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Tetris Improves Your Brain
An anonymous reader writes "Playing Tetris increases the density of the cortex and improves the efficiency of some parts of the brain, according to researchers investigating video games and other complex spatial tasks." Unfortunately, storing a half million copies of the song negates any practical functional gains beyond loading your trunk very efficiently.
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole? Or, really, any sort of two dimensional puzzles like the mazes on the back of tray mats at a restaurant? Or maybe even -- *gasp* -- any game portrayed on a 2D surface like a TV or computer screen?
The study, funded by Tetris' makers ...
I understand now.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous now would they?
Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Tetris 2 and The New Tetris. They both still have massive replay value and really spurred me to look into polyomino based puzzles which had increased fame in the mid 1960s until everyone realized that they had little real world application (but they still show up in papers). Still, it lead me to a book by Martin Gardner who wrote Scientific American columns on Mathematical Games. If you remember those, I recommend this book. So something good came out of studying tile theory and Tetris for me but there's no evidence yet it did anything more for me than say playing Gauntlet on the NES would have.
My work here is dung.
You mean if i keep playing a game i will get better at it?! This is madness...
Anybody remember Blockout? That was a lot more challenging with it being in 3D. :) Aww the days of yore..
Playing video games in general does this. All genres involve some form of problem solving...something television doesn't usually accommodate.
Indeed. This Science Experiment brought to you by Nintendo.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As interesting as this is I dread the assumptions that some will make of this. If Tetris can alter the brain then many will argue that violent video games also alter the brain, spurring their side of the debate. I would think that playing FPS games would alter the brain in a way that would make someone better at tasks that require quick reaction to visual stimuli.
Da Da-Da-Da Da Da Da, Da Da, Da Da, Da Da Da, Dah-Dah-Dah,
Duh,Duh,Duh, Da-Da-Da, Dah Dah, Dum Doo, Dee Dee, Dah Do De Doo.
Dahhh Dahh, Dahhhh Dahhh, Dahhh Dahhh, Dahhhhhh
Dahhh Dahh, Dooooo Dahhhh, Dum Do Deeee Dahhhhhhh,
Repeat!
...in masonry.
Me plays tetris like all the time for real. Love playing tetris soooo much! really, really smart me am.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole?
No, it's shoving the T-shaped block past other blocks into a T-shaped hole. Almost every Tetris game since Tetris Worlds (2001), including Tetris DS, has allowed for this strange move.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to play a game if it makes my brain more dense. Please, I want to remain smart, that's why I hang out here!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Tetris has music?
Quick, before it gets flagged.
Who knows, if you'd pointed out that Tetris was actually created in Russia you might have been moderated informative instead of offtopic...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It may be the only functional gain, but boy do I load my trunk efficiently ...
Does Pacman help me improve my eating skills?
Should the results be extrapolated to boys? They would statistically have logged far more videogame hours than the girls. Would any result be visible? Would it matter/
This Science Experiment brought to you by Nintendo.
Super Mario Rocket Science!
Changes in synaptic connectivity are one way that learning occurs. It is interesting to see that even minor stimulation (in playing a game like tetris) can lead to observable changes, i.e., the hardware of the mind (aka the brain) can be re-modelled by the software being run (the 'program' or specific task being undertaken). One of the next questions is to begin to understand the rules governing how learning is represented. This will allow us to begin debugging the OS kernel that links brain and mind.
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
... me pack the car for vacation.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
This is simply how the brain works. You perform a task repeatedly and the neurons that are firing become more efficient and form a stronger connection, project more axons and dendrites, and generally do what they're supposed to.
... Great. More money being spend on useless research. We all already know the brain adapts and improves itself. How about a study on drugs to increase that improvement, say while I'm study for my Neuroanatomy gross lab.
Basically they did an MRI scan of girls before the study, then scanned them again after they had played Tetris for three months and their brain showed increased density rostral to the central sulcus, which is the region responsible for complex movements of the fingers and hands (based on the rough rendering at the top of TFA).
