Slashdot Mirror
Playing Tetris Is Good For You
An anonymous reader writes "Some UK researchers found out that playing Tetris is actually good for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, by interfering with memory. I wonder if playing Minesweeper is effective against boss-inflicted stress."
So, what does playing tetris do when you're trying to store normal memories, like where you put your glasses?
Really, all they did was show people something disturbing then immediately distract them with Tetris afterwards. I'm positive they could have districted them with anything and it would make a difference.
It is common knowledge that the best way to remember something is to put it in your brain then recall it over increasingly long periods of time. If you don't recall it (what they call "flashback" in the article) then the memory will naturally fade. It is at the beginning of a memory when it is weakest so it makes sense that if you distract someone and prevent them from recalling the memory then it will quickly fade.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I know COD4 helps me by competing for my brain resources against homework. Without it, I'd be like Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now...."the horror, the horror".
I couldn't agree more.
Games for a long time have been known to have positive effects towards the user, instead of just negative. The things games do well as it says in TFA, they remove stress. I find it very helpful to come home after a long day and cool down with some PC gaming. It helps me unwind my brain.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
can be very therapeutic. The trick is to be able to regulate just how distracted you become. It's not going to help some one if they have PTSD and then get hooked on Tetris to the point where you can't live without it. Yes, that is an extreme.
My point is actually that Tetris is just the distraction and you can probably get similar results with any sort of simple mind stimulating puzzle like sudoku. Heck, I'm willing to bet any video game would help as long as, say, your PTSD was triggered by almost getting run down by six 18-wheelers and you sit down for a session of Big Mutha Truckers. Course... if you don't have PTSD before playing that game you will after the fact...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Talk about replacing memories. Now whenever I hear a song, I'm not thinking about where I was when I first heard it. I'm thinking about hitting those damn color buttons on time.
Last year I was in an airport waiting for a delayed flight during a kidney stone attack. I bought Internet access at through Boingo for the day and it helped me get through the attack.
Maybe just getting your mind off things would have been a better test.
No won says Tetris is super fun or exciting.
I do, when I win.
Seriously though, I find tetris to be a whole lot of fun. And if you just start at level 9 every time, it can be pretty exciting, too. It doesn't quite have the clench factor of CMR3 or anything (slide slide slide CRASH - you can see how long it's been since I bought a new game though) but it can be quite engaging. Proof positive that graphics aren't everything - tetris works fine when drawn in text characters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did you ever roll your score through the signed int maximum, 32,767 points? Did you ever roll it back through zero? Did you know that there's a graphical display glitch in the score display: the old score is erased by writing the new score on top, so if the new score has fewer digits (-9,999 as opposed to -10,000, for example) the last digit will stay visible?
My current high score is -256, but that's not counting the time I rolled it through zero (the game didn't think that was a high score).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Tetris was especially good to me back in the late 1980s when I was at university at Sheffield in the UK. There were a few Tetris Payout machines around the city that could hold up to £60 of cash.
The premise of this version was that you scored more points for lines cleared higher up the screen and you had to get as many points as possible in a fixed time limit. The payout was based on how many points you got on a sliding scale. As I recall the maximum payout was £12.
The engineers who built the machine programmed it to get easier each time you failed to win money in a game and it got harder each time you did win. They made a mistake though because a good enough Tetris player could beat the machine on its hardest setting.
There were about 3 or 4 students in the town that could empty these machines. Amazingly at the Student Union bar they came around once a week and filled the machine with cash. Those of us that could empty the machine would race to get to the machine first in order to empty it!
I kept records of what I made and it was over £1000 which is not a lot of money now but it bought a lot of beer for me when I was 19 years old and skint! And I still managed to find enough time to get a degree!
Eventually these machines disappeared no doubt because the people in charge realised that the only people making money were the people playing them!
I'm currently getting My Master's in Social Work...
According to the DSM-IV PTSD isn't even diagnosable for 3 MONTHS after the event. Obviously, asking people after a week how many times they remembered a movie isn't really related to PTSD. Traumatic Memories are laid down differently, more sensory in nature- than a mere 'thought'. (No source on that, sorry. There are debates about changes in brain structure and things with PTSD)
They loosely define flashbacks. In PTSD, flashbacks can include feeling injuries, getting lost in the traumatic event, not being able to distinguish them from the present. And simply, I bet that the people who remembered less or more didn't feel like they were still in that room being subjected to awful images, as much as thoughts of those images like 'eww, that was gross' or 'those poor people'.
So, distracting yourself right after taking in information makes things harder to remember. But, making the correlation straight to PTSD, is off base.