From the Vault: Tetris Syndrome

To play a game of “Tetris” is to invite a geometric invasion into your mind. After hours of intense block manipulation, you finally set aside your gaming device. You take a deep breath, close your eyes -- and there the frenzied, multicolored tetrominoes continue to cascade across your vision. They build walls in your dreams and shape the patterns of your very thought. What’s going on inside the mind of a 'Tetris' player and what can we learn from so-called 'Tetris' syndrome. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore. (Originally published Dec 1, 2015)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
You know what that means. The vault door hangs open,
the void is within, Will you walk in? Well, of
course we're going to walk into the void. The question
is what are we gonna find this week? Well, this
week we're going to revisit an episode from Tuesday, December one,
So this is a couple of years old. Now, this

(00:27):
is the first part of a two part episode. So
the first part is gonna rerun today and then the
next part is going to rerun next Saturday. So if
you want to hear part two of this older episode,
you can go back in the catalog and and and
get the old episode, or you can just wait till
next Saturday and we'll put it back up for you.
But this episode is called Tetris Syndrome, A Mind Made

(00:49):
of Blocks. It's fun that this episode came out around
Christmas time because I realized every Christmas I think back
to Tetris because it was a game that I received
as a Christmas gift and it had that wonderful chip
tune version of the dance of the sugar plum Ferry. Dude,
we talk about this in the episode. Don't spoil everything, Okay, Well,
I'm just throwing it out there. If it's the perfect

(01:11):
post Christmas listen as well well, even if you are
not interested in puzzle games or video games or anything
like that. I think this was actually a really interesting topic.
We had a lot of fun exploring it, so we
hope you enjoy the Tetras Syndrome episode. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you,

(01:39):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Before we get going here,
I just want to shot up quick reminder to everybody.
Go on over to stuff of All your Mind dot
com if you want to learn more about the show,
You want to find old episodes, you want to explore
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(02:01):
through the Apple system, what did you head on over there?
Give us a little love on the review there. It'll
help out the algorithm for our show and it's a
good way to give back and ensure that we get
to keep putting out this kind of content for you.
So this episode today is going to be about Tetris,
and it's going to be part one of a two
part series that we're doing on the science of Tetris,

(02:22):
the ancient mystery puzzle of the universe. Yeah, so the
first life is a mostly dealing with the power of
Tetris and the history of Tetris. Second part is going
to dive into some possible uses for that power and knowledge. So, Robert,
I have a perhaps pretty weird question for you. All Right,
hit me with a pretty weird question. If there were
no thinking beings in the universe, would numbers exist? Oh,

(02:47):
this is a great question. Yea, Our numbers a human
discovery or human or are numbers of human invention? Right?
Like the number seven? Is that an inherent feature of
the universe or is that just sort of like an
idea we've come up with to describe what happens when
there are seven of something. I tend to see it
as kind of a mix of the two. Like, yes,

(03:07):
there is there is an inherent number sense to the universe,
but obviously there's a there's a human ordering system layered
on top of that so that we can interact with
it and understand it. Yeah, I think that's a sensible
way of looking at it. But there are certainly people
who I think would be called Platonists in this sense
that they're Platonic in the sense that they believe in

(03:28):
the real existence of abstract objects that are inherent to
the universe, like numbers, mathematical objects, the theorems that those
things actually do exist as objects in some sense, even
though they don't have physical matter in any way. And
I sort of feel the same way the Platonists feel

(03:49):
about numbers. I feel that way about Tetris. So tell
me your personal Tetris history. Well, I think it is.
I deal that this episode is publishing during December because
for me, there's always something kind of Christmas e about
Tetris because I got it back in the day on

(04:10):
old school Nintendo. I think I got it for Christmas,
so it arrived in the Christmas season, and some of
the wonderful music um that was on that game included
UM I believe danced with the sugar plumb ferries from
the Nutcracker, which of course is a Christmas themed ballet.
Ballet that I had to set through or or got
to sit through. However you want to look at it

(04:32):
many many times, as I had two sisters who were
both involved in dance. Oh, it wasn't one of those
things where your school took you to the Nutcracker every year. No,
I had to, I think, go every year to see
one of my two sisters performing it. And it and
the Nutcracker is an interesting thing to have to sit
through because the first is totally front loaded. The first
half has a rat king, it has battles, it has

(04:52):
a fabulous candy Land discovery, weird uncles with an eye patch,
and then the second half is just just a slumber fest,
various dances that are performed for the victors like they've
already won. It's just all complete. Afterthought, that's interesting. Yeah,
it does have a lot of great hallucinatory imagery. I

(05:13):
recalled though. I remember that there's a lady with a
huge dress and a bunch of creatures come out from
under her dresses. Yeah, but anyway, Yeah, the dance of
the sugar Plum Ferry was on the any S version.
I played the game Boy version, and I also associate
this with Christmas. I think maybe because I associate most
video games I played as a child with Christmas, because

(05:35):
you know, Christmas is when you get the game and
then you have that huge allotment of time and to
vote to the game. You can just completely mild your
brain to this game play at nine hours a day
because there's no school and your you know, your parents
don't want to deal with you during Uh So, yeah,
I I totally had that. I had a couple other

(05:56):
games for the Game Boy two back in the early
nineties when I was a kid. I had Tetris, but
also had Super Mario Land. I don't know if you
played that on the game Boy. It involves weird it
kind of like ancient Egyptian themes that are it wasn't
like I played that one. It's sort of unique Mario game.
And then I also had a video game called Altered Space,
which involved isometric movements that was very hard to control,

(06:20):
uh and mostly you would just fall on spikes and
run out of air and die. You played a little
astronaut who has limited care. Because that was initially imagining
some sort of Timothy Leary tamed game. Oh no, that
would have been wonderful, like as a kid, I had
the game version of the William Hurt movie where he
takes ayahuasca and gets in the sensory deprivation tank. You

(06:41):
know another thing about about having it, I wonder if
this is the case with you as well. I had
some horrible Nintendo games on myf like I had Mission Impossible,
which was an impossibly difficult game, and then a few
other games that really had limited appeal even to me.
But Tetris was a game that I played like crazy.
My sister, I am sister who was old enough to

(07:02):
play the other played like crazy, and even my my
dad got in on the act and was playing Tetris
and it just ensnared all to all of us. Yeah,
it does have this very universal appeal, which has been
chalked up to several different factors from people we're gonna
talk about later in this episode. But the reason I
mentioned those other games I had on the game Boy
was going back to this very first thing I said,

(07:24):
which is that I sensed, even as a child, that
there was something very very different between Tetris and these
other games, even popular games like you know, the Mario game.
I mean, like it didn't have to be a bad game.
Other games to me, felt like human artifacts. They felt
invented in the sense that you know that that a

(07:46):
wheelbarrow is invented. Tetris to me felt like a fundamental,
inherent aspect of the universe that was an ancient, secret mystery,
and it just seemed to me impossible to believe there
was ever a time when there wasn't Tetris woven into

(08:06):
the fabric of physics and mathematics. So you're you're basically
imagining a scenario where the the Hominids in two thousand
and one of Space Odyssey are looking up instead of
seeing a complete um monolith, they're seeing the long bar
of seeing the Tetris shapes fall and form the monolith. Yeah,
and it's got to be the long bar, because that's

(08:28):
the most coveted piece among avid Tetris players as long
as you've prepared yourself for it's insertion. Yeah, exactly, how
true that is. No, I see what I see what
you're saying. Exactly this, Uh, it feels perfectly natural, like
playing Tetris is like coming home on some level. Um.

