December 3, 2015 • 46 mins
In their previous episode, Robert and Joe explored the geometric hallucinations of Tetris syndrome. Now they're back for a serious look at the ways in which a good dose of cascading, interlocking tetrominoes might just cure what ails ya -- from lazy eye to full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stop to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Today's episode is part two of a two part episode
about the science of Tetris, really the science of Tetris,
(00:23):
get also the history and philosophy of Tetris, because, as
I said in the last episode, I have a very
very strong intuition that Tetris is not just an invented
artifact of the work of human hands and human minds,
but is somehow a natural, fundamental outgrowth of the phantasmagorical
(00:45):
blood magic of the universe. It comes from the cosmos itself.
It's not just something we made. It was here, and
in nineteen four the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, discovered it.
I like that the idea of discovering Tetris as this, uh,
this sort of dimension of of mathematical perfection, Yeah, underlying
(01:09):
reality totally. And in the last episode we talked a
little bit about that, about where Tetris came from and
its influences, and then about the Tetris effect. This uh,
this syndrome, this experience commonly reported by Tetris players, where
they where it sort of takes over their minds. They
see Tetris in everything throughout the world, They hallucinate it,
they dream about it, And we talked about some possible
(01:31):
explanations for that, as well as how Tetris skills develop
in the brain and the interesting fact that that people
who cannot form episodic memories can still form hallucination recall
for Tetris that counterintuitively, expert Tetris players use less brain
energy than novice Tetris players at higher levels of play.
(01:53):
So there's a lot that's very fascinating and weird and
mysterious about the game Tetris itself. But today we wanted
to talk about how some of this science of tetris, uh,
how it works as a game, and how Tetris can
be used to solve problems in the real world. Yeah,
and a lot of this, uh the first portion of
(02:15):
this episode, a lot of it relates to just why
do we love it? So? Why is it so satisfying
to play tetris? Um and uh, and the the science
behind us is it's a lot more interesting than you
might think. It's it it goes pretty deep into just
how we think and how we process the world. Absolutely,
So if you haven't listened to part one, go back
listen to part one, uh first, and then come and
(02:38):
join us again here where we will continue the cosmic
journey of Tetris and clear those lines again and again
and again. All right, So why do we love Tetris?
Why don't we play it so much? Why did it
have such an impact to begin with? Well, we should
back up and ask why we play any games so much?
(02:58):
Why do we love any game? I mean, as we
observed in the last episode, there there's a difference between
a really good game and a not so good game.
And it's not just I mean, these days a lot
of people might refer to things because of the complexity
of games on newer generations, and things like graphics and
story and you know, because you have these action adventure
(03:20):
games that are that are so complex and all that.
There's more, you're immersing yourself in a an unreal world.
Yeah yeah, yeah, So ignoring all that and just getting
back to the basics of simple types of games and gameplay,
puzzle games. Uh, playing Tetris versus playing I don't know,
what's another early puzzle game, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game,
(03:44):
on which did really exist. Don't don't bother looking at it,
field just get sad. Yeah, w wanted. Why are these games? So?
Why don't we immerse ourselves in? And how does this work?
One idea that seems pretty strongly supported is that very
rewarding and enjoyable game play and game mechanics come from
(04:05):
the psychological process that's been described under the term cognitive
flow flow. Yeah. Yeah, at heart, any good game is
tapping into cognitive flow. As Sean Baron broke down in
a two thousand twelve Gama Sutra article, it breaks down
as follows and Tetris boils this down perfectly to a
(04:28):
highly concentrated mental gaming experience. You have concrete goals and
manageable rules, plus goals that fit player capabilities, plus clear
and timely feedback, plus an elimination of distractions, and this
equals cognitive flow. Yeah. So it's a game essentially where
you understand how to play, You can play, you have
(04:50):
the skill. It's yet it's challenging enough that it's not boring.
You're constantly getting feedback on how well you're doing, and
there's not extreme a stuff going on. It's just perfect focus,
zeroing in on a perfect brain consuming task that is
just challenging enough to always keep you engaged. Yeah. Now
(05:12):
that's not to say that cognitive flow is just a
result of gaming EXPERI yeah, we cure it in our
daily lives. Be it in your work if you're lucky,
or you know, in your hobbies, or even in just
random chores that you have down, you know, skill wise.
Um in the term itself comes from psychologist Mihi. Chick
sent me high, the Hungarian psychology professor who pioneered the
(05:36):
study of cognitive flow. I like this guy's research. I've
read about it before, and it's interesting to me because
this is what people would, I think often call positive psychology.
So much of what is studied in psychology or psychiatry
deals with people who are having less than optimal experiences.
(05:57):
And this is an attempt to study, well, what's going
on when humans are just really at their peak mental experience,
when they're feeling great, when things are going well inside
their heads. What's happening there? And and and the thing he
identified is that a key to a sort of happy
existence or a happy experience is this process of flow. Yeah, indeed,
(06:19):
and uh, you know, it's interesting looking back to the
previous episode where the stick Gold study started off and
ended up getting into the Tetris area by considering people
who engaged in um in rock climbing, and then they
would perceive rock climbing later. Uh and and overall his
study was about looking at people who engage in novel
(06:41):
physical or mental activities for extended periods of time and
how they often experienced a hallucinatory replay of the activity.
And with the check semi hi, we see rock climbing
come up again because as an avid rock climber, that's
where he first took note of this special feeling in
his own experience that he got while inching his way
up at challenging rock face. He began thinking about it
(07:03):
in terms of his psychology studies, and he laid it
out pretty much as we've been discussing that flow is
about having set goals, having uh a self contained universe.
So you especially see this in gaming right where they're
something like Tetris. The rules, the space, it's all pretty
well defined. There's there's less ambiguity. You get immediate feedback
(07:24):
if you're doing it right. Contains a manageable challenge. It's hard,
but you can do it. Sense of control over the situation,
at least until you reach the upper levels uh, And
you're completely involved in what you're doing. And so this
results in a sense of ecstasy um, great interclarity, a
confidence that what you're doing is doable, and then you
(07:45):
have the skills to tackle it, a sense of serenity,
a sense of timelessness, and intrinsic motivation to keep going.
It becomes fun in itself. I mean, there's no reason
you have to play a tetrisa. You know, nobody, nobody's
give being you tangible rewards or punishments based on how
many lines you clear. But it becomes intrinsically motivating. There's
(08:07):
something about the activity itself that's pleasing enough that you
have to go on. And it shuts down the chatter
and your brain. It shuts down that default mode network,
all those little voices and the that are worrying about
the path or the future. It all goes dull as
your brain uh tackles the problem at hand, be it
climbing a rock, working on an article, mowing the yard,
(08:30):
or playing tetris. Yeah, totally. So if you look at
all of the conditions that must be present to create
the optimal sense of flow. I think Tetris is almost
perfectly designed to satisfy them. Like, it's hard to think
of a cleaner distillation of exactly what those conditions are.
The clear goals, stack them, clear lines, manageable rules, it's
(08:54):
absolutely clear what's going on in Tetris. Uh. Tetris adjusts
itself to your capability. So at the beginning it's easy. Uh.
If you are a very good player, you can move
up to higher difficulties pretty quickly. Gives you an adjustment period.
But the difficulty changes and tracks with you as you play.
You know, as you go up higher, you get farther,
(09:15):
it gets harder and more challenging. There's feedback and that
you can like. The music is an interesting feedback thing
in Texas, Texas, I say Texas again. In Tetris. As
you keep stacking higher, I don't know if you remember that,
the music gets faster. It's letting you know, okay. And
of course there's very obvious visual feedback. You know, you
(09:36):
you can clearly see as you're getting towards the ceiling
of the screen, this is not what you want and
what is there that's extraneous, I mean nothing, It's it's
all there. And uh, and of course it works even
better if you can just uh sort of like put
a black blanket over your head and tape your eyes
(09:58):
directly to the Tetris screen and so that nobody can
walk in and say, like, hey, there's a fire, you
need to have activate the building. I mean, you just
you're there, You're in the zone. But there's some other
theories we've come across that that help explain exactly why
Tetris feels like such a perfect game for our brains.
(10:18):
And one of the ones I wanted to mention was
actually something I saw alluded to in a brain Craft video.
Some of our periscope followers. We were talking to him
last Friday, and we mentioned that we were going to
do this episode and they said, oh, you should watch
the Braincraft videos. So there, I think they're PBS. Yea
PBS is behind it. I watched this as well. I
(10:38):
was entertaining, yeah, and so they but they mentioned something
called the Zigarnic effect in reference to Tetris. So what
is the deal with this? Okay, so the Zigarnic effect
comes to us again. We looked to UH to Soviet thinking.
Here it comes from Soviet to psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma
Wolvovna Zigarnick. She lived from nineteen dred to nineteen eight
(11:00):
and she first observed this in the nineteen twenties. UM,
and it basically boils down to this. It's the it's
the psychological tendency for us to remember incomplete or interrupted
tasks better than complete ones. UM and Tetris. Of course,
to tie that in is a continuous stream of incomplete task,
(11:21):
constant sense of achievement, but also a constantly unachieved finish.
