All those childhood hours frivolously playing "Tetris" may have been more beneficial than first imagined, according to a cognitive study released by the University of Cambridge.
Researchers in the institution's MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit -along with the University of Oxford and Sweden's Karolinska Institutet - found the iconic 90s video game can reduce severity of PTSD symptoms by creating a blockade in the brain.
Participants aged between 18 and 51 years old began by watching a public service videos compilation of numerous death scenes, including a man drowning in a sea and a young girl hit by a car. A day later, the 31 females and 21 males were split into two groups: a "reactivation-plus-Tetris-group" and a control group.
The first looked at still images of the previous day's film to freshen their memory which, according to study author Emily Holmes, makes memories easier to change. "It's a bit like hard pasticine that's a certain shape. When you warm it up, it becomes malleable and you can start reshaping it," said Holmes in speaking with New Scientist.
After listening and rating classical music, they played the block game for 12 minutes whereas the control group sat and waited with the stimulant. All participants were then asked to spend the next week recording and "intrusive" memories - or flashbacks -in a diary.
At the end of the week, researchers found the control group experienced 51 percent more intrusive memories than the other group. They theorized that playing "Tetris" re-configured visual memory because the brain focused both on the game and memory of the film.
Holmes attempted a similar study in 2009, but subjects were often unwilling to play a game just after a traumatic experience. This isn't to say the more recent experiment had a few uncontrollable kinks of its own.
"Simply returning to the lab might have strengthened participants' memory and led to a relative increase in intrusions, whereas there was no effect on our key group," the report read. "Another possibility is that playing an enjoyable computer game alone could have led to the improvement, and thus Tetris alone requires examination."
The authors admit their study was limited, since seeing images on a television screen is different from experiencing real-life trauma. The hope is that these experiments will help alleviate PTSD symptoms before they leave a permanent mark.
"Think of it like hand washing. Hand washing is not a fancy intervention, but it can reduce all sorts of illnesses," Holmes said. "This is similar - if the experimental results translate, it could be a cheap preventative measure informed by science."
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