(08:48):
I definitely remember playing it and being obsessed with it,
and and it was just startled to realize this was
a new thing in the world. I couldn't believe. I mean,
this is a game that was invented in nineteen eighty four,
but it didn't feel that way. I even even old
old games like go and checkers and chess, I mean,
these old board games still felt like artifacts. They still

(09:11):
felt invented by humans in a way that Tetris didn't.
Tetris felt like an ancient mystery. And I'm still not
quite sure exactly why that is. But I think throughout
these couple of episodes we're gonna do on the science
of Tetris, we we may have some leads about why
it feels that way to me at least, and I
think to to some other people too, Or simply the case,

(09:32):
it could just be the case that God itself is
the long bar or or some sort of multidimensional um
shape that we can't quite understand, but that fits into
all possible Tetris scenarios. But indeed, as we explore here,
we're also gonna get into some of the recreational mathematical
roots of Tetris, and even those don't go back tremendously

(09:54):
far that they only go back into the early twentieth century. Nevertheless,
I insist there is an ancient mystery at the secret
of this journey, and maybe by the end will unlock it.
But I think we should actually look at the game
Tetris now, it's history and where it comes from. And
the first thing I've got to start with is uh,

(10:14):
sort of incidental to the game of Tetris itself. But
did you know that the famous Tetris music, that theme
right there is based on a Russian folk song that

(10:37):
actually has lyrics. I do not know the Tetris theme
with lyrics. I love it so much I looked it up.
This is the Wikipedia translation, so this may not be
the most accurate. But but the first verses, oh my
crate is so full, I've got chintz and brocade take pity,
Oh sweetie, of this lad's shoulder nice seems kind of
appropriate for the game where you're you're stacking the blocks

(10:59):
drever my great, it overflows. That is a revelation for me. Yeah,
but surely Tetris didn't just appear out of thin air.
I mean, obviously it grew out of some kind of
puzzle tradition. Yes, yes, and so I mean certainly you
can if you want to to take the roots of

(11:19):
tetris and extend them back just completely geometrically. Yes, you
can get back into the history of geometry itself, but
for the most part, we can begin the birth of
tetris with something that was called a pin tomino. This
is an arrangement of five unit squares or cubes, all
joined along their edges. Um they're twelve free pin tominoes.

(11:43):
They're shaped roughly like the letters VT, W, x, U,
z F, P I, N y L. That's funny. I
looked up some of these designations of like the letter
to the pintomeno, and some of them makes sense, Like
the W pintomeno looks like a W, the Y pin
tom you know, looks like a long bar with a
lump on the side. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are
a little a little more abstract. They're eighteen one sided

(12:07):
pentomenos in sixty three fixed pintomenos. Okay, So essentially, though,
the pentomeno is if you take some squares and you
line them up so that the sides are touching in
one way or another, how many different shapes can you
make out of five squares? And that's what it is. Yeah,
And then you you had pintomeno puzzles that were all
about arranging them together into a shape, usually something that

(12:31):
you know, a rectangle, something fairly simple. Now, the first
published pentomeno puzzle of this nature, even though it was
not named as such, appeared in Henry Dadeny's The Canterbury
Puzzles in nineteen o seven. That a companion to the
Canterbury Tales. Um, if anything, it would be the section
in the back with a crossroad puzzles too, I guess

(12:51):
um no. This is basically a puzzle publication. Uh. And
in this particular one that Dandenny put together, you had
fit twelve pentomino shapes together with one square traumino. And
I'll explain the terminology here in a minute. That's four
squares as you know encounter in tetris later on. You
have to join these together on an eight by eight checkerboard. Okay,

(13:14):
So you've got like a puzzle space. That's the board,
and the problem is you've got all these pieces that
you've got to fit into the space so that they're
not you know, poking out the sides or something right.
And like any good game, um, there's a there's part
of it is the mechanics, which I've described, but the
other part was the fluff. And the fluff here was
that William the Conqueror had, out of rage, broken a

(13:36):
chess up board, and you had to have to reassemble
the chessboard. That these each of these shapes is a
piece of the shattered board. O the story behind the game. Yeah,
I kind of love that when there's a game that's
not like an adventure action game with characters, but it's
a puzzle game, and yet it has a backstory. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I think that's essential. I don't want to
play a game that's just pure abstract mathematics and mechanics.

(13:59):
I want some cool off in there. That's how I
get engaged with. Of course, the exception would be Tetris exactly, yes,
because there is well we'll discuss some that have some
fluff added on, and sometimes the fluff is delightful, but
for the most part, Tetris is the exception to the rule. Okay,
but so William the Conqueror gets a chessboard, smashes it
into a bunch of pentominoes, and you've got to fit
them back together, right though of course they're not called

(14:21):
pentominoes at the time. It's not until nine three that
American professor Solomon W. Golam actually coins the term. So
what he did is he took the word domino, which,
of course we know is a little a little block
that you line up a play dominoes, whether you do
cascading domino, the guy who makes the pizza, yeah, exactly,
that that sort of domino. So he took the word domino,

(14:43):
and then he and it. He treated it kind of
whimsically as if it was die domino, as if omino
were a shape, and die referred to the number of
squares cubes making it up, because there are two squares
in a domino exactly, So he said, what if there
were other omino's, So in this case, a pent domino
is penta or five plus domino. Likewise, we already mentioned tetromino,

(15:07):
which would be tetra for plus domino, right, um and uh.
And he also threw out just a general polyominos, a
term for these various constructions depending on how many different
square cute elements are making them up. So there could
be like sex dominoes or sept dominoes exactly, though I
imagine as you go higher and higher up the list

(15:28):
of cardinal numbers. There, the number of possible shapes just explodes, right,
because as you add more squares to move around in
different positions, you could probably make an ultimately infinite number
of shapes. Yeah, Like, I mean, the bigger ones are
going to resemble full blown levels from video games or
or dungeoning adventures from Dungeons and Dragons with each of

(15:50):
the cubes, right. Um. Now, all of this comes to
a head publicly with his nine article Checkerboards and Polyominos
in Ameri Ken Mathematical Monthly. And this this really came out.
This kick started a lot of interest in these shapes
and the kind of puzzles you could have with them.

