Tetris Effect On Brain

Nov 13, 2018  The Tetris Effect: how four simple tiles can help anxiety and reshape your brain By Alex Spencer 13 November 2018 From flow states to amnesia, the psychology behind the latest Tetris game. As it turns out, the floating pieces that Tetris players saw were actually cognitive afterimages from the earlier activity. The brain doesn't stop searching for images to.

Playing Tetris does more than just put us in the mood to organize and stack colored boxes. New research shows that the popular game can make us more efficient thinkers and even reduce episodes of PTSD.The presents evidence that people who played Tetris for an hour and a half a week for three months experienced structural brain improvements. Their cerebral cortexes became thicker in certain places, and other areas of the brain became more efficient, using less glucose to fuel the same tasks.

Another study looked at the effects of the game on those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and found that it reduced flashbacks by up to 50%. The researchers called Tetris a “cognitive vaccine”—it interferes with the consolidation of traumatic visual memories by occupying both the brain's working memory and visual processing simultaneously.The video is not totally one-sided, however: It does mention the potentially harmful “Tetris Effect” caused by extreme amounts of Tetris intake.

Wargaming already gave us a good idea of what to expect with World of Tanks Blitz, and if you substitute water for land and boats for tanks, you get the idea pretty quickly. World of Warships Blitz for PC - Windows/MAC OSToday gyus I am preenting you World Of Warships Blitz published by. It’s kind of a crutch any time one explains or reviews a mobile game and says “it’s kind of like x but with y instead.” Yet there are cases where those kinds of comparisons are more than appropriate, and World of Warships Blitz is one of those.

You may find yourself daydreaming about completing lines, or mentally organizing everyday objects. Host Vanessa Hill wraps up with this piece of advice: “The question of Tetris being good or bad is kind of like a big puzzle.

For now, you can just keep on playing—in moderation.”h/t:.

Actually, Tetris is already renowned for its brain-warping powers. Born inside a computer laboratory in Moscow, in 1984, it was so addictive that its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, kept playing it instead of finishing it. His friend Vladimir took a sample to another lab, and had to delete it from all the computers because nobody was doing any work. When it finally spread to the West, it came with a ‘boss key’ which instantly called up a fake spreadsheet document when your manager came walking past. Had the KGB designed it as a weapon of economic sabotage, they could not have done it better.

Since then, Tetris has been linked to intense brain activity, increased critical thinking, and even quitting smoking. When you do something so often it appears in your dreams, that’s called “the Tetris effect.” No wonder the technology Jeffrey Goldsmith called Tetris the world’s first “pharmatronic” – that is, computer drug.This time, scientists say Tetris distracts parts of the brain which would otherwise be busy forming traumatic memories. But there is a wider sense in which Tetris and games like it are good for the mind: they’re work.Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, with his son (Photo: SIPA PRESS/REX FEATURES)We hear a lot about the psychological benefits of hard work, exercise, or volunteering, and games of today increasingly resemble our day jobs.

It’s not just the mobile apps which, testing your budgeting skills or time management as if they were preparing you for an interview. Even the games where you’re a supernatural assassin in the midst of the French Revolution make you feel like a shelf-stacker with their incessant, overbearing busywork.It might seem bizarre that people working stressful, often computer-aided jobs might then relax into stressful, computer-aided leisure.

But games are different from most jobs in a crucial way: they are fair. In the real economy, ego, human error, bureaucratic empire-building, bad regulation and pure chance conspire to frustrate and sometimes terrify. In games, though, hard work is always rewarded, and the goals are always clear. Even if the system is obtuse or obscure, it always makes sense in time. The developer and critic, to distinguish them from games of chance or games of skill, and sees them as a kind of “industrial fantasy” – the fantasy of a just world, or perhaps one ever-so-slightly slightly tilted in your favour.For people with depression or anxiety, that can be a great comfort.

When the world’s terrors are amplified and its pleasures drained of their joy by some neurochemical quirk, games can restore the balance. They give us little hardships, little victories, and with them a little more belief in ourselves.

Recently the New York Times reported on a scheme in France which runs entire fake businesses – elaborate simulations designed to help the long-term unemployed “regain confidence”, if not a wage. Games like this are training wheels for the will. Yet there is a dark side to all this. The science of “gaming addiction” is murky, with researchers divided on whether it’s a disorder or a buzzword. It’s easy to see – and indeed I have seen – how pre-existing issues can turn coping into obsessing.

Games offer clear rewards for clear goals, while the rest of the world offers weak, uncertain ones for tasks which seem overwhelming. You can get hooked there, clinging to that small comfort while everything else decays. In these instances games actually become tools of self-harm – a way to endlessly discipline yourself, and mess up your life as surely as by starving.The middle way lies in using games gently. It’s not wrong to hide from an unpredictable and occasionally hostile world by training yourself on a miniature, more predictable version. But games must serve as a stimulus, not a substitute.

That also goes for their therapeutic power. Our increasing understanding of the strange alchemy of computer games can never exempt us from our duty to solve problems at their source in the real world – so the trauma doesn’t happen in the first place.