January 20, 2018 • 47 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. (Previously published Dec. 3, 2015)
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Episode Transcript
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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.
Once again we were venturing down into the vault, this
time to come back on part two of the episode
that we started last Saturday, that we re ran from December.
This is going to be an episode that aired on
December three called Better Living through Tetris. More colored blocks,
(00:28):
rushing out of the void of the vault to Healless
which do you think is the most healing of the
Tetris shapes? Is it? Is it the L Is it
the T? No? No, it's the straight line of four blocks,
because that's the that's the money block. That's the one
that allows you to get that that wonderful four rows
eliminated at one time, catching money. All Right, without further ado,
(00:51):
let's dive in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to
Step to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I am General McCormick, and today's episode is part
two of a two part episode about the science of Tetris,
(01:14):
really the science of Tetris, but 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
(01:35):
outgrowth of the phantasmagorical blood magic of the universe. It
comes from the cosmos itself. It's not just something we made.
It was here and in nineteen eighty four, the creator
of Tetris, Alexei Pajutnov, discovered it. I like that the
idea of discovering Tetris as this uh, this sort of
(01:57):
dimension of of mathematical affection. Yeah, underlying 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
(02:19):
throughout the world. They hallucinated, they dream about it, and
we talked about some possible 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
(02:40):
Tetris players use less brain energy than novice Tetris players
at higher levels of play. 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
(03:04):
the real world. Yeah, and a lot of this, uh.
The first portion of 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 the science behind this 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
(03:26):
to part one, go back listen to part one, uh first,
and then come and join us again here where we
will continue the cosmic journey of Tetris and clear those
lines again and again and again. Alright, 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,
(03:47):
we should back up and ask why we play any
game so much? 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 non 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
(04:08):
graphics and story and you know, because you have these
action adventure games that are that are so complex and
all that. There's more so that you're immersing yourself in
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
(04:30):
playing I don't know what's another early puzzle game, the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game on the which did really exist.
Don't don't bother looking at it, You'll just get sad. Yeah, wanted, wanted?
Why are these games? So? Why don't we immerse ourselves?
And the how does this work? One idea that seems
pretty strongly supported is that very rewarding and enjoyable game
(04:55):
play and game mechanics come from this psychological process that's
been described under the term cognitive flow flow. Yeah. Yeah,
at 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
(05:17):
boils this down perfectly to a 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,
(05:41):
you can play, you have 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 extraneous stuff
going on. It's just perfect focus, zeroing in on a
perfect brain consuming to ask that is just challenging enough
(06:02):
to always keep you engaged. Yeah. Now, that's not to
say that cognitive flow is just a result of gaming.
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.
(06:24):
Chick sent me high, the Hungarian psychology professor who pioneered
the 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
(06:47):
optimal experiences. 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
the thing he identified is that a key to a
sort of happy existence or a happy experience is this
(07:09):
process of flow. Yeah, indeed, 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
(07:32):
people who engage in novel physical or mental activities for
extended periods of time and how they often experienced on
the hallucinatory replay of the activities. 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 a challenging rock face.
(07:54):
He began thinking about it in terms of his psychology studies,
and he laid it out pretty much as we've been
to 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,
(08:15):
you get immediate feedback if you're doing it right. Contains
a manageable challenge. It's hard, but you can do it,
a 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
(08:36):
you're doing is doable, and then you 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 tetris.
You know, nobody, nobody's giving you tangible rewards or punishments
based on how many lines you clear. But it becomes
(08:58):
intrinsically motivating. There's 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 past or the future. It all
goes dull as your brain, uh tackles the problem at hand,
(09:18):
be it climbing a rock, working on an article, mowing
the yard, 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
(09:40):
conditions are. The clear goals, stack them, clear lines, manageable rules,
it's absolutely clear what's going on in Tetris. Uh. Tetris
adjusts itself to your capabilities. So at the beginning it's easy. Uh.
If you are a very good player, you can move
up to higher difficulties pretty quickly. Uh. Gives you an
adjustment period. But the difficulty changes and tracks with you
(10:04):
as you play. You know, as you go up higher,
you get farther, 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.
(10:27):
You know, you 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
(10:49):
your eyes directly to the Tetris screen so that nobody
can walk in and say like, hey, there's a fire,
you need to evacuate 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.