(16:10):
So Pentomino puzzles good stuff, big business. Yeah, well, I
mean its big business is you're gonna have in recreational
mathematics in the mid twentieth century. But but it's certainly
we're not talking about Marl Borrows here, right, But it's
still it's catching on. It's it already has an addictive
property to it. And then in night it actually launches
off the pin and paper off the table and into

(16:31):
the world world of computers. Because at this point, we
end up with a computer program that generates solutions for
an eight by eight polyomino puzzle. So we're all already obsolete. Yeah, yeah,
we're already getting the human element out of it, and
we're already seeing it take off into the world of
computer programming in a very early stage. So I imagine
if you're just trying to cram pieces together into a checkerboard,

(16:54):
and you've got a fixed number of pieces and a
fixed board size, there are a limited number of solutions,
right Yeah. According to the University of Victoria Department of
Computer Sciences, it's now known that there are two thousand,
three hundred and thirty nine solutions for the six by
ten rectangle, a thousand and ten solutions for the five
by twelve rectangle, three hundred and sixty eight solutions for

(17:16):
the four by fifteen rectangle, and two solutions for the
three by twenty rectangle. So so yeah, this is you
see this, this idea, this new um type of shape
puzzle just taking off in the world of recreational mathematics. Uh,
finding a warrant warm home there, and that's the sort
of sort of soil from which this maddening tetris vine

(17:38):
emerges and you can. The interesting thing here is you
can even factor in some uh, some interesting non Tetris
stuff here. For instance, John Horton Conway's seventy Game of
Life cellular automaton simulation. Is that. Oh um. I think
we may have mentioned it on here in some past episodes,
and we should probably discover it in more depth later on.
But it's essentially a very simple, uh, geometric based simulation.

(18:03):
Many of you may have seen images from this where
it basically looks like crazy little Tetris shapes moving around
and changing form on a screen, sort of one of
those uh cell evolution simulators along those lines. Yeah, the
big one really um and uh yeah, it's a fascinating
topic on to its own, so we may have to
come back on on that one at a later date. Okay, well,
you have laid the soil out of which you, as

(18:25):
you say, the vines of Tetris grow. But I think
we should turn to the vines themselves, because what fascinating
vines they are, a lot of people might not have
guessed this, so some people probably already know the story. Uh.
The creation of Tetris, strangely enough, takes place in a
nineteen eighties Soviet computing lab in Moscow with a slightly

(18:48):
board artificial intelligence researcher discovering the ancient secret of Tetris
under the ruse of testing computer hardware capabilities um SO.
The the creator of Tetris is named Alexei Petknov, and
he was a computer programmer and artificial intelligence researcher working
for the Academy of Science of the u S sr SO,

(19:11):
the Soviet Union Zone Academy of Science. And he was
working in a lab that would occasionally be sent a
new piece of computer hardware, and in this case, in
the case of Tetris, they were sent this thing called
the Electronica sixty. It sounds fancy, yeah, wonderful. And a
part of paget Knov's duties would be to create software

(19:32):
to run on the new computers of the new hardware
they're being sent in order to test what it was
capable of, so to say like, oh, okay, yeah, this
this computer is fine because it can run this demanding
piece of software a okay. So in in paget Knov's
own words, this became his quote excuse for making games,
which I mean, that's gonna be a pretty cool job.

(19:54):
Comparatively in the Soviet Union in Oh yeah. I mean
that's a pretty great situation anywhere where you find the
way to make your job even more engaging, or make
it engaging to begin with, without actually just completely knocking
off and doing your own thing. Right. So, Paget knobs
in this lab testing the Electronica sixty, and what he

(20:16):
comes up with to test it is Tetris. Tetris is
one of these games he creates. And I don't know
to what extent we really should try to describe Tetris,
because I feel like almost everybody who's going to be
listening to this has seen Tetris. If you haven't, you
should go watch a video of somebody playing Tetris on you.

(20:36):
Any number of official Tetris or Tetris knockoff versions that
you can just play online. I found a free website.
I don't know if this is legal, it's probably not, actually,
but I found a website that has an emulator that
will emulate the any S version of Tetris that's in browser.
And it's pretty great that the any S version. I
really like the graphics. Yeah, yeah, it was a great

(20:58):
use of the you know, simple graphics to deliver the
Tetris experience, though I do still prefer the music from
the game Boy version, but Dance of the Sugar Plumb
Ferry is good to either way. You should you should
play Tetris a little get in the mood for this episode. Uh,
you can pause right here and go do that and
come back if you like, otherwise we will continue. But basically,

(21:18):
what Tetris is is you've got seven blocks of different
shapes and these are the tetrominos that we were talking
about earlier, and they fall from the top of the
screen towards the bottom of the screen on a little
playing area, and the player can move the blocks around
left to right and can rotate them in increments of
ninety degrees, so you can flip the piece and you
can move it side to side, but what you can't

(21:40):
do is stop it from falling. There's the inexorable creep
towards the bottom of the screen. And so what the
player does is arrange the blocks to form and then
clear solid horizontal lines. Oh yeah, that's satisfying moment where
you have blocks all the way across a single line
and then that that line just anishes. Yeah. And so

(22:01):
if the blocks stack up all the way to the
top of the screen the game is over. Interestingly enough,
Paget and Nov said that originally the lines did not
clear in the version of the game he was making,
that you would just try to stack them, but he
found that the screen filled up too quick. You know,
you'd make these stacked rows, and eventually it reached the
top of the screen. So then he came up with

(22:22):
the idea of every time you created a solid row,
having it vanish and and just turned into magical abstract points.
Then I think it's interesting because it you can see
the roots of the recreational mathematical puzzle there right, because
you wouldn't have um that much space if you were
just filling this out on a sheet of paper. Yeah. Yeah,

(22:43):
So if if the blocks stack up all the way
to the top of the screen, of course games over
that that's your death in the game terms. And as
the game goes on, the blocks begin to fall faster
and faster, which of course makes it harder to fit
them in as time goes on, and eventually in most
versions of the game, you get to something that the
players would call a kill screen or a death screen,

(23:07):
which is in the any S version at least level
twenty nine, or the transition between level twenty nine and thirty,
where the blocks just fall so fast it's impossible to
play anymore. You cannot continue though. Actually, before we did
this episode, I watched a documentary called The Ecstasy of
Order about Tetris Champions, that which I recommend if if

(23:28):
you all at home, want to watch it. It was
really interesting, and there are a couple of players who
do manage to get to level thirty. In it, it's
a very brief, fleeting victory does it so that the
game itself does not stop and say, hey, you've won Tetris,
but you've merely you've made it to a threshold of
survivability that no one else has reached, right with a
vast majority of players, you know, it's not like you've won.

(23:50):
You've still died. You've just died a little bit farther
along the track the trail, than anybody else has gone before.
And that's an interesting thing about Tetris too. You can
never win. There is no winning, there's only getting farther

(24:12):
before you die, which makes Tetris a lot like life.
It is, yeah, and been probably a good lesson for
a young gamer to encounter where you especially if you're
up against the impossibility of mission impossible, where there's just
no getting to the end of it, you just feel
constantly like the metal gear these dogs stop. Well, now
I'll play Tetris. It's like the experience of the game

(24:34):
is you're never gonna get your money's worth out of
that game because you're not getting to the end of it,
to the narrative end of the game. But there is
no narrative in Tetris other than the simple narrative of
shapes coming at you better stack them and try to
stave off the inevitable. Yeah, so what happened when Alexei
Pajitnov made this game? So he claimed he was inspired
by his love of puzzle games like Pin tomino Is,

(24:57):
the ones we were talking about before, and he he
came up with the mechanics of Tetris with pentominoes in mind,
but then he decided to go with tetrauminos to simplify things, basically,
to make the game simpler. Uh fun fact, since the
Electronica sixty that he was using had very little in
the way of graphical capabilities, the original shapes were made