Where do I go to get funding to do stupid stuff like this? I have an MR machine, I have 3-months to kick back and travel the world giving 10 minute seminars while my research subjects regulate themselves. Please, someone tell me what I must do.
This is great. I usually play Tetris as I listen to streaming radio from the Internet. I can't just sit and listen. I have to occupy my mind and fingers with something to be able to focus. If I gain brain capacity in the process, all the better! By the way, I can score 250 lines in type A, and I can beat type B on level 9 high 5 with no window on the first try!
Where was this article when I was playing Tetris in the library during my free periods in high school and getting crap for it?
Funny how probably just about anyone who grew up in the 80's could hum out the theme songs to these two bleepy and catchy-as-hell soundtracks.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
I don't understand why you think the title should be generalized to Puzzles instead of Tetris. The experiment only looked at the impact of Tetris on the brain and not puzzles in general. It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No one is claiming that playing Tetris makes you smarter than playing other games because no one has tested that, yet.
On the DS i played tetris waaay to much. I would find myself in the office, talking about office-stuff and just thinking 'If this dude, that is sitting on this chair, takes his screen on his lap and sits parralel to this closet, he would make like 3 lines'. That is when I stoped playing. Scary. But real.
Next:
"Exercising Improves Your Body"
News at 11.
factor 966971: 966971
There was a version of Tetris included with the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack (BOWEP). I've spent so many hours on that game it's not even funny... it went up to level 10 (the levels advanced according to how many lines you cleared... level 10 began after 93 lines), although you could start at any level (higher levels give more points).
It's kinda strict, though... it doesn't allow T-spins (where a T piece is rotated into a position that would be impossible for it to reach otherwise) or easy spin (which allows a piece to be rotated for a moment after it otherwise would have been locked down; some games allow you to continuously rotate a piece forever while others will still lock the piece after a certain point). After getting used to the easy spin on the Facebook version of Tetris, level 10 of MS Tetris is damn hard...
It had a couple of bugs, though, that the testers never found... apparently they weren't too hard-core (it takes a while to reach them)...
First, they used a 16-bit signed int to hold the score, which meant the highest possible score was 32,767 points – which was entirely possible for a good player to reach. So, if you manage to reach 32,767 points, it rolls to -32,768 points and starts counting upward toward zero again (my high score is -256 points, which comes out to 65,280 points, but I've also rolled it back up through zero on one occasion – the game didn't save that high score). The high score system also flaked out when you got negative scores: it sorted them correctly to the top of the high scores, but if the high scores had negative scores at the top it sometimes said you got a high score when you actually didn't and the high score table could get corrupted with positive scores on top of the negative ones. It asked whether to save the high scores when you exited the game, though, so whenever it incorrectly thought I got a high score I always exited the game without saving the high scores to make sure the list didn't get corrupted.
The second bug was even harder to reach... the routine to print the score on the screen didn't erase the old score, it just covered it. As long as the scores are increasing, it's fine, but -9999 won't entirely cover -10000, leaving one unchanging digit at the end of the score. The same thing occurs between -1000 and -999, etc, until finally when you roll the number back into the positive range the negative sign is gone. Since the negative sign isn't as wide as the numerals, there's half a digit cut off after the score after that. (If the window is entirely re-painted, such as by minimizing it and then restoring it, the score will be correctly shown.) The actual digit shown at the end will be arbitrary, since you get different amounts of points for different moves – whatever the final digit of your score was will remain if the new score is shorter than the old.
If anybody's interested, I posted a video on YouTube a while ago of myself playing the game and highlighting both of these bugs. I can't get the link right now but you should be able to get my channel and there are only a few so you'll find it easily.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
You have that backwards. The article is correct. Since they only tested Tetris, the only claim they can make is about Tetris.