As we mentioned in the previous episode, there's no hey,
you won screen in Tetris. It just keeps getting harder
and harder and harder until you perish. And of course
it's made up of lots of little individual incomplete tasks,
right because every time there's a gap in a row
in Tetris, that's a little thing that there's a little
(11:43):
flag in your brain that says I need to go
back and fix that, and I'll get there eventually. So
it's a one huge incomplete task forever being incomplete, made
up of an infinite number of incomplete tasks. UH. It's
almost as if this was in mind when it was designed. Yeah,
so there's a Garnic effect, of course, plays into the
(12:05):
typical human drive to finish what we started, to see
things through to the finish, and the associative associated negative
psychological renovocations of doing the opposite. You know, where you're
you're haunted by that model airplane you never finished, or
that novel that you have have completed, or you know,
or whatever chores around the house are, and god knows,
when you have a house, there's always some something that's
(12:27):
not quite finished about everything. And how those just continue
to stick in your mind? Um. There's a one explanation
of the Zigaronic effect that I found that I thought
was pretty uh, pretty nice comes from Roy Bambinster and
Brad Bushman in their two thousand and eight textbooks Social
Psychology and Human Nature. They said, the Zigarnic effect is
(12:49):
a tendency to experience automatic, intrusive thoughts about a goal
that one has pursued, but the pursuit of which has
been interrupted. That is, if you start working toward a
goal fail to get their, thoughts about that goal will
keep popping into your mind while you're doing other things,
as if to remind you to get back on track
and finish reaching that goal. So not only is this
(13:12):
something that is related to the motivation we have to
keep playing Tetris, but it also might sort of explain
what we talked about in the previous episode because this
mentions intrusive thoughts about the incomplete task. So in the
last episode we talked about the Tetris effect where people
experience dreams and hallucinations about Tetris if Tetris is never
(13:32):
finished yet it's always this intrinsically motivating task that remains
incomplete in the mind. It kind of makes sense through
this method that it would keep jumping up into into
your thoughts. Yeah, yeah, I think it plays nicely into
into just trying to figure out Tetris syndrome, the Tetris
effect in general. And then there's a broader lesson here
(13:54):
though that applies well beyond games, and that is that students,
be it an you be an official student, or just
somebody studying up on something in your life. Uh, it
pays to suspend your studies, to take a break, to
come back to it and not try to wipe it
all out in one massive cramming session. Absolutely, I find
this to be extremely useful in my own work. So
(14:16):
if I'm trying to uh to think clearly about maybe
an episode I'm researching or something like that, I find
it's way more useful to uh to start on it
before I end work for one day. So if it's
you know, five thirty and I'm trying to quit work
for the day, um, and I'm at the end of
(14:39):
one task, it's better to do ten percent of the
next task and then come back to it the next day.
My thoughts about it are gonna be a lot clearer
than to break from work in between when tasks are
concluded and when the next one starts. Yeah, and generally
also if you have some sleep in between, then you're
you're going to to consolidate those memories. All that working
(14:59):
is working in your favor as well. But also it's
pointed out a lot that if the if the task
is intimidating, just started, because if you just started, then
you get to benefit from the Zigarnic effect, because that's
effect is going to be in play to encourage you
to come back and work more on it. So beginnings
are difficult, but begin and then take a break and
(15:21):
then come back. Yeah, This isn't gonna become the self
help show, but but try that one at least. Yeah,
I I highly advocate that strategy. Get it started, it'll
be easier. Another thing that is UM. I can't remember
exactly where I came across this, but I feel like
it was in UH. It was in something that was
(15:43):
linked to from that Braincraft video. But but anyway, however
I came across this. Another thing that I saw referenced
UH with regard to Tetris is the idea of epistemic action.
And I had actually never heard about this phenomena before,
but I it turned out to be pretty interesting. So
in nine David Kirsch and Paul Maglio published a paper
(16:06):
in Cognitive Science called on Distinguishing Epistemic and Pragmatic Action,
and Kirsh and Maglio make the distinction between two different
kinds of actions that a person can perform. So you've
got pragmatic action, and this is one. It's an external
action that changes something in the external world in furtherance
(16:27):
of you achieving a goal. So if you are stranded
on a tiny island and starving, throwing a rock at
a seagull would be a pragmatic action. To unlock that
seagull's delicious meat. Or you could make a much smaller action.
You could say, press a button while playing tetris to
move a Tetris piece with the goal of actually moving
(16:48):
it to the spot where you want to place it.
You're just doing an action to reach a goal. But
then they distinguish this from a different kind of action,
a different kind of external action, which is what they
call astemic action, and this is making a change to
the world in order to simplify a problem solving task.
(17:09):
So imagine you remember those spot the difference puzzles and
children's books, you know what I'm talking about. They'll show
you two pictures of a scene. One's Mickey Mouse, you know,
roller skating, and the next one's Mickey Mouse roller skating,
but the clock hands are pointing to a different time
and something like that. And let's say you've got a
children's work book with with two of these on different pages. Um,
(17:31):
and what you do is you tear out one of
the pages and then hold the pictures right next to
each other. That would be an epistemic action, because they're
what you're doing is an action that is really designed
to change the nature of a problem inside your head
to simplify the task. So when you see them next
to each other, or maybe you um lay them on
(17:54):
top of each other and hold it up to a
light to see what's different. In the two pages, you're
using external action to reduce the mental complexity of a task.
And they looked at Tetris in this paper actually and
pointed out how experience Tetris players use epistemoic action in Tetris,
(18:14):
and this is the way it works. You've got a
block falling down and you want to fit it in,
and instead of doing all the work of flipping the
block around in your head to see where it would fit,
the players flip it. They physically flip it, plus press
the button to flip it to offload some of the
cognitive work required to see where it would fit. So
(18:37):
by visually seeing exactly what the block looks like in
all its orientations, you can see, okay, here's exactly where
it would fit without having to flip it in your mind,
thus freeing up some mental resources to look at what's
the next block in the in the preview bar. So
so essentially it is using physical action and to make
(19:00):
mental work easier. They say epistemic action can be used
to reduce the memory involved in a mental computation. UH,
it can be used to reduce the number of steps
involved in completing a mental computation, or it can be
used to reduce the probability of error in a mental computation. UM.
And so if you follow this idea, you can conclude
(19:22):
that when you play Tetris, it's again kind of a
perfect back and forth between body and mind. It creates
a constant, flowing, rapid feedback cooperation between mental problem solving
and then this external epistemic action. You use the body
to simple simplify a problem. You press the button, flip
(19:43):
the block, see where it would fit. Then you use
your mind to solve the problem. Then you use the
body again to execute the solution, and you just keep
going back and forth on repeat. Alright, so once again
we see a manner in which Tetris illuminates how our
brain works. And we've discussed they just almost perfect way
(20:05):
that Tetris captures our mind. So we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we're gonna explore
some some of the applications that that scientists have have
explored have actually looked into and some some very real
possibilities for tetris as a as a treatment option for
a few different ailments. All right, we're back. Okay, So Robert,
(20:37):
we've talked about the tetris cure. What can you cure
with tetris potentially at least because I was quite surprised
to see some of this research, but once I read
into it, it started to make a lot of sense
to me that you could potentially use tetris in maybe
in place of drugs or other types of therapies and
(21:00):
lots of scenarios. Yeah, because we've again just think back
to all the ways we've discussed in which tetris captures
your mind, How it plays into two different modes of memory. Um,
how it uh it's got the skeleton key to a
deep part of your brain. Yeah, it's it's involved in
flow state. It really reminds me of a lot of
(21:21):
what one is setting to do a set out to
do with meditation and yoga to to a certain extent,
except you kind of have a leg up on it
by it being this fun, engaging game as opposed to, uh,
to something that takes a little more deliberate mental or
physical force. Okay, So let's imagine that I am two
packs a day kind of guy and I'm trying to
(21:42):
quit smoking. Can Tetris help me? Potentially? Yes, And which
sounds crazy, especially anyone who has firsthand experience with just
how how powerful, uh that addiction can be. But we
do have some evidence to back it up. This is
a new study. This came out August two thousand fifteen,
and it's from a team of psychologists from from Plymouth
(22:04):
University and Queensland University of Technology in Australia. So this
is how it how it went down. Uh, they got
together thirty one participants ages eighteen through twenty seven, and
they were monitored for levels of craving and also prompted
seven times a day to report their cravings. Fifteen of
(22:25):
these individuals, so roughly half, were required to play three
minutes of Tetris before reporting their craving levels. So it's
kind of like you, you have problems with different cravings
for different things, and somebody's gonna call you and ask
how you're doing with those cravings. But half of the
group get to play Tetris first before they're quiz done it.
So cravings were recorded in thirty percent of occasions, most
(22:47):
commonly for food and non alcoholic drinks, which were reported
on nearly two thirds of those occasions. So of the
cravings were for drug related instances, and these included coffee,
cigarettes when one, and beer and spice. Yeah, and spice
were for miscellaneous activities such as sleeping, playing video games
(23:08):
which I found interesting, socializing with friends, and sexual intercourse.
