By playing Tetris, a patient can help form a cognitive blockade as the game forces visual processing that is able to diminish unsettling memories. This is most commonly associated with those who are in the military.
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“Our findings suggest that, although people may wish to forget traumatic memories, they may benefit from bringing them back to mind, at least under certain conditions – those which render them less intrusive”, said study co-author Ella James of the University of Oxford. Scientists say that playing Tetris can block flashbacks of traumatic events, lowering the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to The Independent. The researchers then had some of the subjects play Tetris as a way of helping them clear their mind of the traumatic images they had seen.
On day seven, the participants returned to the lab to fill in a questionnaire and complete memory tests to confirm how much they remembered of the film’s content. She earned a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Maryland, where she researched cell-to-cell communication in bacteria.
These results made the researchers think it might have to do with the way the game re-configures the visual memory, as the brain chooses to focus on the visual game instead of the recurring memories of the film.
Those who played Tetris in the next 24 hours have reported recalling fewer details and experiencing less flashbacks of the traumatic footage.
“From Marcel Proust’s example of sudden childhood recall after eating a madeleine to flashbacks depicted in war films, involuntary memory has long held fascination”, researchers said.
The authors admitted that the study was obviously limited since experiencing something and watching something on a TV is completely different. The authors of the study hope that the studies can be replicated in the near future, which could include people who were recently recovering from a real-life traumatic experience. Darwin said the study was interesting, but she was not sure that it could be applied to people who had actually survived real-life trauma.
“If you watch a horror movie, you can get scared for days”, Jaine Darwin, trauma and crisis intervention specialist in Massachusetts, told ABC News. The study blends the work of animal and human neuroscience and clinical areas of public concern, researchers explained. “[But] you lack the smell or tactile association of the event”. When someone is just seeing a traumatic event on television, the only recommendation is to turn off the film to protect the person from the intrusive memories. And because memory is so malleable, long-term psychotherapy is often successful.
Meanwhile, the control group was given neither the memory-reactivation task nor played Tetris.
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The research team also found that it was only the combination of memory reactivation and Tetris combined that led to fewer intrusive memories.