(11:10):
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. Yeah,
PBS is behind it. I watched this as well. I
(11:30):
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 comes from Soviet to psychologist and psychiatrist Blooma Wolfovna Zagernick.
She lived from nineteen hundred to nine, and she first
(11:53):
observed this in the nineteen twenties. Um and it basically
boils down to this. It's the it's the ecological 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 tasks, a constant
(12:14):
sense of achievement, but also a constantly unachieved finish. As
we mentioned in the previous episode, there's no hey, you
won screen and 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 flag in
(12:36):
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. So
there's a gronic effect of course, plays into the typical
(12:58):
human drive to finish. What we started to see things
through to the finish, and the associative associated negative psychological
univocations 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 not
(13:20):
quite finished about everything, and how those just continue to
stick in your mind? Um, there's a one explanation of
the Zigarnic effect that I found that I thought was pretty, uh,
pretty nice comes from Roy Baumbinster and Brad Bushman in
their two thousand eight textbooks Social Psychology and Human Nature.
They said, the Zigaronic effect is a tendency to experience automatic,
(13:44):
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 and 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 something that uh is related
(14:06):
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. I'll
see 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 finished yet, it's always
this intrinsically motivating task that remains incomplete in the mind.
(14:30):
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 though, that applies well
beyond games, and that is that students, be it a you,
(14:52):
be you 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 if I'm trying
to uh to think clearly about maybe an episode I'm
(15:14):
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 one task, it's better
to do ten percent of the next task and then
(15:35):
come back to it the next day. My thoughts about
it are going to 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 geting
to consolidate those memories. All that working is working in
your favor as well. But also it's pointed out a
lot that if if the task is intimidating, just start it,
(15:59):
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 then come back. Yeah,
this isn't gonna become the self help show, but but
try that one at least. Yeah, I highly advocate that strategy.
(16:22):
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 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
(16:45):
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 David Kirsch and Paul Maglio
published a paper in Cognitive Science. It's called on Distinguishing
Epistemic and Pragmatic Action, and Kirshi and Maglio make the
(17:05):
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 of you achieving a goal. So if
you are stranded on a tiny island and starving, throwing
(17:26):
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 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
(17:47):
different kind of action, a different kind of external action,
which is what they call epistemic action, and this is
making a change to the world in order to simplify
a problem solving task. 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.
(18:09):
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 workbook with with two
of these on different pages. Um, and what you do
is you tear out one of the pages and then
hold the pictures right next to each other. That would
(18:30):
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 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
(18:53):
reduce the mental complexity of a task. And they looked
at Tetris in this paper actually and pointed out how
experience Tetris players use epistemic action in Tetris, 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
(19:16):
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 by
visually seeing exactly what the block looks like in all
its orientations, you can see, okay, here's exactly where it
(19:39):
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 to make mental
work easier. They say, epistemic action can be used to
reduce the memory involved in a mental computation UH, it
(20:00):
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
that when you play Tetris, it's again kind of a
perfect back and forth between body and mind. It creates
(20:22):
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
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
(20:44):
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
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,
(21:09):
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,
(21:30):
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
(21:52):
lots of scenarios. Yeah, because we've again just think back
to all the ways we've discussed in which tetris cat
is 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
(22:13):
a lot of 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
(22:34):
and I'm trying to quit smoking. Can tetris help me? Potentially? Yes?
And which sounds crazy, especially anyone who has firsthand experience
with just how um, how powerful um 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
(22:56):
from Plymouth 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 seven,
and they were monitored for levels of craving and also
prompted seven times a day to report their cravings. Fifteen
(23:18):
of 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,
(23:39):
most 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,
wine and beer and spice, Yeah and spice. Sixteen percent
were for miscellaneous activities such as sleeping, playing video games
(24:01):
to which I found interesting, socializing with friends, and sexual intercourse.
Food cravings tended to be slightly weaker than those in
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
(24:22):
be used outside the lab to reduce cravings for substances
and activities other than eating. So in this we can
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 curving addictions, not
not the again, not the primary tool, but but an
(24:44):
additional tool. So I'm sure that they didn't find that
that it would completely eliminate cravings, But did they have
an estimate for by how much the cravings were reduced? Yeah,
by approximately one fifth. 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
(25:05):
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
(25:26):
part 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, Robert, because we
haven't really touched on this as much. This is something
I find in gaming in general these days, especially um
(25:48):
with a three 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,
which Tetrisses is perfect for that. It is one of them.
