I’ve seen this story linked all over the place today, so it must be true: researchers at Oxford University claim that playing Tetris can be an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder because it helps prevent the formation of bad memories.
Speaking from personal experience, it has been my belief for a long time that there is indeed something about Tetris that is a bit psychoactive. It’s easy to slip into almost a trance-like state when playing Tetris if one’s surroundings foster concentration and eliminate other distractions. The so-called “Tetris Effect” is a known and studied phenomenon; a 2000 study found that 60 percent of subjects who played Tetris had dreams about playing the game. I know I had Tetris dreams for a very long time about 20 years ago, when I used to play it for hours every evening. Those researchers were looking at what is called “hypnagogic sleep” — learning a task while asleep through the mechanism of dreams. Something about the game triggers a response in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for generating and “fixing” memory. This new study shows that playing Tetris in the near aftermath of a traumatic event acts to prevent the formation of memories by redirecting the hippocampus to focus on the spatial relationships of the game.
Y’know, there was already a Star Trek episode about this, where a sneaky alien babe tries to take over the Enterprise by getting everyone addicted to a video game…and Tetris WAS written by a Russian software developer at the height of the Reagan Era…maybe this is some leftover Soviet mind control that imperils Democracy And Freedom™! Quick, somebody alert President Obama and…..what? He’s playing what on his Blackberry? Oh, never mind.
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
Update to yesterday’s post about boiled eggs:
The picture at the top is what I got by boiling two eggs in 180-degree-ish water for 6 minutes. Sorry for the so-so photo, I only had my cell phone handy.
The eggs were indeed nicely done. The cooked ring of egg white was consistent in its thickness [...]