Food cravings tended to be slightly weaker than those and
other categories. But they claimed this is the first demonstration
that cognitive interference. Again, that's Tetris coming into your life,
captivating your brain, shutting out everything else. Cognitive interference can
(23:29):
be used outside the lab to reduce cravings for substances
and activities other than eating. So in this we could
see how Tetris or some variation of Tetris, some variation
of a you know of a puzzle solving game, could
be used as a support tool for curbing addictions. Not
not again, not the primary tool, but but an additional tool.
(23:52):
So I'm sure that they didn't find that that it
would completely eliminate cravings. But but did they have an
estimate for by how much the cravings were reduced? Yeah,
by approximately one Okay, So I mean that that's you
could look at that as small, or you could look
at that as big. I mean if if all it
(24:12):
takes is Tetris and you don't have to you know, uh,
this is without some other kind of like drug interference
or major behavioral therapy or anything. Yeah. I mean, you're
trying to curb this addiction. So any tool at your
disposal that that put gives you an advantage is certainly
worth taking up. So yeah, I could see this being again,
a part of one's treatment. Certainly not the only part
(24:34):
of one's treatment, but it could help. It could certainly help. Yeah.
I wonder the extent to which Tetris is special here,
Like how would this compare to other video games? I
feel like Tetris is kind of special because we haven't
feel the same way, rather because we haven't really touched
on this as much. This is something I find in
gaming in general these days, especially um with a three
(24:56):
and a half year old running around in my life,
is that blessed is the game that can be enjoyed
in very small allotments of time. Yes, true, Tetrisses is
perfect for that. It is one of them. I just
the other day When we were preparing for this episode,
I was doing some research. I decided to play a
little bit of Tetris, and I several different times I
(25:18):
played for maybe three to five minutes, and oh man,
that was a session. You can't have a three to
five minute session of I don't know what do people
play these days of Fallout four? Yeah, these are games
that require vast periods of time, vast immersive periods of
time where there's always time for Tetris, and and it's
never a situation where I can't play Tetris now this
(25:41):
environment is too distracting. No, you can play Tetris in
a war zone, which is kind of insightful given the
next thing we're going to discuss. Yeah, because I think
it is time to talk about Tetris and traumatic memory formation.
So a lot of people probably know this, but it's
worth explaining a little bit. Sometimes when people have a
(26:01):
traumatic experience, they can form a kind of recurrent toxic
memory pattern that can cause serious trouble for them after
the traumatic incident is over and done with. So you
mentioned a combat zone. Yeah, imagine you're in a combat zone,
whether you are a soldier or just a bystand or whatever.
(26:22):
You're at a place where people are fighting and there's
a sudden eruption of gunfire, and that leads to intense
fear maybe maybe two personal injury, to the threat on
your life, to witnessing the death or injury of others,
and this can lead to post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
One of the main symptoms of PTSD is the presence
(26:44):
of what are known as flashbacks, or these distressing, intrusive
memories of the traumatic experience that come rushing into your
mind like an irresistible torrent and can have debilitating effects.
I mean, obviously you don't want to be you know,
driving the kids, discore will and suddenly just utterly possessed
by memories of the time when somebody shot you in
(27:06):
the shoulder. Yeah, I mean, it's the one of the
worst moments of your life is suddenly just popping up
in your day and in in the course of your daily
life during what should be the best moments of your
life at times. Right, So, there has been a lot
of research into ways of treating PTSD and people who
already have it. So some treatment courses involve cognitive therapy.
(27:26):
You know, that's gonna be talk therapy or exposure therapy
exposing yourself to the problem. Some include drugs like anti
anxiety medications or antidepressants, and there are even some kind
of weird and controversial therapies that have been suggested, like
have you ever read anything about eye A movement, desensitization
and reprocessing or e M d R. No. I don't
(27:47):
think I've run across this, yew. This is where you
expose yourself to the traumatic memory, and while you're doing that,
you practice specific patterns of eye A movement in conjunction
with the anxiety inducing thoughts. This is a side note.
I find this less one really fascinating, and I would
love to hear from listeners who are psychiatrists or or
(28:08):
from people who have practiced this method personally. I don't know.
Do you all think there's validity to it. I've read
what seemed to be credible scientists saying that there is
empirical research to show that this works, but I've also
read that it's controversial. It sounds like one of those
weird scientific discoveries that might be too good to be true,
like you can really have an effect just by moving
your eyeballs around. Remind there are some yogic meditation techniques
(28:32):
that involved the movement of your eyes, and uh, I
haven't played around with them a lot, but it's it's
certainly present there. So I wonder if there's some connective
tissue between the two. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's interesting by itself,
and I'd love to hear from listeners about it. But anyway,
back to the to the tetris um, what if there
were a way to all of those things I mentioned
(28:54):
before were if you already have PTSD, you've already got
this traumatic flashback problem. But what if there were a
way to inoculate yourself against PTSD before the symptoms begin
to take hold. Okay, so this is the idea here,
is that something traumatic has occurred. What can I do
to keep from the to keep that trauma from taking
(29:15):
root in my brain? Yeah, I'd be like if you
get bit by a dog with rabies and you immediately
go to the hospital for rabies vaccine, you get bit
by a zombie and you get to to cut your
arm off. Yeah, so this would be a cognitive vaccine
against traumatic memories. So in January two thou nine researchers
led by Dr Emily A. Holmes of Oxford University. They
(29:37):
published a study on the effects of Tetris on the
formation of traumatic or intrusive memories and it's called Ken.
Playing the computer game Tetris reduced the build up of
flashbacks for trauma, a proposal from cognitive science. So they
had two pieces of knowledge that they were starting with.
One of them was cognitive science suggests that the brain
(29:58):
has selective resources, is with limited capacity, so your brain
can't do everything. You can only devote so much energy
resource to a limited number of things at a time.
And the second fact is the neurobiology of memory suggests
a six hour window to disrupt memory consolidation. So that
(30:18):
you know that there's this idea that about six hours
after a memory takes places, when the window for consolidating
that memory in the brain is, you know, forming that
strong recurrent pattern memory. So if you deny the brain
the resources it needs to form visuospatial memories during that
crucial few hours after the event takes place, could you
(30:41):
stop bad memories from consolidating with such great emphasis in
the mind. And they tested it. They tested it out
by getting forty volunteers and making them watch faces of death. Well,
I don't know Actually they didn't say the name of
the tape because I remember covering this study like way
(31:05):
back in the early like the initial version of this
podcast episode with Alson Loudermilk, and I don't remember Faces
of Death, but then maybe I overlooked it. No, no, no,
it was it was something like that. They were they
were showed a film. Uh, shown a film full of
horrible images designed to simulate a traumatic experience. Quote. All
participants viewed a traumatic film consisting of scenes of real
(31:27):
injury and death, followed by a thirty minute structured break.
They described the film as a twelve minute film that
contained eleven clips of traumatic content, including graphic real scenes
of human surgery, fatal road traffic accidents, and drowning. So
that was pretty had disturbing student film, I guess. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:48):
they were all made to watch that tape from the ring.
So after viewing the film and taking a real nice
thirty minute break, half of the participants, half of these
forty people were given nothing to do except sit quietly
for ten minutes. This was a control group, and the
other half played Tetris for ten minutes. Pretty simple experiment. Um.
Then they checked to see how often members of each
(32:10):
group experience flashbacks during the ten minutes. No surprise that
people playing Tetris experience fewer flashbacks, but that's not really
surprising they were playing Tetris. Then, here's where it gets interesting.
The researchers sent the volunteers away with instructions to keep
a diary on how many times they had flashbacks to
to to the Faces of Death basically over the next week,
(32:34):
and the different groups had different rates. They found that
the people who played Tetris for ten minutes after watching
the film had significantly fewer flashbacks to the Faces of
Death type video and less symptomology consistent with PTSD when
they checked back seven days later. Crucially, both groups had
(32:57):
equivalently strong voluntary recall of the film. And this is
an interesting aspect too, because they could both remember the
film fine. They could remember what they saw. Uh, it's
just that the group that played Tetris had less trouble
with the unbidden recurrence of these memories throughout their day
to day lives. So so again, it's not it's not
(33:19):
just a matter of hey, Tetris distracted them from initially
thinking about it, but Tetris interfered with the brains codifying
of the experience as a traumatic Yeah. And they concluded
from this that it's not just distraction like you say,
it's something about the visuospatial nature of tetris. This is
something that they call out specifically that tetris is of
(33:41):
visual and spatial or visuospatial task, because verbal and other
distracting tasks have been demonstrated ineffective before against trauma flashbacks.