I just the other day, when we were preparing for
this episode, we was doing some research. I decided to
play a little bit of Tetris, and I several different times,
(26:11):
I 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
(26:31):
never a situation where I can't play Tetris now this
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
(26:54):
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.
(27:15):
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
(27:36):
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 to school and suddenly just utterly possessed
by memories of the time when somebody shot you in
(27:58):
the shoulder. I mean, it's the one of the worst
moments of your life is suddenly just popping up in
your day and 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, you
(28:19):
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 think
(28:40):
I've run across this one yet. 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 last one really fascinating, and I would
love to hear from listeners who are psychiatrists or or
(29:00):
from people who have practiced this method personally. I don't know,
do y'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 yogurt meditation techniques
(29:25):
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 those things I mentioned
(29:46):
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. So this the idea here is that
something traumatic has occurred, what can I do to keep
from to keep that trauma from taking root in my brain? Yeah?
(30:09):
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 somebody 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 published a study on the
(30:31):
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 has selective resources with limited capacity,
(30:54):
so your brain can't do everything that you can only
devote so much energy resource to 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 you know that there's this
idea that about six hours after a memory takes places,
(31:15):
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 stop bad memories from consolidating with
(31:37):
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. Act. Well, I don't know.
Actually they didn't say the name of the tape because
I remember covering this study like way back in the
(31:58):
early like the initial version of this podcast episode with
Alison Lowdermilk, 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 injury and death,
(32:21):
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 disturbing
student film, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, they were all made
(32:41):
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 group experience
(33:04):
flashbacks during the ten minutes. No surprise, the 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,
(33:27):
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
(33:50):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:55):
first study, one of the things they wanted to point
out that they were not saying people who already of
PTSD can get better by playing Tetris, though they speculate
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 in a bit,
but just a couple of comments. One of the things
(35:18):
is it's hard to test something like the formation of
traumatic memories leading to PTSD because for obvious ethical reasons,
you can't expose somebody to life shattering trauma for the
sake of the experiment. So the best they could do
was show somebody a really disturbing movie. And even that
seems kind of weird. I mean when you read the like, yes,
they were showed the graphic images of death, and then
(35:40):
we asked them how troubled they were. Now you could
imagine a scenario where they are trauma metic rushes out
begins treating the individual who is is down on the
ground with that and is wounded, and then passing out
game boys exactly 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
(36:02):
or something and then give them Tetris. But these findings
have been followed up on in subsequent studies. So the
same group did another study in two thousand ten where
they they attempted to answer the questions would all games
have this effect via distraction or enjoyment or might some
(36:23):
games even be harmful? And then second, would the effects
be found if administered several hours post trauma? 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,
(36:46):
And yeah, I looked at a video of somebody merely
playing pub Quiz two thousand eight pub Quiz Machine two
thousand eight on YouTube, and I think that alone could
cause traumatic memories. But but anyway, they had those too,
and they concluded that no, the pub Quiz did not
do as well as Tetris. In fact, they found that
(37:07):
the pub quiz made the traumatic experience flashbacks more intense.