(25:17):
out of text characters. I think they were brackets, so
that would make sense. So falling shapes made out of brackets,
I do want to throw in that there. There are
plenty of other knockoffs of Tetris out there, and apparently
some of them do use pin dominoes rather than tetrauminose,
oh dude. In preparing for this episode, I played one.
There's one online called pent Trist that uses not pent

(25:38):
Trist but but pent Trists like Tetris, and it uses
pin dominoes, and at least in the time I played
it, it it was significantly harder than Tetris. Yeah. Yeah, I
imagine it would be just one more piece. Likewise, if
you were to play Tetris with simpler shapes, I imagine
it would the game would fall apart too easily. Like
what if you were playing them with dominoes, that would

(26:00):
be that would just be base level, way too easy,
to the point if you would get bored of it
almost immediately. Yeah, I think four really is the perfect number.
I I will argue very strongly in that in that
proposition's defense. But anyway, past Not recounts to The Guardian
where he told his own story about this. He says,
quote I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth,

(26:24):
I just couldn't stop playing it. When other people tried it,
they couldn't either. It was so abstract that was its
great quality. It appealed to everybody. And I think this
may be something about why so many people can get
into Tetris, Even people who don't usually play video games.
They can pick up Tetris and immediately feel at home
and intrigued. And and I think it has something to

(26:47):
do with the lack of representational nature of it. It's
like geometrical art you might see in a mosque or something.
You know. It's like it doesn't have characters or familiar objects.
It's just shapes and space and time and movement. Utterly universal, yeah, yeah,

(27:08):
completely devoid of any dependency on on its uh its
similarity to a real world scenario. It's completely in its
own universe. Yeah. So what happens when you create an
amazing and addictive game while employed by the Soviet Union,
Well that was an interesting question for peasant Nov and

(27:29):
he kind of feared what would happen if he tried
to make money off of his game. So the game
started getting passed around from place to place, in in Russia,
there were floppy disks of it that people were taking
two different workplaces, and then everybody would get addicted to
it and not do their jobs, so it sort of
posed a problem. Eventually it made its way to Hungary,

(27:51):
and then from Hungary it made its way to the
rest of Europe, the United States, Japan, and the whole world. Um.
But for ten years Paget Knobs seeded the game rights
to the government to the Soviet Union and so he
didn't really see much money from Tetris for a long time.
But eventually once that expired in the nineties, he got

(28:13):
more involved. And uh, I'm not sure if how much
money he eventually made off of Tetris. I I hope,
I hope it did well for him. Yeah, yeah, I
hope so too. I certainly remember seeing his name on
even the ne s because his ties. Your eyes were
glued to the program and you couldn't help but notice
anything in the system that resembled the outside world, such

(28:34):
as such as his name or St. Basil's Cathedral which
was on the loading screen. Yeah or yeah, if you
did really well in the game, I think you could
watch St. Basil's Cathedral being launched into space. Good goodness, gracious, Yes, yes,
why I haven't thought about that and forever I never
really understood why that happens, but it was. Was it
the idea that the cathedral is secretly an alien spaceship

(28:56):
that has been planted on Earth? And yes, and it
just it had to use our brain power, the collective
brain power of a Tetris obsessed planet, to to actually
launch it back into the stars. Yeah. But so, paget
Of gives a pretty cool perspective on the role Tetris
played in the early consumer adoption of the computer. Actually,

(29:18):
he says Tetris came along early and had a very
important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front
of computers, which were scary objects to non professionals used
to pen and paper. But the fact that something so
simple and beautiful could appear on screen destroyed that barrier.
I like to think that's true. Yeah, yeah, I would

(29:39):
think so. I mean you think of if you think
back to early computer games too, some many but not
all of them. We're a bit abstract looking on the screen,
to the point where I could see them being very intimidating.
Like I remember as a kid, we were at somebody's
house and they had at some sort of submarine simulation game,
and only you really had to use your imagination to

(29:59):
see the any kind of actual submarine uh simulation going on. Yeah, well,
I mean, have you seen any of the old TAR
twenty hundred Star Wars games where they're trying to represent
the characters from Star Wars or the ships from Star Wars,
But you know they've got a an a T a
T walker like in the Empire Strikes Back, and it's

(30:21):
just it's a big dog, it's like, or it's a horse,
it's a four legged animal of some kind, and you're
just like some pixels flying around shooting at it. And
I don't want to to criticize limited graphics and the
importance of imagination because some of my favorite gaming experiences
that have yet uh to be equaled by our our

(30:42):
heavy graphics age are some of those where you had
just enough graphics graph graphical detail to give you an
idea of what it was, and the rest was your imagination.
So yeah, yeah, that that's true. I just think that
there's less of a gap when you're talking about using
limited graphics to do something abstract versus to do something
that's supposed to be representational of images you recognize. But anyway,

(31:05):
Tetris after this went on to become big business all
around the world. It was eventually licensed from the Russians
by a video game licensor named Hank Rogers, which led
to what was, as I've said, in my opinion, the
definitive version of the of Tetris with the definitive music,
Tetris on the game Boy. And so in nineteen nine

(31:26):
Nintendo released Tetris for the game Boy and the nes
and sold millions of copies. And then, of course in
ninete Tetris became the central game in the Do you
remember these the Nintendo World Championships. Oh this was there
was the Fred Savage movie The Wizard. Huh. I think
it was all promotion for that. Yes, so tech was

(31:47):
Tetris in The Wizard. It's been I've seen you know what,
I've never actually seen The Wizard. I remember virtually nothing.
I think it was. Wasn't it just a commercial for
the power of love pretty much? But this is the
perfect game for for that kind of scenario, right, because
it's a it's a test of a true test of skill. Yeah, absolutely,

(32:07):
I think it makes perfect sense for this to be
the central game and a video game competition, because, like
I say, it's so universal, it feels so core, so ancient,
it's like the ultimate game, and there's something about playing
Tetris that is so inherently human. One of the things,
an interesting fact I came across about Tetris is that

(32:31):
Tetris is considered, it's in computational theory, a hard problem.
It's considered MP complete, meaning that even a computer cannot
play perfect Tetris. You can't write a computer program that
automatically optimizes Tetris moves and always makes the best move
because there is no known strategy for always determining the

(32:53):
optimal move. And this is not the case for a
lot of games. There are games like Connect four or
you know, play many of other puzzle games where there
is inherently a best move you can make that you know,
a lot of times humans might not have enough computational
ability to know what it is, but a computer can know. Yeah,
I think we can all relate to that and from

(33:13):
our Tetris playing experience. Because you start off with the
definite strategy in mind, generally you want to build it
up so that you can shoot down a vertical um
tetramino and just clear four rows at once, and then
do that again. Do that as many times as you can,
but you're gonna reach that point where that's no longer
an option. Where each shape, each new shape as it comes,
and maybe you have the preview box that tells you

(33:35):
what the next one is going to be. You can
try and crunch that data as well, but it's very
much a real time problem from from block to block. Yeah. Yeah,
the preview boxes actually, I think a really important part
of Tetris strategy. I don't know if I mentioned that
when I was describing Tetris earlier. I mean, you've played Tetris,
you know. But the big thing about Tetris strategy is

