1y ago

YSK if you've seen something traumatic, playing Tetris for a couple of hours afterwards can drastically reduce the chance of it becoming a deeprooted memory and causing PTSD

www.ox.ac.uk Tetris used to prevent post-traumatic stress symptoms | University of Oxford

A single dose psychological intervention, which includes using the computer game Tetris, can prevent the unpleasant, intrusive memories that develop in some people after suffering a traumatic event.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-28-tetris-used-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms

140 comments

This work perfectly for most of my lectures in Quantitative Methods in college.
When it came to the exam, I couldn’t recall a thing.
- Hahahaha. That proper made me laugh

Can confirm, I've been playing tetris for three hours and I've almost completely forgotten about the dead hooker in my trunk.
- Huh, that's the kind of thing that would just make me start visualizing how many I could fit in there.
  
  that's basically tetris, we've come full circle
  
  Deadtris
  
  My problem is that I always go for the biggest hooker, when offered the choice.
  
  It really all depends if you leave them whole, cut them up or use a blender.
- Gotta solve your problems one at a time...

My mum used to work with criminaly insane people in an asylym. I realize now why she frequently jacked my Gameboy to play Tetris.
- Can I ask what role she did? I read a book last year called 'The Devil You Know - Tales of Forensic Psychiatry'. It was very illuminating and interesting, each chapter a different (anonymised) story of one of her patients. Especially her 'bike lock' theory of why some people can commit such horrific crimes.
  
  'Bike lock' theory?
  
  Uh, I think she was a handler, of sorts. Don't rightfully know, I just know it was a job with a lot of risks and it was hella stressful. Her workplace had one "inmate" escape and murder a 9-year old one time and that was just, well devastating.

yo... everyone is laughing cause its kind of funny but I had a really intense and traumatic childhood... and I also played a lot of tetris as a kid. Like more than 12 hours a day of it.
Is that seriously why my trauma didn't effect me like it would have with other people??
That's fucking nuts. Like what.?.
- Sorry to hear about your childhood. Are you one of these superhumans I watch playing Tetris and thinking "how the FUCK can anyone react that quickly?!". I'm pleased to hear though that you found a way to not be traumatised!
  
  Imo it gets impressive really fast if you play on keyboard, that's what I like about this game: it surprises myself
  
  yeah I can go pretty fast using the arrow keys on a keyboard. I'm out of practice these days but I use to be that kind of impressive.
- Glad it worked out for you!

it's a lie perpetuated by Big Tetris!!
jk, good to know. I assume this should work similarly for any game that doesn't contain violent content and yet activates the brain.
- I wonder if there's any research on that? It's been a while since I read the study but iirc there's something specific about Tetris that increases the effect, something to do with manipulating objects to fit into neat rows.
  So maybe trying to fit the shopping in the back of a car would be as effective! Anyway I posted this hoping it would be of use to some of the people affected by the latest lemmy attack.
  
  Wait what lemmy attack? What happened?
- I would imagine crossword puzzles or anything similar in that nature could also apply.
- Probably to some extent, but there's a few aspects that probably make Tetris exceptional for this
  First, you have to pay attention and plan ahead, but in a simple enough way and fast enough that it discourages fully forming thoughts. You also can't do it on autopilot - you can't pattern match or rhythm your way through, so you can't zone out. So while you're playing, you probably can do very little to ruminate over the event and reinforce it
  Second, it's spatial reasoning, working + short term memory, and very visual. We encode long term memories like carving groves into wood - the longer we think about it while it's in short term memory, the clearer the details. If ASAP you overwrite the short term spatial and visual memories with meaningless combinations of blocks, you lose a lot of detail. That's going to result in a much weaker association of the emotions to a location or an image, making triggers less likely and easier to break
  Third, it ties up your visual systems - as the primary sense of humans, visual processing is a huge portion of what our brains do. It's tied up in complex ways with the way we predict things and access memories, and for reasons I barely understand that can be used to weaken triggers and dampen emotional response
  So putting it together, it distracts you from effectively building a narrative by putting your thoughts into language. While that's going on, it overwrites aspects of your short term memory over and over with meaningless junk data. Finally, it's just soothing - you get little hits of dopamine and jolts of stress response
  
  Excellent explanation, nice.