So if you if you have a 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,
(37:29):
so you can wait four hours after the event play
some Tetris and supposedly this discourages flashbacks. 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 Foo or something like it,
does does the game have to provide a certain level
(37:51):
of challenge? Is there a difference between the effects on
experience Tetris players and on novices. So there are a
lot of questions 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
(38:14):
tasks can block traumatic memories even after the memories are
already formed. So remember 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
(38:35):
is they had people after the memory formation had already
taken place, recall the memories, 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
(38:56):
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 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
(39:16):
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 visual visuospatial uh 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,
(39:38):
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 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 signal
(40:00):
effiicantly weakened the hold it has over you. So anyway,
I would love to see more research in that area,
and it seems very interesting 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
(40:22):
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 vision in an eye that
otherwise appears normal. Or out of proportion to associated structural
problems with the eye. So up to three percent of
the population suffers from amblyopia and it's a It's ultimately
(40:45):
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 treating this has always
been patching, So you wear an eye patch over the
a I um and uh and and eventually brings things
back back to order. But um, this is this is
(41:09):
generally more helpful with younger cases and not with older
individuals who are suffering from lazy eye. So two thousand thirteen,
a research team led by Dr Robert Hess from mcgel
University and the Research Institute of the mcgel University Health
Center looked in to possible use of tetris as a
means of treating uh individuals are suffering from the yeah
(41:34):
once more so, they they found that by distributing information
between the two eyes in a complimentary fashion, catris 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
(41:54):
in the brain and allows UH the the the individual's
brain to relearn, essentially 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
(42:15):
ground plane objects. So this forced the two eyes to
work together, so you have to be they have two
eyes have to be working together to get the full image. Wait,
which I could see the preview box 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
(42:38):
in the other episode, it's called the Ecstasy of Order. Again,
I really liked it, so I recommended. There's a Tetris
champion 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
(42:59):
block while the other watches the preview box to tell
you which block is coming next. I think he's joking,
but 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 the very
thing about the tatris experience that is being uh utilized
potentially treat lazy in this case. So uh as as
(43:22):
far as this particular research goes, clinical trials worse at
least initially scheduled for 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,
(43:47):
such as their game dig Rush, which 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 less abstract. Yeah.
But the thing is that it utilizes a tablet and
three D glasses, so you get that red and blue,
(44:08):
um 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, which 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 ambliotech dot com. That's a m b
(44:30):
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, I don't feel any
(44:52):
closer to articulating what that that ancient mystery or that
secret is. What's because the Holy Tetromino stands out side
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 up with
some kind of astronomical metaphor or or the stars Tetris blocks,
(45:16):
but they're not really unless you start thinking about it. Yeah,
and then there's no Indian thinking about it. Wait a second,
Yeah they are, Yeah, they are. Do you ever notice
how the Maria on the moon, the lunar oceans, that
it's all Tetris blocks. Yeah, yeah, I'll buy into it.
(45:40):
It sounds good to me. It's a 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 block. So
it's it's a storm because it's the troubling Z shaped block.
Those blocks are the devil. All right. Well, we know
that this is a topic that resonates with a lot
(46:02):
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
you know the ancient secret of Tetris and you understand
why it is the strongest potion in the in the
(46:22):
Digital Sorcerer's potion bag, you should let us know. That's right.
You can find is that stuff to blow your mind?
Dot com that is our mothership. That's what we'll find
all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, you'll find blog posts,
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(46:44):
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 and how Stuff Works for more on this and
(47:05):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com,
Big Think, Remember Stott
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Once again we were venturing down into the vault, this
time to come back on part two of the episode
that we started last Saturday, that we re ran from December.
This is going to be an episode that aired on
December three called Better Living through Tetris. More colored blocks,
(00:28):
rushing out of the void of the vault to Healless
which do you think is the most healing of the
Tetris shapes? Is it? Is it the L Is it
the T? No? No, it's the straight line of four blocks,
because that's the that's the money block. That's the one
that allows you to get that that wonderful four rows
eliminated at one time, catching money. All Right, without further ado,
(00:51):
let's dive in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to
Step to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I am General McCormick, and today's episode is part
two of a two part episode about the science of Tetris,
(01:14):
really the science of Tetris, but 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
(01:35):
outgrowth of the phantasmagorical blood magic of the universe. It
comes from the cosmos itself. It's not just something we made.
It was here and in nineteen eighty four, the creator
of Tetris, Alexei Pajutnov, discovered it. I like that the
idea of discovering Tetris as this uh, this sort of
(01:57):
dimension of of mathematical affection. Yeah, underlying 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
(02:19):
throughout the world. They hallucinated, they dream about it, and
we talked about some possible 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
(02:40):
Tetris players use less brain energy than novice Tetris players
at higher levels of play. 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
(03:04):
the real world. Yeah, and a lot of this, uh.
The first portion of 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 the science behind this 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
(03:26):
to part one, go back listen to part one, uh first,
and then come and join us again here where we
will continue the cosmic journey of Tetris and clear those
lines again and again and again. Alright, 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,
(03:47):
we should back up and ask why we play any
game so much? 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 non 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
(04:08):
graphics and story and you know, because you have these
action adventure games that are that are so complex and
all that. There's more so that you're immersing yourself in
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
(04:30):
playing I don't know what's another early puzzle game, the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game on the which did really exist.