(33:55):
it will show you not just the block that's currently falling,
but what the next block up is. But after that
it's a big mystery. And and even the computer can't
solve this problem. There is no computer that that can
solve Tetris. It's a it's a mystery. It's an ancient mystery,
I insist it is. Okay, So in this episode, we're

(34:16):
eventually going to talk about the neurological effects of Tetris
on the human brain, the sort of the psychology and
neurology of Tetris. But before we get into that, we
got to mention one more thing about Tetris and culture,
which is all of the wonderful Tetris knockoffs that have
that have come from this game. Because, like anything that
sells millions and millions of copies and becomes up a

(34:38):
phenomenon like Tetris, you're gonna see other people want to
get in on the on the action and put their
own particular spin on it. And a lot of many
of them are great, They're perfectly serviceable. They're just complete
rip offs. Sometimes they try and add their own thing,
like trying to use a different polyomino in order in
order to spice things up. But one of my favorites

(34:59):
is just pure fluff on top of a traditional Tetris game,
and that's the release Monty Python and the Quest for
the Holy Grail, a PC game which included a Tetris
mini game called drop Dead that involved fabulously throwing plague
victims into a mass grave. So so they were shaped, Yes,

(35:20):
each Tetromino is shaped like a medieval peasant, and sometimes
their body has been you know this way or that,
or they're just completely straight, but you're throw you're throwing
those into the mass grave, and the bodies keep piling
up and they're falling faster like any kind of a
Tetris game, with the added feature that sometimes one isn't

(35:42):
quite dead yet and makes it makes moving it around
more challenging because it's you know, fighting back and trying
to to wiggle free, and you just want to throw
as many bodies into the mass grave as possible, right, Yeah,
you got a job to do. Yeah, So that's that's
the best I've I've ever seen. Um, you have been
various other attempts to spice it up. There was a

(36:04):
particularly it was a two thousand four mini game in
Mortal Kombat Deception. Oh man, they're still making Mortal Kombat
games in two thousand four. Yeah, they still make them today,
I guess. So. Yeah, in Mortal Kombat X just came out.
I don't think. I don't think everyone beyond Mortal Kombat
three in the arcade game version, well there was. You know,
four was kind of a I think a dark point

(36:25):
for a lot of people. But I know that they
put up They've put out some great games in recent times. Uh,
but the Tetris mini game in two thousand four was
not actually so great. It was just like typical Tetris
with some little bobble head Mortal Kombat characters. I think
they would have been far better off just ripping off
Monty Python's take on it and just have you know,

(36:46):
dead monks and ninjas falling into a pit. Yeah, so, uh,
Katana's out there doing finishing moves on people and throwing
all their dead body parts into the I can see that,
but they were probably you know, pressed for time, So
that seems like they've got uh, just violent variations on
Tetris basically. Yeah. But then there's also the sexy take.

(37:07):
And I'm going to leave you the listener to explore
this more on your own. I don't know if there
is a definitive sexy Tetris, but it looks like they're
various scenarios that involve humanoid tetraumino's interlocking with each other.
So it's it seems inherently disturbing, like stacking sex. I guess,

(37:27):
you know, kind of a Kama Sutra um group sex
take on Tetris. It's out there if you want to
explore it. Uh, and then I think they also just
have Tetris with a backdrop of a naked person or something,
so that exists as well, um an interesting attempt to
put some sort of fluff on top of of this

(37:49):
most perfect game. You don't need that. That would be distracting.
It's Tetris, That's what I'm thinking. I mean, are you
trying to mess with Tetris. Yeah, it seems like you
would have only that's the kind of game, and you
would only play for a few minutes and go like
ha ha, that's clever, or oh, that's not really clever,
and then you'd move back to just playing pure Tetris. Right.
One of the Tetris arcade games I saw in the

(38:10):
in the documentary I was talking about earlier, the Ecstasy
of Order is invisible Tetris. I didn't know about this before,
but that's where you can only see the blocks while
they're falling, but once they land, they become invisible. I
can't even imagine trying to play that. That sounds really
frustratingly hard. I would again, I'd rather just play regular Tetris,
And of course would be remiss if we didn't mention

(38:30):
the various three D forms of Tetris that have come
out where you're using three dimensional tetrominos and trying to
assemble them, and I've played those before. Those those I
feel like those are also fun for a limited amount
of time, and then you want to go back to
good old two dimensional Tetris. We keep saying Texas instead
of Tetris. It makes me think that there should be
a geographical representations or like you know, US States represented

(38:56):
as as as square block formations that you try to
fit together. Yeah, yeah, the United States as an assemblage,
like how does Tennessee fit into Texas? And I guess
you couldn't do it proportionally because every time in Alaska fell,
the game would just be over. But we should take
a break to hear from our sponsor, and then when

(39:17):
we come back, we're going to talk about some of
the brain science of Tetris, some of the science that
has been done on how Tetris affects our minds. Hey,
we're back, So it is time to talk about something

(39:39):
that has been called in the media the Tetris effect
or Tetris syndrome, which I like that one even more
because it has a slotting, nefarious air to it. Yeah,
so I have talked about how I think Tetris is
an ancient mystery, But have you ever noticed how the
six rectangular pains on each half of a home window

(40:00):
and form all of the Tetris blocks, except, of course
the most beautiful and most cherished of all blocks, the
long bar. But all the other blocks, you know, you
with you've got the six pains arranged in the two
by three formation. You can make the T, you can
make the L, you can make the S and the
Z and the square. And how the corners of the

(40:21):
coffee table in your house are kind of like L
blocks that just fits so nicely against the square block.
That really is the essence of this foot rest. And really,
when droplets of water bed together on a rain splashed
window and eventually flow away, it really is a lot
like how the stacks of blocks will away from viewing
Tetris once you've completed four solid lines. And then of

(40:45):
course you begin to see how the Tetris blocks do
come creeping down from the darkness at night when you
lie in bed, and they follow you into your dreams.
And how I'm going to stop you there, Joe, because
this sounds like, if not Tetris in drone, or the
Tetris effect, perhaps even Tetris madness, full blown Tetris madness. Yeah,
this is what most people have described as the Tetris effect.

(41:09):
It's in short, when Tetris players have dreams or mild
hallucinations about the game, the mechanics and visual aesthetic of
the game follow you beyond the game play itself into
your life. You see Tetris in the world, You hallucinate
blocks and places where they're not, and you dream about
them as you're falling asleep at night. I definitely remember

(41:30):
this from that Christmas that we got Tetris, playing it
for ab certain a number of hours, and then afterwards
you close your eyes and then against the darkness, you
see the blocks falling. And then you're trying to sleep
at night and you see the blocks following, and you're
dreaming and the blocks are still falling. And it was
never frightening, but it was just it was like unlike

(41:50):
anything I'd experienced before. It was essentially a paranormal experience, uh,
but but one that was so abstract, so so with
out narrative. It wasn't like I was seeing space, aliens
or anything. You were just seeing the pure uh, geometric
wonder of Tetris playing through your your vision, you know.
I looked up online to see if this had happened

(42:13):
with any other games, and it certainly has, I think,
maybe not to the same extent as Tetris. But I
googled Minecraft hallucinations. I've never played Minecraft, but I just
wanted to see what you'd come up with, and oh yeah,
I found some Yahoo q and Yahoo answers and some
forum threads where people are like, I'm I'm dreaming about

(42:34):
things from Minecraft and I'm seeing Minecraft blocks all over
the place. This does seem to be a way in
which our brains are susceptible to visuospatial tasks or images
that we have to manipulate in a virtual world, especially
in something as addictive and engrossing as Tetris. And this

(42:58):
has been reported on for a while now. The earliest
reference I can find to the term the Tetris effect, uh,
and this seems to be Most people say that this
is the first time the term appears is in article
called this is Your Brain on Tetris from Wired. Yes,
great article, it's still off online, you can still access it. Yeah.