So you're saying if my parents had let me play video games, my childhood traumas would have been easier to deal with. Those f%*&ers....
- Can confirm it doesn't help. You're good.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5127/jep.028212
how it works^
- Well, how it may work. It is fairly controversial.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyemovementdesensitizationandreprocessing
  
  It’s not that controversial within the psychological community. It is widely used and researched.
- These links appear to be about something possibly related but slightly different. These involve treating traumatic memories that already rooted themselves. The post above is about preventing the memories from being rooted in the first place. Sure, they could be related concepts and mechanisms, but they are different.
- I think that's something different bud. Interesting resesarch though.

Also, just an anecdote, but good music and puzzle games seems to help those of us who had PTSD form.
- For me, in my deepest depressive state, I found stupid movies to be a really good tool for managing my symptoms. My go-tos were Ocean's 8 and Rampage.
  There was just something about pointless entertainment that occupied my time well without eliciting emotional responses. (ie, emotional responses I was incapable of regulating)
  
  That's interesting, seems you use a similar strategy to me.
  I have bipolar, knowing I'm going to have extreme lows in the future even with meds can be very dispiriting, but I know that I'll always have a giant weapon in my arsenal... comedy shows. The difficulty comes when there's nothing to watch and I need a boost, only so many times you can rewatch The Office, It's Always Sunny etc.
  (yes this was a thinly-veiled request for suggestions of funny!)

A couple of hours? That's a lot of fucking Tetris.
- Filthy casual.
- Have you played the new Tetris? I sunk quite a bit of time into that. It's gorgeous, really good music that syncs with your moves.
  
  Tetris Effect? Love it, great in VR too where you are entirely focused, almost transcendent.
- It works by sending you into a catatonic state from sheer boredom
- lol I use to play like 12+ hours a day

My new catchphrase is "time for Tetris".
- Life in Philly be like ^

Here is the actual paper; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5822451/
- Thanks :)

Me after watching family get brutally murdered in front of my very eyes:
hOlD uP gOtTa PlAy SoMe TeTrIs To PrEvEnT pTsD, mEnTaL hEaLtH aWaReNeSs BrO
On another note, does playing amogus with the boys increase the chances of it becoming PTSD?
- I think if you play among us after experiencing extreme trauma, that really is kinda sus

I remember a podcast on NPR a few years ago mentioning something similar. The psychologist that was on the show was discussing how doing something that does something that requires your full attention reduces anxiety. It’s interesting to see that this can also be applied to reduce PTSD.

Oh noo, I can still hear the 4bit music from the Gameboy classic speaker ...
... how? Where is it coming from? Why won't it stop? What is it trying to mask & protect me from?
- Do
  Da-do
  Do-da-Do
  Da-Do
  Do-da-Do
  Da-do
  Daaa do-da

After reading this I thought there must be a nice and simple Tetris game in the play store. Boy was I wrong. I think some guy has a "block puzzle" empire and has just rereleased the same tetris clone game a hundred times. And official Tetris is a total abomination of unlocks and achievements.
Bummer.
- There are three main Tetris games as far as playability goes.
  Classic Tetris for NES where you play with your foot
  Tetris effect where handling and graphics are decent
  Tetr.io where speed is everything
  Notable mentions
  Tetris 99 - tetris for Nintendo switch
  PuyoPuyo tetris - sometimes you play puyopuyo sometimes you play tetris
  Everything else is basically irrelevant
  
  Tetris Effect is great, really immersive in VR
- Yeah the ip is very horribly maintained. Imo the best game is an fangame, tetr.io
- I went through a similar thing, conclusion I came to was that as Tetris is so popular, the owners of the IP have it on lockdown... it is quite a specific IP that's kinda hard to do something similar-but-the-same.
  Options I came up with were pirating a copy, or xbox game pass (iirc Tetris Effect is available there). Or... are there any Gameboy emulators that run on mobile?
- Tetra classic
- You can play regular Tetris for free on Tetris website on a laptop or something. I agree the app version is abominable
- https://www.neilb.net/tetrisjs/
  
  This is quite playable!
- For Android there is Techmino, though it isn't on the Play Store and instead you download it from the project's github. https://github.com/26F-Studio/Techmino
- Google 'first person tetris' it witb turn your world upside down.
  
  I'm glad I decided to re-read the comments on this, as someone with aphantasia who really struggles with spatial stuff... WHAT THE FUCK, you weren't exaggerating haha

I don't know, chief; have you seen modern Tetris gameplay?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ya8_GnzZn4
- What in the fuck is that‽‽ Where are they even looking on the screen? Also how much Adderall has been provided to these competitors?
  
