- November 12th, 2010 by Nathan Fischer
As a kid, I remember playing Tetris for hours at a time – maybe without even blinking. The music, shapes, speed and increasing difficulty put me in a strange zone. Now it looks like that same experience can help those afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. How exactly does Tetris help cure PTSD?
It’s not a cure or a viable method of therapy just yet, but a small experiment yielded some interesting results. According to PC Mag:
In the study, participants with no history of mental illness watched 20 minutes of traumatic footage involving injury or death. They were then divided into three groups. Thirty minutes after the film, one group sat quietly, one group played Tetris, and another group played a different trivia-based video game called Pub Quiz for 10 minutes each.
Participants who played Tetris had fewer flashbacks than the other two groups. In the 10-minute period, those who played Tetris had an average of four flashbacks, while those who played Pub Quiz had about six and those who did nothing experienced an average of 12.
Obviously we aren’t talking about soldiers here who have had the misfortune of watching a brother fall, or to see one suffer through painful medical treatments just a few feet away only to succumb to his wounds. My cousin was a combat medic for eight years and he doesn’t seem like the same person since he’s been back. Is it within the realm of possibility that Tetris – or what the mind goes through when it’s engaged in such a game – can cure or even remotely alleviate PTSD?
Follow-up reports showed that those who played Pub Quiz instead of Tetris had more flashbacks in the following weeks, but PC Mag was careful to say, “However, the experiment requires significantly more testing before Tetris or a similar task could actually be prescibed as a treatment for PTSD.”
[Via PC Mag]