(43:20):
So it was written by Jeffrey Goldsmith and if you're
too young to remember the this is your brain on
drugs commercials, And I don't know how widespread that reference
point is anymore. Uh. It was, well, it was one
of the most charming touchstones of the nineteen eighties propaganda
war against narcotics. But guy's got an egg. He holds
up the egg, he says, this is your brain. He
cracks it, drops it in a pan, fries it says,

(43:43):
this is your brain on drugs. Yeah. Great, great marketing. Uh,
but but the the effectiveness of that marketing is a
is a topic unto itself for sure. Yeah. So the
obvious implication is of Goldsmith's title this is your Brain
on Tetris is that he's sort of accusing Tetris of
being a hallucinogen or some kind of psychotropic agent. Uh.

(44:05):
Yet he also brings over the associations with addictiveness or
compulsive behavior. And I would just want to read a
quote from his article. He says, no home was sweet
without a game boy. In nineteen that year, I stayed
for a week with a friend in Tokyo. For a
week in quotation marks I think meaning longer. Uh, And

(44:26):
Tetris enslaved my brain at night, geometric shapes fell in
the darkness as I lay on the loan to Tommy
floor space days I sat on a lavender suede sofa
and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house,
I visually fit cars and trees and people together, dubiously.
Hunting a job in a house. I was still there

(44:47):
two months later, still jobless, still playing. My friend, an economist,
threatened a battery deprivation, but he knew my habit ran deep,
knew that I could always tilt, blinded by sunlight, to
a convenience store to save face. I would buy a
box of tiny chocolate filled bears, as if double A
power cells were an afterthought, not the meaning of my

(45:09):
wretched life. Uh. And he also refers to Tetris later
in the article as an electronic drug or and this
is a great term, a pharmatronic pharmatronic. I like it.
I don't know if that later appeared in like William
Gibson novels or something, but it sounds like it should.
But anyway. Goldsmith then reports on some research we're going

(45:31):
to describe in in just a minute about what the
brain of a Tetris player looks like. But the term
Tetris effect shows up later in his article where he says,
the Tetris effect is a biochemical reductionistic metaphor, if you will,
for curiosity invention. The creative urge to fit shapes together

(45:52):
is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix,
to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities
are now all guess each as potentially addictive as the next.
So once again we see that tetris it's a perfect
metaphor for just about everything we do in our life. Yeah,
I mean not only just the inevitability of of annihilation,

(46:15):
but just the it's just our the basic way that
we tackle mental tasks. It combines the the seeking order effect,
like we're trying to create solid blocks out of these
you know, disordered, unfitting shapes, and so we're seeking to
create order to impose order on a chaotic universe. But

(46:36):
it also has the uh, the task clearance type of
mechanic that we use throughout our daily work lives. You know,
you have a you have a to do list, and
the most satisfying part of every day is crossing that
thing off your to do list, which in Tetris, you get,
you get to do constantly. You know, every some number
of seconds you clear a line and it disappears and

(46:58):
quite literally disappear years and and being crossed automatically off
your to do list. So it Tetris again mimics life,
and sometimes life throws some bad blocks at you and
you just have to accept that you're not going to
fit into your order. But maybe that next block will

(47:18):
help you work this one out and it is eventually
you'll create some sort of order around it. Yeah, I
think that's entirely true. And if you listen to these
professional Tetris players, the one who are the ones who
get really deep into it, you know they'll they'll talk
about the sort of the fortune goddess of Tetris, the
Tetris god who doles out good blocks and bad blocks,

(47:41):
and you know they to a certain extent, the blocks
you get are randomized, um, but they're randomized in a
particular way. There's this thing referred to as a bag
that keeps a certain number of blocks in it and
you get you get the blocks from the bag and
then it's re randomized. But uh that like you can
get a good run where they'll get view lots of
long bars, and it's very nice happy times to be

(48:06):
to to be irritating though, if you've got too many
long bars, Like, why am I getting all these long
bars now? I'm just having to just throw them on
top of each other horizontally at the bottom. I need
these later to to really drive home and kill Yeah,
why wasn't I getting these long bars when I was
getting like seventeen s and Z bars. Uh? Those S
and Z bars really are the worst. They're the ones

(48:28):
that make the game as as cruel as it is.
But there was another quote I wanted to read, actually,
that was from a psychologist, Russian psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko,
and this sort of addresses the Tetris effect. Pokilko was
a friend and partner of Alexei Pechetna, of the creator
of Tetris Tetris and he was one of the original

(48:49):
patients in the first outbreak of Tetris madness in Russia
in nineteen eighty four. He he got to play it
before it was a commercial item, back when it was
a secret brain infection being traded on floppy disks around
in Moscow. And he says about Tetris quote. The main
part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and

(49:11):
it happens almost immediately. Insight means emotion, small but many
of them every two three seconds. The second mechanism is
unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions that force you
to continue and make it very addictive. The third is automization.
In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit,

(49:32):
a motivation to repeat. So, yeah, you've got some explanations
there for maybe some of the cognitive appeal of constantly
returning to thoughts of Tetris. Of it's sort of taking
over your brain because you've got the pleasing feeling of
solving a visual problem. You've got in the constant reward
every time you solve it. You've got the unfinished action

(49:53):
always drawing you back to the problem. There is no
conclusion to Tetris. You never finish it. It's impossible, and
so failure is never super frustrating because failure is inevitable. Yeah,
and then, of course the thirty says is automization. Eventually
it becomes uh, not so much a deliberate action, but
just an automatic part of your brain. You do it

(50:13):
without even thinking. Yeah, I do also want to mention,
while researching the articles about the Tetris effect in the
nineteen nineties, that I came across some frankly hilarious or
at least retrospectively hilarious scare articles about games and technology
destroying your brain. Uh there, Oh man, it was so

(50:35):
funny about talking about this theory from the ninety nineties
called cyber sickness. There there was a paper from the
Technology Review in the nineties called cyber Sickness Virtual Reality's
dark Side. It's really funny looking back on the techno
paranoia of a previous age, especially when it's addressed at
things that we now consider to be so inherently harmless.