  Generally, they look at their own boards and keep their next piece queue in their periphery vision; the distinct colours of each piece is actually written into modern Tetris guidelines. Advanced players like these also glance at their opponent's board to determine whether to delay their attacks, both offensively and defensively.
  I'd like to plug my favourite Tetris match of all time: Salty Cup S2 - Doremy vs Wumbo
  For context, Wumbo always uses the center 4-wide to win many tournaments, and while it was a very effective strategy, it was also extremely cheesy and boring to both watch and play against; he also maintained a "Tetris god" persona where he only ever uploads his wins to his Youtube channel. Doremy, on the other hand, was getting great attention for his flashy and fun Tetris plays, never shying away from uploading videos from his losses. Doremy also caught Wumbo editing out his losses from his Twitch VODs. All this culminated in a rivalry, and in this matchup, it was the underdog versus the overpowered villain. So while this Tetris match isn't as flashy and fast as the more recent ones, it is definitely one of the most memorable.
  
  "That's my secret, Cap... I'm always Adderall."
  
  The shape at the top is where their current piece is, they just move to fast for it to really move. The hollow piece shows where it will land, the right hand side are the upcoming pieces.
  So, I don't know what hold is but I imagine they're switching between looking at the board, the hollow piece, and the upcoming pieces.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=5ya8_GnzZn4
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

damn too late

Can confirm, not just with the game but similar activities eg: stacking those body parts into a nice cube really takes away from the stress of killing someone
- Oh, but be careful - stacking them however neatly won't make the full rows disappear.
  
  Depends on how good your friends are.
- I like to do a thinking pose but with their hands on my chin.

This would have been great to know 3 years ago... ahwell...
- What happened?
  
  You realise that if it's traumatic to them they might not want to talk about it?
  
  I get being curious, but different people have different timelines and levels of comfort when processing their trauma.
  If they're ready to discuss and let you know what happened, they'll offer the amount of information they're prepared to share. If they don't offer, then please respect their space.

https://openpathcollective.org/ provides a long list of therapists that work on an affordable, sliding scale. If you experience something traumatic, please seek support for your mental health

lucky us Tetris wasn’t a thing back when Batman was a kid

When's the study coming out about Tetris Attack? Because I feel that would just increase your stress.

It’s only a mild brainwasher.

time to put tetris in the mental health folder on my phone

So this is why I have trouble recalling the 90s.

Downside is, every time you play Tetris to prevent PTSD, it causes you to remember all the traumatic shit that ended up tucked away in the back of your brain from all those previous times you played Tetris to avoid PTSD.
- I would guess that you are joking but with truth.

We just watch Keeping Up Appearances for half an hour. Nothing could be as traumatic as trying to drink tea from fine bone china with hand painted periwinkles
- It's pronounced Bouquet!
  
  mrs bucket?
- It's pronounced Bouqeeeeeeet!
  Comedy is so essential these days. Much more preferable to horror, there's enough of that in the world already without piping it in via the eyeballs
  
  The other brilliant series to wind down with is Still Game.
  Though This Country filled in the gap for a while!

Nah, Post Traumatic Growth is where holy grail of human behavior lies. (Been there, done that)

Or have SDAM and not worry about trama.
- Can't have trauma if you can't remember you have trauma 😎
  
  The one plus side of me having SDAM haha

Is this too do with the focus you get from playing Tetris as well as the Tetris effect that can occur afterwards that'll keep your brain occupied so you don't think about the trauma as much?
- When you see something traumatic, your brain will over the next few hours create images of the traumatic event. These images will come back to you as flashbacks over the years. Playing a game that requires high focus on visual details prevents the brain from creating those images, and as a result you'll get less (or not at all) flashbacks after the traumatic event.
  
  I think you've summed it up brilliantly here. I'm sure anyone who's ever played a game like Tetris a little too long will remember closing their eyes to go to sleep and still seeing tetronimos! So I guess it pushes everything else out of the 'RAM' of our visual memory, including the traumatic stuff. No room for this horrid memory, the mind-cupboard is full of tetronimos now
  
  This is why after a traumatic event it is advised to do stuff to keep the brain occupied.
  It can be Tetris or anything else, anything that can keep the brain busy.

I remembered as a bored primary school kid circa 2004 discovering my dad's old OG Game Boy from 1989 and playing the hell out of the bundled Tetris game.

That is not what "the Tetris Effect" means. :P

does it work with candy crush?

Cramming for a 1600 SAT? Pffff, just grind Tetris for a center 4-wide, get some real work done.
- Real gamers play only using Tetrises smh
- ew c4w certified wumbo moment
  real gamers use hachispin
  dpc? what's that

140 comments