In some cases they even intensify them. So in this
first study, one of the things they wanted to point
out that they were not saying, people who already have PTSD,
you can get better by playing tetris, though they speculate
(34:02):
this could be a possibility, and this gets revisited in
a later study. And they were also not suggesting that
playing any video game would have the same effect, and
they get into that in another experiment and a bit,
but just a couple of comments. One of the things
is it's hard to test something like the formation of
traumatic memories leading to PTSD because for obvious ethical reasons,
(34:25):
you can't expose somebody to life shattering trauma for the
sake of the experiment. So the best they could do
is show somebody a really disturbing movie. And even that
seems kind of weird. I mean when you read like, yes,
they were showed the graphic images of death, and then
we asked them how troubled they were. Now, you could
imagine a scenario where they are trauma metic rushes out,
(34:46):
begins treating the individual who is is down on the
ground with that and is wounded, and then passing out
game boys exactly to those soldiers in their nets. Yeah,
that's the other half. It seems impractical to seek out
people who have just been shot or hit by a
car or something and then give them Tetris. But these
(35:07):
findings have been followed up on in subsequent studies. So
the same group did another study in two thousand and
ten where they they attempted to answer the questions would
all games have this effect via distraction or enjoyment or
might some games even be harmful? And then second, would
the effects be found if administered several hours post trauma.
(35:29):
Because this first one it was just Tetris and they
played thirty minutes after they saw the movie, So they
essentially repeated the experiment, but instead of just Tetris, they
tried Tetris and then this game called pub Quiz Machine
two thousand eight. Um, and yeah, I looked up a
video of somebody merely playing public Quiz two thousand eight
(35:51):
pub Quiz Machine two thousand eight on YouTube, and I
think that alone could cause traumatic memories. But but anyway,
they had those two and they concluded that no, the
pub Quiz did not do as well as Tetris. In fact,
they found that the pub Quiz made the traumatic experience
flashbacks more intense. So if you if you have a
(36:13):
traumatic experience and then play pub Quiz, it's going to
be even worse for you. Don't do that. But Tetris
still performed better. And they also found that even four
hours after watching the film, Tetris had significant reduction in
flashback because window. Yeah, so you can wait four hours
after the event play some Tetris and supposedly this discourages flashbacks.
(36:35):
Just another reason to make sure Tetris is on your
phone just in case. Now, again, I wonder about Tetris
versus non verbal visual games. So if you're playing Metroid
or Shack Fou or something like it, does does the
game have to provide a certain level of challenge? Is
there a difference between the effects on experience tetris players
and on novices. So there are a lot of questions
(36:56):
that haven't been answered yet. Um. But then there was
another study from this year and this is the last
one in psychological science, in a group of researchers, again
including Dr Emily A. Holmes, who was on the other studies,
published findings that visual spatial game tasks can block traumatic
memories even after the memories are already formed. So remember
(37:18):
earlier I was like, well, they weren't saying that you
can cure PTSD or not cure, but but help or
alleviate some aspects of PTSD just by playing tetris after
it's already formed. Here they found maybe you can do that.
And because what they did is they had people after
the memory formation had already taken place, recall the memories,
(37:41):
so bring up voluntarily in the mind the traumatic memories
and then play tetris, and they found that this also
reduced flashbacks. Well that that makes sense given the nature
of memories. The example I always bring up when we
discussed this is that that every memory in your head
is not a little stone statue of the event, but
(38:02):
a clay statue of the event, and it's it's it's
something that it can be, it's valuable, it can be changed,
it can be altered every time you draw it out there.
And also when you draw it out it is susceptible,
uh to positive change if it's traumatic. Um, so that
would make sense. Yeah, So in all of these studies,
they chalk this up to competition for resources in in
(38:25):
visual visuospatial conception in the brain. Essentially that they're saying
that the disturbing images that come in your flashbacks when
you're you know, remembering that you got shot or hit
by a car, you know, threatened by a guy with
a chainsaw or something whatever that is, that's terrifying you.
It's essentially a visual spatial problem in your brain. And
(38:47):
if you can if you can dampen that, if you
can just kind of uh smudge that memory with competition
by the part of your brain that you used to
solve tetris puzzles, you significantly we in the hold it
has over you. So anyway, I would love to see
more research in that area, and it seems very interesting
(39:08):
and hopefully promising. I mean, if people can get relief
from this, I I think that's a wonderful thing. Yeah, totally.
So we have one more area of potential tetris treatment
to discuss here, and it concerns UH, something that's commonly
referred to as lazy I. We're talking about amblyopia here.
It's a disorder of sight and it results in decreased
(39:30):
vision in an eye that otherwise appears normal or out
of proportion to associated structural problems of the eye. So
up to three percent of the population suffers from amblyopia.
And it's it's ultimately caused by poor processing in the brain,
which results in the suppression of the weaker eye by
the stronger eye. Huh. Now that the common method of
(39:54):
treating this has always been patching, So you wear an
eye patch over the good eye. Um and uh and
and eventually brings things back back to order. But UM,
this is this is generally more helpful with the younger
cases and not with older individuals who are suffering from
lazy eye. So two thousand thirteen, a research team led
(40:17):
by Dr Robert Hess from mcgel University and the Research
Institute of the mcgel University Health Center looked in to
to possible use of tetris as a means of treating UH.
Individuals are suffering from again yeah, once more. So they
they found that by distributing information between the two eyes
(40:39):
in a complimentary fashion, Tetris trains both eyes to work together,
which is which again is countered to previous treatments such
as patching. So you're forcing both eyes to cooperate, which
increases the level of plasticity in the brain and allows
UH the the the individual's brain to real or essentially
(41:00):
relearn how to look at something and take individual data.
So they did this by using a head mounted video goggles.
They displayed the game dicoptically, so one I was allowed
to see only the following objects and the other eye
was allowed to see only ground plane objects. So this
forced the two eyes to work together. So you have
to be they have to die, have to be working
(41:22):
together to get the full image. Wait, which I could
see the preview box or where they're playing without the
preview box. Maybe they were playing without the preview box.
See this is this is really crazy because in that
documentary about Tetris I mentioned in the UH in the
other episode, it's called the Ecstasy of Order. Again, I
really liked it, so I recommended there's a Tetris champion
(41:44):
in their name Jonas Newbauer, and at one point he
jokes around by demonstrating his secret weapon, and it's pointing
his eyeballs separately in different directions, presumably. I think the
joke is so that one can watch the falling block
while the other watches the preview box to tell you
which block is coming next. I think he's joking, but
(42:05):
I'm not positive whether he's he actually uses this while
playing or not. Huh, yeah, because he would be he
would be doing the direct opposite of of the very
thing about the tatris experience that is being uh utilized
potentially treat lazy in this case. Yeah so uh as
as far as this particular research goes, clinical trials worse
(42:25):
at least initially scheduled, and the company Ambliotech purchased the
research findings and licensed it to to you Be Soft
for the creation of lazy eye treatment games, specific like
therapy games. Yeah so, Ambliotech is currently seeking permission from
the U S. Food and Drug Administration to market the therapy,
(42:46):
such as their game dig Rush, which is is not
tetris um and it looks, uh, it looks like it's
basically like a little Digger character that's moving around on
a If it ain't Tetris, I don't care. It's certainly
US abstract. Yeah, but the thing is that it utilizes
a tablet and three D glasses, so you get that
(43:06):
red and blue, you know, disconnect and you have to
use both eyes and concert to see the full picture.
Um So anyway, they're they're seeking FDA approval for this
according to the most recent report. It was the March
BBC report. And if you want to learn more about
that company and see some screenshots from their game, you
can find them at www dot ambliothech dot com. That's
(43:28):
a m B L y O t e c H.
You know, Tetris has been such an interesting subject to
do on this show because I I still have the
intuition I had at the very beginning. I still feel
like there's an ancient secret inside Tetris, or maybe Tetris
is the ancient secret, And after doing all this research,
(43:50):
I don't feel any closer to articulating what that that
ancient mystery or that secret is. What's because the Holy
Tetromino stands outside of our human world, and in playing Tetris,
were able to dip into the deep currents of energy
that underlie our reality. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to come
(44:10):
up with some kind of astronomical metaphor or or the
stars Tetris blocks, but they're not really unless you start
thinking about it. Yeah, and then there's no inn thinking
about it. And wait a second, Yeah they are, yeah,
they are. You ever notice how the Maria on the moon,
(44:32):
the lunar oceans, that it's all Tetris blocks. Yeah, yeah,
I'll buy into it. It sounds good to me. It's
the big storm on Jupiter. Yeah, just another Tetris block.
That's what two by two I think. Ultimately it is
a very fast, swirling Z shaped blocks. So it's it's
a storm because it's the troubling Z shaped block. Those
(44:53):
blocks are the devil. All right, Well, we know that
this is a topic that it resonates with a lot
of people out there because tetris is just something that's
unavoidable in our culture. At this point, everybody's seen it
or played it. You have varying levels of experience with it,
but chances are you had at least a little bit
of time that you're addicted to it. Yeah. So if
(45:15):
you know the ancient secret of Tetris and you understand
why it is the strongest potion in the in the
Digital Sorcerer's potion bag. You should let us know. That's right.
You can find is that the Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's we'll find
all the podcast episodes. You'll find, videos, will find blog posts.