(50:59):
I mean, who is worried about a virtual reality because
it turned out to be such a bust and be Tetris? Yeah? Well,
I think you could. There is a case to be
made that certainly there are destructive elements to obsessive video
game playing. So well sure, I mean if it comes
at a if you spend enough time on it, that
it's at a cost to your life. But that's certainly

(51:20):
not that. Yeah, nothing that would that that that really
matches up to that headline cyber sickness. Virtual reality is
dark side. Yeah, but I think now we need to
look at some neuroscience and psychiatry to see what's going
on when you play Tetris and how it affects your brain. Yes,

(51:40):
certainly the research underlying these Tetris observations that we've been
discussing here. So one of the first big ones came
out in ninet This is from a Richard Hare of
the University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and
Human Behavior. So they did what you not expect. They

(52:00):
scanned the brains of Tetris players. Okay, this is interesting
because it's not just psychology here. They're not just getting
people to reflect subjectively on their Tetris experience, but they're
gathering physical evidence about playing Tetris. What does it actually
look like? Yeah? So yeah, they're looking and and actually
looking at brain behavior during the playing of Tetris at

(52:21):
varying stages. So hair is suspected and ultimately found that
the brain requires less energy to play higher levels of
tetris um as opposed to lower levels, which which sounds
crazy at first because we all know how how easy
those early levels are and when you first start playing it.

(52:41):
You know, it's it's pretty easy going higher levels. That
gets so fast. Yeah, that's when the stress really you
think that would be when it was just you'd have
maximum cognition levels going on. But uh, so, this is
what they found in first time users. Tetris significantly raises
cerebral glucose metabolic rates or g m rs. So brain

(53:02):
energy consumption soars as your head cheese tackles this puzzle
for the first time. So your your brain is it's
it's dealing with a difficult task and it says, I
need sugar, give me energy. Yeah, and especially with Tetris,
and I imagine especially for someone who is, you know,
a novice to puzzle games of this nature, you're suddenly
encountering this game that is easy to get into but

(53:25):
drastically different in its presentation compared to anything else you've
done before. Yeah, so you said this was funny. You
said in first time users, I assume you meant players,
But I don't know if you were making a drug
joke there. I can't remember you have users the term
that I threw in or if I picked that up
from the original study. But um, but so, so those
were the novices. What happened after that? Okay, So after

(53:46):
four to eight weeks of daily doses of Tetris, uh,
g mrs sink to normal while performance increases seven fold. Okay,
and so ultimately Tetris masters have the lowest final g
mrs of all. So as your skill increases and you
get more and more, you become the Tetris master. The

(54:08):
thing it tells you at the end, if you do
really good, congratulations, you are Tetris master. Um, your brain
uses less energy to get you there. Yeah, I mean,
in effect, Tetris tain't trains your brain, uh and become
to become more efficient at carrying the cognitive load required
to solve the puzzle. Man, that seems so counterintuitive. Yeah,
but here's the thing. Those high GMR levels they leave

(54:31):
you feeling all amped up and uh and this is uh,
this is your brain amped up to learn something new
and guzzling down that energy to make it happen. And uh,
once it has acquired the skills, it ceases to guzzle
all that glucose. So so yeah, it's your brain crunching
this new problem, figuring out how to how to solve it,
and figuring out how to solve it, uh with with

(54:52):
a with a lower energy expenditure. Yeah. So, as Hair says,
the brain might just become more efficient as the tet
trisp becomes or the Tetris solving program in your brain,
as he says, becomes more unconscious and automatic. Yeah. Alright,
So the next study we're gonna look at answers that
question that many of you might have. What if the

(55:12):
dude from Memento, the guy, the Guy Pierce character, what
would happen if he played Tetris? Okay, so you're not
talking about Joe Panaliono. No, we're talking talking about Guy
Pierce's uh no short no, no new memories, dude, Interiro
grade amnesia. He can't form new episodic memories and things
that have recently happened. Yeah, what would happen if he

(55:33):
played Tetris? Well, Luckily there's a study that examines this.
This is a two thousand study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert
Stitt Gold. So he set out to study a similar
feeling to that of playing Tetris, uh, that of a
mountain climber who continues to feel the rocks beneath his
or her hands after a day of climbing, and I
imagine this is similar to you know, that feeling as

(55:56):
you lay in bad after a day on the beach
and the surf, where you still feel the surf, or
certainly something that comes to my mind and also and
also reminds me of of Tetris hallucinations and Tetris dreams
is that when I worked in newspapers, I did a
lot of pagination in design to build these pages in
the paper, sort of a form of tetris. Really yeah.

(56:17):
I would often refer to it as word tetris, because
it's just words and images articles, and you're blocking all
the pieces together and a lot of times they are
shaped like Tetris blocks to form this complete whole. And
of course there's the added stress though that this is
a product that is eventually going to be printed and
sent out to all these people, and you don't want
there to be any errors. And there's so many, so

(56:38):
many places that there can be an error if only
you could have the crutch of adjusting the kerning on
a real Tetris block. So the uh, yeah, a little
little pagination humor for for everyone out there. Um, But
but I remember having dreams at night where I was
in my bed, laying in my bed, and the pillows
in the bed were either illustration or articles on a

(57:01):
on a on a page and in design, and that
if I moved in the bed at all, it would
upset the arrangement of the front page of the newspaper. Yeah,
so it's that sort of thing. Or if you're if
you're a Tetris player, it's Tetris hallucinations. If you're a
rock climber, it's uh, it's kind of rock hasustinagency experience
after the fact. Yeah, So I gotta mention talking about

(57:23):
the study the title of it, because the title is
too good to miss. It's called replaying the game hypnogogic
images in normals and amnesis normals, normals, normals, alright, normals.
This is how it all went down. So stick Old
asked twenty seven participants to play seven hours of Tetris
over the course of three days. There are three groups

(57:45):
involved in the study, twelve novices okay, okay, novice Tatris players,
ten experts they're referred to as Tetris masters, and five
amnesis with extensive bilateral medial temporal lobe damage. These five
individuals were absolutely unable to learn and retain new episodic memories. Okay,

(58:08):
so if you sat them down and taught them how
to play Tetris and then met them again the next day,
they would not remember that that had happened exactly. Yeah,
so this is what they found. So the novices and
experts all reported that they saw Tetris pieces floating down
in front of their eyes as they were going to
sleep at night. Not surprising, we know that's how it works.
It's expected. However, the even the amnesics saw the blocks

(58:32):
at night, even though they could not remember playing the game,
and as it turns out, they actually could play it.
Just find the quote. The performance of the amnesic patients
showed only minimal, albeit significant improvement over seven hours of play.
So their brains were still learning to play Tetris even
though they had no memories. Yeah, they weren't learning as

(58:54):
well as the other novices, right, but they still were learning. Yeah.
Uh strange And and this gets in of course, into
the fact that there are numerous ways that memory works
in the brain. There are different forms of memory. The
two most important ones here for our purposes are as follows.
First of all, in the hippocampus you have. This is

(59:16):
the area that registers those episodic memories, the very memories
that the musics here could not form, explicit memories of
actual life events, episodic memories, Yeah, what happened yesterday? What
did I do? What was it like? Playing tetris? But
then the cortex registers implicit memories. This is stuff we learned,
but no, don't necessarily have conscious access to. So might

(59:38):
this be something like how to ride a bike or
things like that? Yeah? Things uh? Or imagine many of
you encounter this with with passwords or things you type
into the computer. Sometimes you can't you can't say what
it is. You have to do it too and then
rediscover what you're actually doing. You've made that method memory,

(59:59):
but but you don't have a direct recall of the event.
So this study the experiences of the amnesics here's suggests
that tetris syndrome is as much a matter of implicit
memory as anything else, and that the brain is extracting
memories from our experience even subconsciously. Um. And then furthermore