This game is for chicks : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMKTdrQqpNk&feature=PlayList&p=FA61A91B8C81A86E&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
Playing tetris causes your brain to pack its neurons together more tightly!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
[Peter is wearing shorts, sandals and a paisley shirt, with his feet up on his desk, munching chips and playing tetris on his computer]
Bill Lumbergh: Hello Peter, what's happening? Listen, are you gonna have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?
Peter Gibbons: No.
Bill Lumbergh: Ah. Well then I suppose we should go ahead and have a little talk.
Peter Gibbons: Not right now Lumbergh, I'm kinda busy. You know what, in fact I'm gonna have to ask you to just go ahead and come back later, I've got a meeting with the Bobs in a couple minutes.
Bill Lumbergh: I wasn't aware of a meeting with them.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, they called me at home.
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
Well, if this is true ... and I can't find the paper yet so I don't know. Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time. I hope they understand that with no control group they are setting themselves up for scientific disaster.
I mean, how are they going to eliminate alternative explanations? This is standard scientific procedure--I'd be shocked to hear this being published without adhering to something I learned about in fourth grade.
My work here is dung.
Most people are familar with the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and most in business are familiar with the other golden rule (He who has the gold makes the rules). I would just be cautious about any study that is funded by a game producer that concludes that games are good for you.
I don't doubt that such a positive correllation is possible. I just am leary of any study that finds in favor of the payor. It's like those periodic news stories you see where it is touted that businesses are moving back toward formal attire, that "the suit is back", or similar sentiments. The most common sources for those news items (if they are even worthy of being called "news") are PR firms associated with menswear retailers like The Men's Warehouse. All the statistics in the press releases seem well researched and are accepted as valid, but the conclusions are being made while the menswear retailer(s) hold(s) the purse strings.
The only reassuring thing about this particular study is the research entity, the Mind Research Network. They appear to be a legitimate non-profit corporation whose mission centers around understanding mental illness and cognitive processes. I couldn't find any serious criticisms of their other work. It will be interesting to see how this study fares as it is reviewed by peers and colleagues.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Apparently the key phrase here is "some parts of the brain."
Those parts didn't include the ones that were supposed to keep my roommate from failing out of college while he was playing Tetris.
I know some dudes who are insane at these games but I am pretty sure that are clinically retarded. Do some games make you more stupid? Well, I am pretty confident WoW does.
I used to play the original tetris on a 386. It was incredibly relaxing: When you activated the turbo button while tetris started, it calibrated its delay loop for sizzling 40 MHz. Then push it again to clock it down to 4.77 MHz and enjoy. You could spend a whole day playing it and achieve miracle high scores, all the while doing things, like spending a couple of minutes in the bathroom, making coffee in the kitchen, doing homework etc.
How I miss the turbo button...
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
...you improve Tetris's brain.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
However, researchers found no correlation between reading slashdot and increased brain activity. At least, not in girls.
Your local library probably has the Scientific American publication, "Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games: The Entire Collection of His Scientific American Columns". The version I borrowed runs pdf files with adobe reader 6 on the disk.
ideopath @ play
Yea, in fourth grade we learned about the need for alternative explanation elimination too. You evidently stopped there, coz in fifth grade we all learned that it's impossible to ever fully rule out alternative explanations.
It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No, I'd hypothesize pretty much the same as what the article stated, that there's something more or less special about Tetris... It's a puzzle, so it has a thinking component, but it's also real time so you're rewarded for solving that puzzle over and over as fast as possible. I know my mind works in two modes: one when I'm solving problems alone, another when I'm in a testing situation (e.g. school, interviews, etc), so there is a difference when you're trying to do things as quickly as possible.
There have been similar studies with mice. They drop a mouse in a tub of water, the mouse swims around and then it finds the "island" so it doesn't drown. After a couple times of this the mouse immediately goes to the island.