You'll find a link out to our social media accounts
(45:36):
such as Twitter and Facebook. We're blow the mind on
both of those, and we are stuff to blow your
mind on Tumbler. And if you want to get to
us with your personal Tetris stories or any feedback on
the show, or your thoughts about the cognitive science of
gaming and Tetris, you can email us and blow the
mind at how Stuff Works for more on this and
(46:04):
thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuffworks dot com? Fou
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stop to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Today's episode is part two of a two part episode
about the science of Tetris, really the science of Tetris,
(00:23):
get also the history and philosophy of Tetris, because, as
I said in the last episode, I have a very
very strong intuition that Tetris is not just an invented
artifact of the work of human hands and human minds,
but is somehow a natural, fundamental outgrowth of the phantasmagorical
(00:45):
blood magic of the universe. It comes from the cosmos itself.
It's not just something we made. It was here, and
in nineteen four the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, discovered it.
I like that the idea of discovering Tetris as this, uh,
this sort of dimension of of mathematical perfection, Yeah, underlying
(01:09):
reality totally. And in the last episode we talked a
little bit about that, about where Tetris came from and
its influences, and then about the Tetris effect. This uh,
this syndrome, this experience commonly reported by Tetris players, where
they where it sort of takes over their minds. They
see Tetris in everything throughout the world, They hallucinate it,
they dream about it, And we talked about some possible
(01:31):
explanations for that, as well as how Tetris skills develop
in the brain and the interesting fact that that people
who cannot form episodic memories can still form hallucination recall
for Tetris that counterintuitively, expert Tetris players use less brain
energy than novice Tetris players at higher levels of play.
(01:53):
So there's a lot that's very fascinating and weird and
mysterious about the game Tetris itself. But today we wanted
to talk about how some of this science of tetris, uh,
how it works as a game, and how Tetris can
be used to solve problems in the real world. Yeah,
and a lot of this, uh the first portion of
(02:15):
this episode, a lot of it relates to just why
do we love it? So? Why is it so satisfying
to play tetris? Um and uh, and the the science
behind us is it's a lot more interesting than you
might think. It's it it goes pretty deep into just
how we think and how we process the world. Absolutely,
So if you haven't listened to part one, go back
listen to part one, uh first, and then come and
(02:38):
join us again here where we will continue the cosmic
journey of Tetris and clear those lines again and again
and again. All right, So why do we love Tetris?
Why don't we play it so much? Why did it
have such an impact to begin with? Well, we should
back up and ask why we play any games so much?
(02:58):
Why do we love any game? I mean, as we
observed in the last episode, there there's a difference between
a really good game and a not so good game.
And it's not just I mean, these days a lot
of people might refer to things because of the complexity
of games on newer generations, and things like graphics and
story and you know, because you have these action adventure
(03:20):
games that are that are so complex and all that.
There's more, you're immersing yourself in a an unreal world.
Yeah yeah, yeah, So ignoring all that and just getting
back to the basics of simple types of games and gameplay,
puzzle games. Uh, playing Tetris versus playing I don't know,
what's another early puzzle game, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game,
(03:44):
on which did really exist. Don't don't bother looking at it,
field just get sad. Yeah, w wanted. Why are these games? So?
Why don't we immerse ourselves in? And how does this work?
One idea that seems pretty strongly supported is that very
rewarding and enjoyable game play and game mechanics come from
(04:05):
the psychological process that's been described under the term cognitive
flow flow. Yeah. Yeah, at heart, any good game is
tapping into cognitive flow. As Sean Baron broke down in
a two thousand twelve Gama Sutra article, it breaks down
as follows and Tetris boils this down perfectly to a
(04:28):
highly concentrated mental gaming experience. You have concrete goals and
manageable rules, plus goals that fit player capabilities, plus clear
and timely feedback, plus an elimination of distractions, and this
equals cognitive flow. Yeah. So it's a game essentially where
you understand how to play, You can play, you have
(04:50):
the skill. It's yet it's challenging enough that it's not boring.
You're constantly getting feedback on how well you're doing, and
there's not extreme a stuff going on. It's just perfect focus,
zeroing in on a perfect brain consuming task that is
just challenging enough to always keep you engaged. Yeah. Now
(05:12):
that's not to say that cognitive flow is just a
result of gaming EXPERI yeah, we cure it in our
daily lives. Be it in your work if you're lucky,
or you know, in your hobbies, or even in just
random chores that you have down, you know, skill wise.
Um in the term itself comes from psychologist Mihi. Chick
sent me high, the Hungarian psychology professor who pioneered the
(05:36):
study of cognitive flow. I like this guy's research. I've
read about it before, and it's interesting to me because
this is what people would, I think often call positive psychology.
So much of what is studied in psychology or psychiatry
deals with people who are having less than optimal experiences.
(05:57):
And this is an attempt to study, well, what's going
on when humans are just really at their peak mental experience,
when they're feeling great, when things are going well inside
their heads. What's happening there? And and and the thing he
identified is that a key to a sort of happy
existence or a happy experience is this process of flow. Yeah, indeed,
(06:19):
and uh, you know, it's interesting looking back to the
previous episode where the stick Gold study started off and
ended up getting into the Tetris area by considering people
who engaged in um in rock climbing, and then they
would perceive rock climbing later. Uh and and overall his
study was about looking at people who engage in novel
(06:41):
physical or mental activities for extended periods of time and
how they often experienced a hallucinatory replay of the activity.
And with the check semi hi, we see rock climbing
come up again because as an avid rock climber, that's
where he first took note of this special feeling in
his own experience that he got while inching his way
up at challenging rock face. He began thinking about it
(07:03):
in terms of his psychology studies, and he laid it
out pretty much as we've been discussing that flow is
about having set goals, having uh a self contained universe.
So you especially see this in gaming right where they're
something like Tetris. The rules, the space, it's all pretty
well defined. There's there's less ambiguity. You get immediate feedback
(07:24):
if you're doing it right. Contains a manageable challenge. It's hard,
but you can do it. Sense of control over the situation,
at least until you reach the upper levels uh, And
you're completely involved in what you're doing. And so this
results in a sense of ecstasy um, great interclarity, a
confidence that what you're doing is doable, and then you
(07:45):
have the skills to tackle it, a sense of serenity,
a sense of timelessness, and intrinsic motivation to keep going.
It becomes fun in itself. I mean, there's no reason
you have to play a tetrisa. You know, nobody, nobody's
give being you tangible rewards or punishments based on how
many lines you clear. But it becomes intrinsically motivating. There's
(08:07):
something about the activity itself that's pleasing enough that you
have to go on. And it shuts down the chatter
and your brain. It shuts down that default mode network,
all those little voices and the that are worrying about
the path or the future. It all goes dull as
your brain uh tackles the problem at hand, be it
climbing a rock, working on an article, mowing the yard,
(08:30):
or playing tetris. Yeah, totally. So if you look at
all of the conditions that must be present to create
the optimal sense of flow. I think Tetris is almost
perfectly designed to satisfy them. Like, it's hard to think
of a cleaner distillation of exactly what those conditions are.
The clear goals, stack them, clear lines, manageable rules, it's
(08:54):
absolutely clear what's going on in Tetris. Uh. Tetris adjusts
itself to your capability. So at the beginning it's easy. Uh.
If you are a very good player, you can move
up to higher difficulties pretty quickly. Gives you an adjustment period.
But the difficulty changes and tracks with you as you play.
You know, as you go up higher, you get farther,
(09:15):
it gets harder and more challenging. There's feedback and that
you can like. The music is an interesting feedback thing
in Texas, Texas, I say Texas again. In Tetris. As
you keep stacking higher, I don't know if you remember that,
the music gets faster. It's letting you know, okay. And
of course there's very obvious visual feedback. You know, you
(09:36):
you can clearly see as you're getting towards the ceiling
of the screen, this is not what you want and
what is there that's extraneous, I mean nothing, It's it's
all there. And uh, and of course it works even
better if you can just uh sort of like put
a black blanket over your head and tape your eyes
(09:58):
directly to the Tetris screen and so that nobody can
walk in and say, like, hey, there's a fire, you
need to have activate the building. I mean, you just
you're there, You're in the zone. But there's some other
theories we've come across that that help explain exactly why
Tetris feels like such a perfect game for our brains.
(10:18):
And one of the ones I wanted to mention was
actually something I saw alluded to in a brain Craft video.
Some of our periscope followers. We were talking to him
last Friday, and we mentioned that we were going to
do this episode and they said, oh, you should watch
the Braincraft videos. So there, I think they're PBS. Yea
PBS is behind it. I watched this as well. I
(10:38):
was entertaining, yeah, and so they but they mentioned something
called the Zigarnic effect in reference to Tetris. So what
is the deal with this? Okay, so the Zigarnic effect
comes to us again. We looked to UH to Soviet thinking.
Here it comes from Soviet to psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma
Wolvovna Zigarnick. She lived from nineteen dred to nineteen eight
(11:00):
and she first observed this in the nineteen twenties. UM,
and it basically boils down to this. It's the it's
the psychological tendency for us to remember incomplete or interrupted
tasks better than complete ones. UM and Tetris. Of course,
to tie that in is a continuous stream of incomplete task,
(11:21):
constant sense of achievement, but also a constantly unachieved finish.
