for MY sake and you won't leave me alone to play teteris? You go now!"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I've a pretty serious gamer... my experience with dreaming about a game is this:
.sigs??
I dream about spots I have difficulty completing. And sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the solution. I write it down, go back to sleep, then try it the next day and it works!
This was when I was a kid playing "Quest for Glory" and games in the "adventure" genre. Tetris, though? I don't think so...
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If you dreamed about your girlfriend as much as you dreamed about work, she wouldn't think you were on crack.
Then again, if you spent enough time with your girlfriend such that you started dreaming about her instead of work, you'd probably be fired and subsequently dumped for being an unemployed bum.
Then you'd have no girlfriend and no job, but your dreams would be WAY more fun.
I can spell. I just can't type.
"Dreams are just the body's way of clearing out the mental ''in-box'', Stickgold said."
Ok, now all we have to do is code a little VBS Dream Virus, which when the brain is clearing it's "in-box", will be relayed into other peoples dreams, and so-on... thus creating a pseudo-mind-control method... First Virus... - Vote Gore.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
There was a related study done of amnesiacs who hated tetris and then were forced to play tetris. Not only did they remember that they hate tetris, but over 73% of them asked to be made an amnesiac again so that they could forget that the evil Russians had ever made the game.
Amongst female college students, over 70% of them dreamed of tetris, but failed to improve. However, Dr. Stickgold hypothesised that the over 14 hours of daily Minesweeper play might have interfered.
It has long been known that sleep affects memory consolidation. For instance, we all fall asleep every night, but we almost never remember falling asleep, or the events that take place up to about five minutes before. In fact, a lot of people who claim that they 'have conversations while asleep' or 'sleepwalk' are actually awake during this time, but they don't consolidate those memories and so don't remember it.
I have a dream where little oddly-blocks are not judged by the color of their surface, but by their ascii character-equivalents.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...