Don't don't bother looking at it, You'll just get sad. Yeah, wanted, wanted?
Why are these games? So? Why don't we immerse ourselves?
And the how does this work? One idea that seems
pretty strongly supported is that very rewarding and enjoyable game
(04:55):
play and game mechanics come from this psychological process that's
been described under the term cognitive flow flow. Yeah. Yeah,
at 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
(05:17):
boils this down perfectly to a 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,
(05:41):
you can play, you have 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 extraneous stuff
going on. It's just perfect focus, zeroing in on a
perfect brain consuming to ask that is just challenging enough
(06:02):
to always keep you engaged. Yeah. Now, that's not to
say that cognitive flow is just a result of gaming.
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.
(06:24):
Chick sent me high, the Hungarian psychology professor who pioneered
the 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
(06:47):
optimal experiences. 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
the thing he identified is that a key to a
sort of happy existence or a happy experience is this
(07:09):
process of flow. Yeah, indeed, 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
(07:32):
people who engage in novel physical or mental activities for
extended periods of time and how they often experienced on
the hallucinatory replay of the activities. 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 a challenging rock face.
(07:54):
He began thinking about it in terms of his psychology studies,
and he laid it out pretty much as we've been
to 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,
(08:15):
you get immediate feedback if you're doing it right. Contains
a manageable challenge. It's hard, but you can do it,
a 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
(08:36):
you're doing is doable, and then you 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 tetris.
You know, nobody, nobody's giving you tangible rewards or punishments
based on how many lines you clear. But it becomes
(08:58):
intrinsically motivating. There's 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 past or the future. It all
goes dull as your brain, uh tackles the problem at hand,
(09:18):
be it climbing a rock, working on an article, mowing
the yard, 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
(09:40):
conditions are. The clear goals, stack them, clear lines, manageable rules,
it's absolutely clear what's going on in Tetris. Uh. Tetris
adjusts itself to your capabilities. So at the beginning it's easy. Uh.
If you are a very good player, you can move
up to higher difficulties pretty quickly. Uh. Gives you an
adjustment period. But the difficulty changes and tracks with you
(10:04):
as you play. You know, as you go up higher,
you get farther, 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.
(10:27):
You know, you 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
(10:49):
your eyes directly to the Tetris screen so that nobody
can walk in and say like, hey, there's a fire,
you need to evacuate 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.
(11:10):
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. Yeah,
PBS is behind it. I watched this as well. I
(11:30):
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 comes from Soviet to psychologist and psychiatrist Blooma Wolfovna Zagernick.
She lived from nineteen hundred to nine, and she first
(11:53):
observed this in the nineteen twenties. Um and it basically
boils down to this. It's the it's the ecological 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 tasks, a constant
(12:14):
sense of achievement, but also a constantly unachieved finish. As
we mentioned in the previous episode, there's no hey, you
won screen and 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 flag in
(12:36):
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. So
there's a gronic effect of course, plays into the typical
(12:58):
human drive to finish. What we started to see things
through to the finish, and the associative associated negative psychological
univocations 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 not
(13:20):
quite finished about everything, and how those just continue to
stick in your mind? Um, there's a one explanation of
the Zigarnic effect that I found that I thought was pretty, uh,
pretty nice comes from Roy Baumbinster and Brad Bushman in
their two thousand eight textbooks Social Psychology and Human Nature.
They said, the Zigaronic effect is a tendency to experience automatic,
(13:44):
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 and 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 something that uh is related
(14:06):
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. I'll
see 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 finished yet, it's always
this intrinsically motivating task that remains incomplete in the mind.
(14:30):
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 though, that applies well
beyond games, and that is that students, be it a you,
(14:52):
be you 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 if I'm trying
to uh to think clearly about maybe an episode I'm
(15:14):
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 one task, it's better
to do ten percent of the next task and then
(15:35):
come back to it the next day. My thoughts about
it are going to 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 geting
to consolidate those memories. All that working is working in
your favor as well. But also it's pointed out a
lot that if if the task is intimidating, just start it,
(15:59):
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 then come back. Yeah,
this isn't gonna become the self help show, but but
try that one at least. Yeah, I highly advocate that strategy.