As we mentioned in the previous episode, there's no hey,
you won screen in Tetris. It just keeps getting harder
and harder and harder until you perish. And of course
it's made up of lots of little individual incomplete tasks,
right because every time there's a gap in a row
in Tetris, that's a little thing that there's a little
(11:43):
flag in your brain that says I need to go
back and fix that, and I'll get there eventually. So
it's a one huge incomplete task forever being incomplete, made
up of an infinite number of incomplete tasks. UH. It's
almost as if this was in mind when it was designed. Yeah,
so there's a Garnic effect, of course, plays into the
(12:05):
typical human drive to finish what we started, to see
things through to the finish, and the associative associated negative
psychological renovocations of doing the opposite. You know, where you're
you're haunted by that model airplane you never finished, or
that novel that you have have completed, or you know,
or whatever chores around the house are, and god knows,
when you have a house, there's always some something that's
(12:27):
not quite finished about everything. And how those just continue
to stick in your mind? Um. There's a one explanation
of the Zigaronic effect that I found that I thought
was pretty uh, pretty nice comes from Roy Bambinster and
Brad Bushman in their two thousand and eight textbooks Social
Psychology and Human Nature. They said, the Zigarnic effect is
(12:49):
a tendency to experience automatic, intrusive thoughts about a goal
that one has pursued, but the pursuit of which has
been interrupted. That is, if you start working toward a
goal fail to get their, thoughts about that goal will
keep popping into your mind while you're doing other things,
as if to remind you to get back on track
and finish reaching that goal. So not only is this
(13:12):
something that is related to the motivation we have to
keep playing Tetris, but it also might sort of explain
what we talked about in the previous episode because this
mentions intrusive thoughts about the incomplete task. So in the
last episode we talked about the Tetris effect where people
experience dreams and hallucinations about Tetris if Tetris is never
(13:32):
finished yet it's always this intrinsically motivating task that remains
incomplete in the mind. It kind of makes sense through
this method that it would keep jumping up into into
your thoughts. Yeah, yeah, I think it plays nicely into
into just trying to figure out Tetris syndrome, the Tetris
effect in general. And then there's a broader lesson here
(13:54):
though that applies well beyond games, and that is that students,
be it an you be an official student, or just
somebody studying up on something in your life. Uh, it
pays to suspend your studies, to take a break, to
come back to it and not try to wipe it
all out in one massive cramming session. Absolutely, I find
this to be extremely useful in my own work. So
(14:16):
if I'm trying to uh to think clearly about maybe
an episode I'm researching or something like that, I find
it's way more useful to uh to start on it
before I end work for one day. So if it's
you know, five thirty and I'm trying to quit work
for the day, um, and I'm at the end of
(14:39):
one task, it's better to do ten percent of the
next task and then come back to it the next day.
My thoughts about it are gonna be a lot clearer
than to break from work in between when tasks are
concluded and when the next one starts. Yeah, and generally
also if you have some sleep in between, then you're
you're going to to consolidate those memories. All that working
(14:59):
is working in your favor as well. But also it's
pointed out a lot that if the if the task
is intimidating, just started, because if you just started, then
you get to benefit from the Zigarnic effect, because that's
effect is going to be in play to encourage you
to come back and work more on it. So beginnings
are difficult, but begin and then take a break and
(15:21):
then come back. Yeah, This isn't gonna become the self
help show, but but try that one at least. Yeah,
I I highly advocate that strategy. Get it started, it'll
be easier. Another thing that is UM. I can't remember
exactly where I came across this, but I feel like
it was in UH. It was in something that was
(15:43):
linked to from that Braincraft video. But but anyway, however
I came across this. Another thing that I saw referenced
UH with regard to Tetris is the idea of epistemic action.
And I had actually never heard about this phenomena before,
but I it turned out to be pretty interesting. So
in nine David Kirsch and Paul Maglio published a paper
(16:06):
in Cognitive Science called on Distinguishing Epistemic and Pragmatic Action,
and Kirsh and Maglio make the distinction between two different
kinds of actions that a person can perform. So you've
got pragmatic action, and this is one. It's an external
action that changes something in the external world in furtherance
(16:27):
of you achieving a goal. So if you are stranded
on a tiny island and starving, throwing a rock at
a seagull would be a pragmatic action. To unlock that
seagull's delicious meat. Or you could make a much smaller action.
You could say, press a button while playing tetris to
move a Tetris piece with the goal of actually moving
(16:48):
it to the spot where you want to place it.
You're just doing an action to reach a goal. But
then they distinguish this from a different kind of action,
a different kind of external action, which is what they
call astemic action, and this is making a change to
the world in order to simplify a problem solving task.
(17:09):
So imagine you remember those spot the difference puzzles and
children's books, you know what I'm talking about. They'll show
you two pictures of a scene. One's Mickey Mouse, you know,
roller skating, and the next one's Mickey Mouse roller skating,
but the clock hands are pointing to a different time
and something like that. And let's say you've got a
children's work book with with two of these on different pages. Um,
(17:31):
and what you do is you tear out one of
the pages and then hold the pictures right next to
each other. That would be an epistemic action, because they're
what you're doing is an action that is really designed
to change the nature of a problem inside your head
to simplify the task. So when you see them next
to each other, or maybe you um lay them on
(17:54):
top of each other and hold it up to a
light to see what's different. In the two pages, you're
using external action to reduce the mental complexity of a task.
And they looked at Tetris in this paper actually and
pointed out how experience Tetris players use epistemoic action in Tetris,
(18:14):
and this is the way it works. You've got a
block falling down and you want to fit it in,
and instead of doing all the work of flipping the
block around in your head to see where it would fit,
the players flip it. They physically flip it, plus press
the button to flip it to offload some of the
cognitive work required to see where it would fit. So
(18:37):
by visually seeing exactly what the block looks like in
all its orientations, you can see, okay, here's exactly where
it would fit without having to flip it in your mind,
thus freeing up some mental resources to look at what's
the next block in the in the preview bar. So
so essentially it is using physical action and to make
(19:00):
mental work easier. They say epistemic action can be used
to reduce the memory involved in a mental computation. UH,
it can be used to reduce the number of steps
involved in completing a mental computation, or it can be
used to reduce the probability of error in a mental computation. UM.
And so if you follow this idea, you can conclude
(19:22):
that when you play Tetris, it's again kind of a
perfect back and forth between body and mind. It creates
a constant, flowing, rapid feedback cooperation between mental problem solving
and then this external epistemic action. You use the body
to simple simplify a problem. You press the button, flip
(19:43):
the block, see where it would fit. Then you use
your mind to solve the problem. Then you use the
body again to execute the solution, and you just keep
going back and forth on repeat. Alright, so once again
we see a manner in which Tetris illuminates how our
brain works. And we've discussed they just almost perfect way
(20:05):
that Tetris captures our mind. So we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we're gonna explore
some some of the applications that that scientists have have
explored have actually looked into and some some very real
possibilities for tetris as a as a treatment option for
a few different ailments. All right, we're back. Okay, So Robert,
(20:37):
we've talked about the tetris cure. What can you cure
with tetris potentially at least because I was quite surprised
to see some of this research, but once I read
into it, it started to make a lot of sense
to me that you could potentially use tetris in maybe
in place of drugs or other types of therapies and
(21:00):
lots of scenarios. Yeah, because we've again just think back
to all the ways we've discussed in which tetris captures
your mind, How it plays into two different modes of memory. Um,
how it uh it's got the skeleton key to a
deep part of your brain. Yeah, it's it's involved in
flow state. It really reminds me of a lot of
(21:21):
what one is setting to do a set out to
do with meditation and yoga to to a certain extent,
except you kind of have a leg up on it
by it being this fun, engaging game as opposed to, uh,
to something that takes a little more deliberate mental or
physical force. Okay, So let's imagine that I am two
packs a day kind of guy and I'm trying to
(21:42):
quit smoking. Can Tetris help me? Potentially? Yes, And which
sounds crazy, especially anyone who has firsthand experience with just
how how powerful, uh that addiction can be. But we
do have some evidence to back it up. This is
a new study. This came out August two thousand fifteen,
and it's from a team of psychologists from from Plymouth
(22:04):
University and Queensland University of Technology in Australia. So this
is how it how it went down. Uh, they got
together thirty one participants ages eighteen through twenty seven, and
they were monitored for levels of craving and also prompted
seven times a day to report their cravings. Fifteen of
(22:25):
these individuals, so roughly half, were required to play three
minutes of Tetris before reporting their craving levels. So it's
kind of like you, you have problems with different cravings
for different things, and somebody's gonna call you and ask
how you're doing with those cravings. But half of the
group get to play Tetris first before they're quiz done it.
So cravings were recorded in thirty percent of occasions, most
(22:47):
commonly for food and non alcoholic drinks, which were reported
on nearly two thirds of those occasions. So of the
cravings were for drug related instances, and these included coffee,
cigarettes when one, and beer and spice. Yeah, and spice
were for miscellaneous activities such as sleeping, playing video games
(23:08):
which I found interesting, socializing with friends, and sexual intercourse.
