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.

Comments

Hmm...

[jonfromspace]

"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.

Related.

[Matt2000]

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.

Perspective from a Cognitive Neuroscientist

[big.ears]

What really surprises me about this is that the amnesics did not improve. One consistent finding is that your standard temporal-lobe amnesic has trouble with declarative, not procedural memory. (i.e. they would not remember playing tetris the next day, but they they would play better.) Something is probably wrong with their experiment if amnesics did not improve.

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...

[64.28.67.48]

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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