Enter Mr. Surgeon to remove part of the mouse's brain. Now the mouse swims in circles until it drowns (or the researcher rescues it). Put the brain-damaged mouse in the mouse-equivalent of Disneyland - lots of wheels and slides and blocks and other stimulative things for about a month. Now drop the mouse in the water, and he swims right to the island. The stimulation caused the brain's cells to grow new connections and restore the memory that had been "lost"
It appears playing games for humans is equivalent to Mousy Disneyland - it stimulates the brain's cells to grow new connections.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period."
Adolescent, so their body's would be altering anyway as they did the better known thing of Ageing.
Surely for a test like this get someone who'd be shocking to have a denser brain.
Give tetris to very aged pensioners!
There's loads of crap fMRI research and this looks like another one.
The article talks about blue areas being more efficient. You can't measure efficiency of neural processing with fMRI and it doesn't look like the actual research article claims this either:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/2/174/abstract
...which interesting as it may be, fails to address the issue.
Yes, there can be any number of reasons to hypothesize that Tetris is linked to brain growth. Various similar-but-different experiments using different stimuli and a different species of animal can make it appear that this might well be the case.
And then, to find out, you run a controlled experiment. No control group = no valid conclusion.
I could imagine that it would also depend on the type of game or puzzle played.
As you say, Tetris is good for tile theory (Funnily enough, I have skills at packing freight or for my holidays that are simply...uncanny), but I don't know that a steady diet of Gauntlet would have been much help there.
Yes, I played a lot of Tetris, why do you ask?
The song is a variation of a Russian folk song, Korobushka.
This actually had already been shown in studies of nuns with incredibly long life spans with few signs of dementia even at the ages of 97 plus. Complex interaction and puzzle solving increase the brain's ability to form connections and stay that way way past the point that it should have started deteriorating. The nuns apparently did all kinds of brain teasers and puzzles including spatial puzzles and this was part of their secret to extremely long mentally stable lives. Another link to Martin Gardner here as it was in his column that I read about this in the mid '80s or at least in the same publication. And the summary here reads really weird, did Tetris have music of some sort. I never played it with the sound on so I couldn't tell you.
Why bother
Playing lots of FPS or "action video games" do have significant, measurable effects on cognition including speeding reaction time, decreasing attentional blink, improving multi-element tracking, improving spatial resolution for both vision and attention, etc etc.. A lot of interesting research on the subject is being done at the Bavelier Lab . Review papers can be found here and here [PDF warning].
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous now would they?
You do realize that not all fMRI research uses the methodology in the paper referred to by the slashdot article you linked to, right? Not even most of it, actually. The article you referred to only discusses the case where the regions of interest for correlations between behavioral and fMRI measures are selected by the size of the correlation itself. Much of that bad stuff happens in the field of social neuroscience. Although I haven't read the paper in question because it evidently won't be out until Thursday, there's no reason to believe based on the blurb that they had any reason to use that (horribly flawed) methodology.
Unfortunately, storing a half million copies of the song negates any practical functional gains beyond loading your trunk very efficiently.
What is this? Some kind of joke? Or... something?
Is it like, burning a half-million copies of the Tetris song to CD fills up your car trunk?
WTF is going on with this sentence? I can't make heads or tails of it.
Comment of the year
They can't really make any claims about anything unless they have a good control group. It's like saying that my brain is growing better because I like peanut butter. Or perhaps because I enjoy walking. Or because I like to crack my knuckles. There are millions of variables. They could at the very least try to isolate one of them before claiming any causation.
which is totally what she said
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
And, as has been observed, the test subjects were a group of "adolescent girls", so that is quite likely what happened. But forget about all that. The important thing to remember is that Tetris does cause brain growth. Studies have shown it. All you Tetris-brain-growth-deniers may now be labeled as extremists with an agenda who stupidly ignore the findings of the scientific community. How can you be so so stupid? You need to play more Tetris.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) ). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003)).