Food cravings tended to be slightly weaker than those and
other categories. But they claimed this is the first demonstration
that cognitive interference. Again, that's Tetris coming into your life,
captivating your brain, shutting out everything else. Cognitive interference can
(23:29):
be used outside the lab to reduce cravings for substances
and activities other than eating. So in this we could
see how Tetris or some variation of Tetris, some variation
of a you know of a puzzle solving game, could
be used as a support tool for curbing addictions. Not
not again, not the primary tool, but but an additional tool.
(23:52):
So I'm sure that they didn't find that that it
would completely eliminate cravings. But but did they have an
estimate for by how much the cravings were reduced? Yeah,
by approximately one Okay, So I mean that that's you
could look at that as small, or you could look
at that as big. I mean if if all it
(24:12):
takes is Tetris and you don't have to you know, uh,
this is without some other kind of like drug interference
or major behavioral therapy or anything. Yeah. I mean, you're
trying to curb this addiction. So any tool at your
disposal that that put gives you an advantage is certainly
worth taking up. So yeah, I could see this being again,
a part of one's treatment. Certainly not the only part
(24:34):
of one's treatment, but it could help. It could certainly help. Yeah.
I wonder the extent to which Tetris is special here,
Like how would this compare to other video games? I
feel like Tetris is kind of special because we haven't
feel the same way, rather because we haven't really touched
on this as much. This is something I find in
gaming in general these days, especially um with a three
(24:56):
and a half year old running around in my life,
is that blessed is the game that can be enjoyed
in very small allotments of time. Yes, true, Tetrisses is
perfect for that. It is one of them. I just
the other day When we were preparing for this episode,
I was doing some research. I decided to play a
little bit of Tetris, and I several different times I
(25:18):
played for maybe three to five minutes, and oh man,
that was a session. You can't have a three to
five minute session of I don't know what do people
play these days of Fallout four? Yeah, these are games
that require vast periods of time, vast immersive periods of
time where there's always time for Tetris, and and it's
never a situation where I can't play Tetris now this
(25:41):
environment is too distracting. No, you can play Tetris in
a war zone, which is kind of insightful given the
next thing we're going to discuss. Yeah, because I think
it is time to talk about Tetris and traumatic memory formation.
So a lot of people probably know this, but it's
worth explaining a little bit. Sometimes when people have a
(26:01):
traumatic experience, they can form a kind of recurrent toxic
memory pattern that can cause serious trouble for them after
the traumatic incident is over and done with. So you
mentioned a combat zone. Yeah, imagine you're in a combat zone,
whether you are a soldier or just a bystand or whatever.
(26:22):
You're at a place where people are fighting and there's
a sudden eruption of gunfire, and that leads to intense
fear maybe maybe two personal injury, to the threat on
your life, to witnessing the death or injury of others,
and this can lead to post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
One of the main symptoms of PTSD is the presence
(26:44):
of what are known as flashbacks, or these distressing, intrusive
memories of the traumatic experience that come rushing into your
mind like an irresistible torrent and can have debilitating effects.
I mean, obviously you don't want to be you know,
driving the kids, discore will and suddenly just utterly possessed
by memories of the time when somebody shot you in
(27:06):
the shoulder. Yeah, I mean, it's the one of the
worst moments of your life is suddenly just popping up
in your day and in in the course of your daily
life during what should be the best moments of your
life at times. Right, So, there has been a lot
of research into ways of treating PTSD and people who
already have it. So some treatment courses involve cognitive therapy.
(27:26):
You know, that's gonna be talk therapy or exposure therapy
exposing yourself to the problem. Some include drugs like anti
anxiety medications or antidepressants, and there are even some kind
of weird and controversial therapies that have been suggested, like
have you ever read anything about eye A movement, desensitization
and reprocessing or e M d R. No. I don't
(27:47):
think I've run across this, yew. This is where you
expose yourself to the traumatic memory, and while you're doing that,
you practice specific patterns of eye A movement in conjunction
with the anxiety inducing thoughts. This is a side note.
I find this less one really fascinating, and I would
love to hear from listeners who are psychiatrists or or
(28:08):
from people who have practiced this method personally. I don't know.
Do you all think there's validity to it. I've read
what seemed to be credible scientists saying that there is
empirical research to show that this works, but I've also
read that it's controversial. It sounds like one of those
weird scientific discoveries that might be too good to be true,
like you can really have an effect just by moving
your eyeballs around. Remind there are some yogic meditation techniques
(28:32):
that involved the movement of your eyes, and uh, I
haven't played around with them a lot, but it's it's
certainly present there. So I wonder if there's some connective
tissue between the two. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's interesting by itself,
and I'd love to hear from listeners about it. But anyway,
back to the to the tetris um, what if there
were a way to all of those things I mentioned
(28:54):
before were if you already have PTSD, you've already got
this traumatic flashback problem. But what if there were a
way to inoculate yourself against PTSD before the symptoms begin
to take hold. Okay, so this is the idea here,
is that something traumatic has occurred. What can I do
to keep from the to keep that trauma from taking
(29:15):
root in my brain? Yeah, I'd be like if you
get bit by a dog with rabies and you immediately
go to the hospital for rabies vaccine, you get bit
by a zombie and you get to to cut your
arm off. Yeah, so this would be a cognitive vaccine
against traumatic memories. So in January two thou nine researchers
led by Dr Emily A. Holmes of Oxford University. They
(29:37):
published a study on the effects of Tetris on the
formation of traumatic or intrusive memories and it's called Ken.
Playing the computer game Tetris reduced the build up of
flashbacks for trauma, a proposal from cognitive science. So they
had two pieces of knowledge that they were starting with.
One of them was cognitive science suggests that the brain
(29:58):
has selective resources, is with limited capacity, so your brain
can't do everything. You can only devote so much energy
resource to a limited number of things at a time.
And the second fact is the neurobiology of memory suggests
a six hour window to disrupt memory consolidation. So that
(30:18):
you know that there's this idea that about six hours
after a memory takes places, when the window for consolidating
that memory in the brain is, you know, forming that
strong recurrent pattern memory. So if you deny the brain
the resources it needs to form visuospatial memories during that
crucial few hours after the event takes place, could you
(30:41):
stop bad memories from consolidating with such great emphasis in
the mind. And they tested it. They tested it out
by getting forty volunteers and making them watch faces of death. Well,
I don't know Actually they didn't say the name of
the tape because I remember covering this study like way
(31:05):
back in the early like the initial version of this
podcast episode with Alson Loudermilk, and I don't remember Faces
of Death, but then maybe I overlooked it. No, no, no,
it was it was something like that. They were they
were showed a film. Uh, shown a film full of
horrible images designed to simulate a traumatic experience. Quote. All
participants viewed a traumatic film consisting of scenes of real
(31:27):
injury and death, followed by a thirty minute structured break.
They described the film as a twelve minute film that
contained eleven clips of traumatic content, including graphic real scenes
of human surgery, fatal road traffic accidents, and drowning. So
that was pretty had disturbing student film, I guess. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:48):
they were all made to watch that tape from the ring.
So after viewing the film and taking a real nice
thirty minute break, half of the participants, half of these
forty people were given nothing to do except sit quietly
for ten minutes. This was a control group, and the
other half played Tetris for ten minutes. Pretty simple experiment. Um.
Then they checked to see how often members of each
(32:10):
group experience flashbacks during the ten minutes. No surprise that
people playing Tetris experience fewer flashbacks, but that's not really
surprising they were playing Tetris. Then, here's where it gets interesting.
The researchers sent the volunteers away with instructions to keep
a diary on how many times they had flashbacks to
to to the Faces of Death basically over the next week,
(32:34):
and the different groups had different rates. They found that
the people who played Tetris for ten minutes after watching
the film had significantly fewer flashbacks to the Faces of
Death type video and less symptomology consistent with PTSD when
they checked back seven days later. Crucially, both groups had
(32:57):
equivalently strong voluntary recall of the film. And this is
an interesting aspect too, because they could both remember the
film fine. They could remember what they saw. Uh, it's
just that the group that played Tetris had less trouble
with the unbidden recurrence of these memories throughout their day
to day lives. So so again, it's not it's not
(33:19):
just a matter of hey, Tetris distracted them from initially
thinking about it, but Tetris interfered with the brains codifying
of the experience as a traumatic Yeah. And they concluded
from this that it's not just distraction like you say,
it's something about the visuospatial nature of tetris. This is
something that they call out specifically that tetris is of
(33:41):
visual and spatial or visuospatial task, because verbal and other
distracting tasks have been demonstrated ineffective before against trauma flashbacks.