(01:00:19):
that as memory consolidation UH takes place during sleep, tetris
divisions may stand out as a manifestation of that process.
So yeah, I think this is taken as evidence in
favor of the hypothesis. I don't know to what degree
it's a hypothesis or a widely accepted theory, but the
idea at least that memory consolidation is what dreaming is

(01:00:43):
largely about, yes, in sleep. Do you know how accepted
that idea is? I mean, is that pretty solid or
it's pretty solid based on an episode recorded earlier in
the year where I was researching the power of naps
and the importance of naps at the Nott. Memory formation
came up a lot in that, so I think it's

(01:01:03):
pretty accepted. Huh. Okay, Well, that's interesting because the idea
that memory consolidation takes place during dreams and sleeping is
going to come into play in a paper that I'm
going to reference in the next episode, which will also
be Tetris themed. So this science is fascinating because, uh,
it explains something that is disturbingly common. I mean, one

(01:01:26):
of it would be one thing if every now and
then some weirdo said, well I I hallucinated Tetris blocks.
But this seems to be completely normal, completely widespread for
people who play the game. It takes over their brain
in this way and sticks with them, and they hallucinate
the blocks later. So I decided, as I said earlier,
to search around and see if this happened with other games.

(01:01:47):
Like I mentioned, there are people talking about Minecraft hallucinations,
and there are people who talk about hallucinations related to
other games. So the principle of seeing the world in
terms of visuo space, show game elements, or even experiencing
hallucinations of auditory and visual elements from games is not
unique to Tetris, though with Tetris it might be stronger

(01:02:10):
than average, or maybe even much stronger than average. But anyway,
that leads some experts to want to group what we're
calling the Tetris effect under the broader category of what's
called game transfer phenomenon. Uh So, there has been some
research on this, but essentially it's been based on interviews

(01:02:31):
and interacting with people who play video games and cataloging
their experience to see if they transfer elements of game
content or game interface into their real lives. I've seen
accounts of individuals claiming to see health buyers from playing
a World of Warcraft, and I definitely remember like the

(01:02:52):
only other game transfer um phenomenon that I can attest
to my own life would be from playing way too
my grand Theft Auto Vice City, and I can't for
the life of me, I can't exactly remember what I
was seeing, but I would go from playing a lot
of that too, then driving to work, which was stealing
cars also well luckily I didn't go that far, but certainly,

(01:03:15):
the the experience of driving the cars in the game
was was what was was impacting the way that I
observed driving a car in real life, which was a
little scary considering all the things you do with cars
in that game. That is a little scary. And that
figure is big into how the media has covered this, uh,

(01:03:35):
this scientific recognition of video game of game transfer phenomenon.
But there there are much smaller, more innocuous versions of this.
I mean, have you ever said, let's press pause or
I just leveled up on something about a real world situation,
achievement unlocked exactly? Yeah, somebody somebody tweets achievement unlocked Swedish

(01:03:57):
meatballs for breakfast. I mean, uh, that is that is
an example of game transfer phenomenon. You're you're porting something
about the game content or experience into your daily life
outside the game. It kind of goes back to our
techno religionist episodes that we recorded where we talked about
how you can't help but incorporate technology into your symbolic

(01:04:18):
metaphorical understanding of reality. And so I often think of
like in many different topics that apply to the human experience.
I often think in terms of the health bar and
some of the type of bar or whether you're talking particularly.
I remember in researching willpower and how willpower works, and
it in its state at status, is this kind of
depletable resource in the human mind. You end up thinking

(01:04:40):
about video games. It's the logical way to make sense
of that and to picture it. Yeah, so some media
coverage about exactly the kind of thing you're talking about
the intersection of of science and video games is of
course not so sensible. And and as we've said, this
example is no exception. In response to the game transfer phenomenon,
I know UK newspaper ran the headline gamers can't tell

(01:05:03):
real world from fantasy, and generally much coverage has focused
on sensational, violent implications of this kind of faulty premise.
The researchers themselves disown that kind of coverage. They're like, no,
that's not what we're saying. Almost all of this is harmless,
and they sort of they compare it to the ways
we incorporate other metaphors from other types of content and

(01:05:25):
media we consume into our lives. I mean, it's just
you could express things in terms of a TV show
you watched or a book you read. When you participate
with media, you you get some metaphors or some uh
you know, cognitive sticking points from it. Yeah, Like it's
not that weird. Yeah, Like I think of any other
phrases that we have, you know, fast forwarding through something again,

(01:05:46):
pot something, or let's put a pin in this, which
of course indicates that the speaker likes to torture insects
in the spare time. So keep that one in mind. Yeah,
the the malevolent lepidopterist of your office. Yeah. So while
the using the phrase achievement un locked or something isn't
all that weird, I do still think the Tetris effect

(01:06:08):
is remarkable and strange. The idea of these uh these
consistent and nearly universal Tetris hallucinations and dreams, and that
makes me wonder, well, does the Tetris effect belong in
this category of game transfer phenomena or is it something unique,
is it something on a separate at a different level.

(01:06:29):
Pretty much, I feel like it might be. And in
the next episode that we that we're doing on Tetris,
I think we'll see elements of that now. I've been
thinking about it in terms of Tetris being the purest
form of the drug, and you can, certainly and maybe
you should dilute the purity of that drug when you're

(01:06:50):
applying it in certain scenarios, right, because, like spice, it
may enable you to to have some precognition and to
stand at the top of the dune of the universe
of space time and see beyond what normal humans can.
But you've got to keep coming back. Oh man, I
wonder how spice would affect your ability to play Tetris, Like,

(01:07:11):
what would you see the entire bag your preview screen
would have hundreds of blocks in it, and then what
what well the guild navigator, of course would you would
would make sure to pick the best block possible for
the next turn, whatever the safest block choices. But as
we've showed, there is no such thing. There is no

(01:07:32):
optimal Tetris play. There there's better and worse Tetris play,
but there's no perfect Tetris play. So would you be
able to find that golden path and through Tetris? You couldn't,
I guess an unsolved game. Yeah. Anyway, we are so
excited about the science of Tetris that we're going to
come back next time to talk about some very fascinating

(01:07:53):
Tetris research, more about how Tetris interacts with our brains.
We're going to talk about why Tetris feels so good
to play, but we're also going to talk about Tetris
based therapies for the Tetris cure. Essentially. Yeah, so we're
going to continue to dive into the power of Tetris.
But then what can we do with that power? How
can we utilize it? How can we harness Tetris and

(01:08:16):
use it to improve our lives? In the meantime, if
you haven't played Tetris in a while, I encourage you
to unlock that ancient secret yet again, open the puzzle box,
play a little bit of Tetris, and then come back
and visit with us again next time and and share
in the deep mystery and wonder of the Platonic puzzle
universe with us, So until next time, check out stuff

(01:08:39):
to blow your mind dot com. That's where we find
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and indeed the landing page for this episode will include
links out through some related materials on the site as
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with you today. And if you want to get in
touch with us and let us know your personal Tetris
history or your thoughts about cognition, human neurology and in

(01:09:02):
video gameplay, you can email us at blow the Mind
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