If I play too much Tetris, it causes in my head what is called the "Tetris Effect" where everything I see that even resembles a grid of squares, I start trying to piece together in my mind as Tetris pieces. Probably a step backwards as far as my general thought processes are concerned.
And don't even get me started on the psychological issues that surface when I see bathroom floor tiles after a round of Tetris.
/* No Comment */
I don't know whether it applies broadly or just to this particular game, but I can state that Tetris had a profound impact on my wife's quality of life. She was born with brain damage from a lack of oxygen due to pregnancy complications. This left her epileptic and with extremely poor muscle control/coordination. She used to get made fun of in school because kids thought she was mentally retarded because she moved slowly and awkwardly (just the opposite, really -- she was the first woman to ever get a scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, something she continued all the way through college. The parts of her brain that affect motor control are still damaged, but EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
I would find it very surprising if Tetris could improve the brain, but speed chess, sudoku, crossword puzzles, etc could not. They may make improvements on somewhat different areas of the brain, but I would expect they would all provide some benefits. Tetris rewards speedy hand-eye coordination to move the blocks quickly, but does not engage the verbal parts of the brain like a crossword puzzle does.
I think the old adage "use it or lose it" applies just as well to the brain as to our muscles. There is already research that suggests that Alzheimer's patients have a better end of life under some conditions that exercise the mind. I would love to see more studies that show how the mind can be improved by various puzzles and games. This could lead to focused workout regimes to improve many aspects of how we think.
Maybe we could use this research to make sure that in the next presidential elections, one of the debates has a Tetris round for the candidates. I would find that more interesting than the canned blurbs from their stump speeches that they spew now.
While this is an interesting/intriguing anecdote, it (for obvious reasons) doesn't mention how she would have fared without playing tetris.
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.
As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, [..] EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
If you observe closely, there may be occasional giveaway signals to the way your wife's brain approaches hand/eye coordination...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.
So when you said
There was no control group in this experiment.
and then you got modded +5 insightful, you were ... what? Just pulling that out of your ass?
Great! Now I can tell my wife "See? Video games > TV."
Correct. And, yes, the crowd highly modded the ass-product.
This is where we're at with modern discourse.
Programming is like playing tetris with the alphabet because you can't really win and when you lose, you run out of memory!
I wonder if this has anything to do with the extensive boot times every morning.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Pente, the manly cortical game.
In you, Tetris creates Soviet Russia?
How the hell does this dumbshit cetialphav get modded up? He was wrong. He is wrong. And then instead of apologizing or admitting he was wrong, he blames it on "stupid science reporting." Can't even own up to his mistakes. And he gets modded up. Ridiculous.
Don't let Dr. Mario touch you. He is not a licensed doctor.
No existe.
You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.
So you're saying she can give a good handjob?
Da Da-Da-Da Da Da Da, Da Da, Da Da, Da Da Da
Your "Nyet" is out of tune, comrade.
Speaking of Tetris-like games, once I found Panel de Pon (also known as Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle League, etc.), I could never go back to Tetris (YouTube videos). Instead of dropping pieces and having no way to undo a drop, you swap pairs of horizontally-adjacend colored panels using a cursor you can move around the screen. When three or more panels of like color form a horizontal or vertical line, they flash and then disappear. Any panels above the ones that disappeared will then fall. If this causes another match you get an extra bonus called an x2 chain; if this match then causes more panels to fall and match, it's an x3 chain, and you can get up to x24 chain (very difficult). There is gravity, and new rows of panels slowly push up from the bottom to keep the area filled (you can also manually speed this up if you've just cleared the stack). Still to this day I can play it for an hour at a time, practicing and improving, due to chain techniques available. It's very appealing due to the simple rules that lead to very rich techniques.
But Nintendo wasn't the first to make a commercial version of Tetris! Heck, they even got their algorithms wrong according to the person who made the game.
I am not devoid of humor.