In some cases they even intensify them. So in this
first study, one of the things they wanted to point
out that they were not saying, people who already have PTSD,
you can get better by playing tetris, though they speculate
(34:02):
this could be a possibility, and this gets revisited in
a later study. And they were also not suggesting that
playing any video game would have the same effect, and
they get into that in another experiment and a bit,
but just a couple of comments. One of the things
is it's hard to test something like the formation of
traumatic memories leading to PTSD because for obvious ethical reasons,
(34:25):
you can't expose somebody to life shattering trauma for the
sake of the experiment. So the best they could do
is show somebody a really disturbing movie. And even that
seems kind of weird. I mean when you read like, yes,
they were showed the graphic images of death, and then
we asked them how troubled they were. Now, you could
imagine a scenario where they are trauma metic rushes out,
(34:46):
begins treating the individual who is is down on the
ground with that and is wounded, and then passing out
game boys exactly to those soldiers in their nets. Yeah,
that's the other half. It seems impractical to seek out
people who have just been shot or hit by a
car or something and then give them Tetris. But these
(35:07):
findings have been followed up on in subsequent studies. So
the same group did another study in two thousand and
ten where they they attempted to answer the questions would
all games have this effect via distraction or enjoyment or
might some games even be harmful? And then second, would
the effects be found if administered several hours post trauma.
(35:29):
Because this first one it was just Tetris and they
played thirty minutes after they saw the movie, So they
essentially repeated the experiment, but instead of just Tetris, they
tried Tetris and then this game called pub Quiz Machine
two thousand eight. Um, and yeah, I looked up a
video of somebody merely playing public Quiz two thousand eight
(35:51):
pub Quiz Machine two thousand eight on YouTube, and I
think that alone could cause traumatic memories. But but anyway,
they had those two and they concluded that no, the
pub Quiz did not do as well as Tetris. In fact,
they found that the pub Quiz made the traumatic experience
flashbacks more intense. So if you if you have a
(36:13):
traumatic experience and then play pub Quiz, it's going to
be even worse for you. Don't do that. But Tetris
still performed better. And they also found that even four
hours after watching the film, Tetris had significant reduction in
flashback because window. Yeah, so you can wait four hours
after the event play some Tetris and supposedly this discourages flashbacks.
(36:35):
Just another reason to make sure Tetris is on your
phone just in case. Now, again, I wonder about Tetris
versus non verbal visual games. So if you're playing Metroid
or Shack Fou or something like it, does does the
game have to provide a certain level of challenge? Is
there a difference between the effects on experience tetris players
and on novices. So there are a lot of questions
(36:56):
that haven't been answered yet. Um. But then there was
another study from this year and this is the last
one in psychological science, in a group of researchers, again
including Dr Emily A. Holmes, who was on the other studies,
published findings that visual spatial game tasks can block traumatic
memories even after the memories are already formed. So remember
(37:18):
earlier I was like, well, they weren't saying that you
can cure PTSD or not cure, but but help or
alleviate some aspects of PTSD just by playing tetris after
it's already formed. Here they found maybe you can do that.
And because what they did is they had people after
the memory formation had already taken place, recall the memories,
(37:41):
so bring up voluntarily in the mind the traumatic memories
and then play tetris, and they found that this also
reduced flashbacks. Well that that makes sense given the nature
of memories. The example I always bring up when we
discussed this is that that every memory in your head
is not a little stone statue of the event, but
(38:02):
a clay statue of the event, and it's it's it's
something that it can be, it's valuable, it can be changed,
it can be altered every time you draw it out there.
And also when you draw it out it is susceptible,
uh to positive change if it's traumatic. Um, so that
would make sense. Yeah, So in all of these studies,
they chalk this up to competition for resources in in
(38:25):
visual visuospatial conception in the brain. Essentially that they're saying
that the disturbing images that come in your flashbacks when
you're you know, remembering that you got shot or hit
by a car, you know, threatened by a guy with
a chainsaw or something whatever that is, that's terrifying you.
It's essentially a visual spatial problem in your brain. And
(38:47):
if you can if you can dampen that, if you
can just kind of uh smudge that memory with competition
by the part of your brain that you used to
solve tetris puzzles, you significantly we in the hold it
has over you. So anyway, I would love to see
more research in that area, and it seems very interesting
(39:08):
and hopefully promising. I mean, if people can get relief
from this, I I think that's a wonderful thing. Yeah, totally.
So we have one more area of potential tetris treatment
to discuss here, and it concerns UH, something that's commonly
referred to as lazy I. We're talking about amblyopia here.
It's a disorder of sight and it results in decreased
(39:30):
vision in an eye that otherwise appears normal or out
of proportion to associated structural problems of the eye. So
up to three percent of the population suffers from amblyopia.
And it's it's ultimately caused by poor processing in the brain,
which results in the suppression of the weaker eye by
the stronger eye. Huh. Now that the common method of
(39:54):
treating this has always been patching, So you wear an
eye patch over the good eye. Um and uh and
and eventually brings things back back to order. But UM,
this is this is generally more helpful with the younger
cases and not with older individuals who are suffering from
lazy eye. So two thousand thirteen, a research team led
(40:17):
by Dr Robert Hess from mcgel University and the Research
Institute of the mcgel University Health Center looked in to
to possible use of tetris as a means of treating UH.
Individuals are suffering from again yeah, once more. So they
they found that by distributing information between the two eyes
(40:39):
in a complimentary fashion, Tetris trains both eyes to work together,
which is which again is countered to previous treatments such
as patching. So you're forcing both eyes to cooperate, which
increases the level of plasticity in the brain and allows
UH the the the individual's brain to real or essentially
(41:00):
relearn how to look at something and take individual data.
So they did this by using a head mounted video goggles.
They displayed the game dicoptically, so one I was allowed
to see only the following objects and the other eye
was allowed to see only ground plane objects. So this
forced the two eyes to work together. So you have
to be they have to die, have to be working
(41:22):
together to get the full image. Wait, which I could
see the preview box or where they're playing without the
preview box. Maybe they were playing without the preview box.
See this is this is really crazy because in that
documentary about Tetris I mentioned in the UH in the
other episode, it's called the Ecstasy of Order. Again, I
really liked it, so I recommended there's a Tetris champion
(41:44):
in their name Jonas Newbauer, and at one point he
jokes around by demonstrating his secret weapon, and it's pointing
his eyeballs separately in different directions, presumably. I think the
joke is so that one can watch the falling block
while the other watches the preview box to tell you
which block is coming next. I think he's joking, but
(42:05):
I'm not positive whether he's he actually uses this while
playing or not. Huh, yeah, because he would be he
would be doing the direct opposite of of the very
thing about the tatris experience that is being uh utilized
potentially treat lazy in this case. Yeah so uh as
as far as this particular research goes, clinical trials worse
(42:25):
at least initially scheduled, and the company Ambliotech purchased the
research findings and licensed it to to you Be Soft
for the creation of lazy eye treatment games, specific like
therapy games. Yeah so, Ambliotech is currently seeking permission from
the U S. Food and Drug Administration to market the therapy,
(42:46):
such as their game dig Rush, which is is not
tetris um and it looks, uh, it looks like it's
basically like a little Digger character that's moving around on
a If it ain't Tetris, I don't care. It's certainly
US abstract. Yeah, but the thing is that it utilizes
a tablet and three D glasses, so you get that
(43:06):
red and blue, you know, disconnect and you have to
use both eyes and concert to see the full picture.
Um So anyway, they're they're seeking FDA approval for this
according to the most recent report. It was the March
BBC report. And if you want to learn more about
that company and see some screenshots from their game, you
can find them at www dot ambliothech dot com. That's
(43:28):
a m B L y O t e c H.
You know, Tetris has been such an interesting subject to
do on this show because I I still have the
intuition I had at the very beginning. I still feel
like there's an ancient secret inside Tetris, or maybe Tetris
is the ancient secret, And after doing all this research,
(43:50):
I don't feel any closer to articulating what that that
ancient mystery or that secret is. What's because the Holy
Tetromino stands outside of our human world, and in playing Tetris,
were able to dip into the deep currents of energy
that underlie our reality. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to come
(44:10):
up with some kind of astronomical metaphor or or the
stars Tetris blocks, but they're not really unless you start
thinking about it. Yeah, and then there's no inn thinking
about it. And wait a second, Yeah they are, yeah,
they are. You ever notice how the Maria on the moon,
(44:32):
the lunar oceans, that it's all Tetris blocks. Yeah, yeah,
I'll buy into it. It sounds good to me. It's
the big storm on Jupiter. Yeah, just another Tetris block.
That's what two by two I think. Ultimately it is
a very fast, swirling Z shaped blocks. So it's it's
a storm because it's the troubling Z shaped block. Those
(44:53):
blocks are the devil. All right, Well, we know that
this is a topic that it resonates with a lot
of people out there because tetris is just something that's
unavoidable in our culture. At this point, everybody's seen it
or played it. You have varying levels of experience with it,
but chances are you had at least a little bit
of time that you're addicted to it. Yeah. So if
(45:15):
you know the ancient secret of Tetris and you understand
why it is the strongest potion in the in the
Digital Sorcerer's potion bag. You should let us know. That's right.
You can find is that the Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's we'll find
all the podcast episodes. You'll find, videos, will find blog posts.
You'll find a link out to our social media accounts
(45:36):
such as Twitter and Facebook. We're blow the mind on
both of those, and we are stuff to blow your
mind on Tumbler. And if you want to get to
us with your personal Tetris stories or any feedback on
the show, or your thoughts about the cognitive science of
gaming and Tetris, you can email us and blow the
mind at how Stuff Works for more on this and
(46:04):
thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuffworks dot com? Fou
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