(16:22):
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 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
(16:45):
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 David Kirsch and Paul Maglio
published a paper in Cognitive Science. It's called on Distinguishing
Epistemic and Pragmatic Action, and Kirshi and Maglio make the
(17:05):
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 of you achieving a goal. So if
you are stranded on a tiny island and starving, throwing
(17:26):
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 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
(17:47):
different kind of action, a different kind of external action,
which is what they call epistemic action, and this is
making a change to the world in order to simplify
a problem solving task. 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.
(18:09):
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 workbook with with two
of these on different pages. Um, and what you do
is you tear out one of the pages and then
hold the pictures right next to each other. That would
(18:30):
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 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
(18:53):
reduce the mental complexity of a task. And they looked
at Tetris in this paper actually and pointed out how
experience Tetris players use epistemic action in Tetris, 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
(19:16):
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 by
visually seeing exactly what the block looks like in all
its orientations, you can see, okay, here's exactly where it
(19:39):
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 to make mental
work easier. They say, epistemic action can be used to
reduce the memory involved in a mental computation UH, it
(20:00):
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
that when you play Tetris, it's again kind of a
perfect back and forth between body and mind. It creates
(20:22):
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
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
(20:44):
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
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,
(21:09):
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,
(21:30):
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
(21:52):
lots of scenarios. Yeah, because we've again just think back
to all the ways we've discussed in which tetris cat
is 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
(22:13):
a lot of 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
(22:34):
and I'm trying to quit smoking. Can tetris help me? Potentially? Yes?
And which sounds crazy, especially anyone who has firsthand experience
with just how um, how powerful um 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
(22:56):
from Plymouth 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 seven,
and they were monitored for levels of craving and also
prompted seven times a day to report their cravings. Fifteen
(23:18):
of 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,
(23:39):
most 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,
wine and beer and spice, Yeah and spice. Sixteen percent
were for miscellaneous activities such as sleeping, playing video games
(24:01):
to which I found interesting, socializing with friends, and sexual intercourse.
Food cravings tended to be slightly weaker than those in
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
(24:22):
be used outside the lab to reduce cravings for substances
and activities other than eating. So in this we can
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 curving addictions, not
not the again, not the primary tool, but but an
(24:44):
additional tool. So I'm sure that they didn't find that
that it would completely eliminate cravings, But did they have
an estimate for by how much the cravings were reduced? Yeah,
by approximately one fifth. 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
(25:05):
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
(25:26):
part 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, Robert, because we
haven't really touched on this as much. This is something
I find in gaming in general these days, especially um
(25:48):
with a three 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,
which Tetrisses is perfect for that. It is one of them.
I just the other day, when we were preparing for
this episode, we was doing some research. I decided to
play a little bit of Tetris, and I several different times,
(26:11):
I 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
(26:31):
never a situation where I can't play Tetris now this
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
(26:54):
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.
(27:15):
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
(27:36):
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 to school and suddenly just utterly possessed
by memories of the time when somebody shot you in
(27:58):
the shoulder. I mean, it's the one of the worst
moments of your life is suddenly just popping up in
your day and 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, you
(28:19):
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 think
(28:40):
I've run across this one yet. 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 last one really fascinating, and I would
love to hear from listeners who are psychiatrists or or
(29:00):
from people who have practiced this method personally. I don't know,
do y'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 yogurt meditation techniques
(29:25):
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 those things I mentioned
(29:46):
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. So this the idea here is that
something traumatic has occurred, what can I do to keep
from to keep that trauma from taking root in my brain? Yeah?
(30:09):
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 somebody 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 published a study on the
(30:31):
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 has selective resources with limited capacity,
(30:54):
so your brain can't do everything that you can only
devote so much energy resource to 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 you know that there's this
idea that about six hours after a memory takes places,
(31:15):
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 stop bad memories from consolidating with
(31:37):
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. Act. Well, I don't know.
Actually they didn't say the name of the tape because
I remember covering this study like way back in the
(31:58):
early like the initial version of this podcast episode with
Alison Lowdermilk, 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 injury and death,
(32:21):
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 disturbing
student film, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, they were all made
(32:41):
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 group experience
(33:04):
flashbacks during the ten minutes. No surprise, the 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,
(33:27):
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
(33:50):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:55):
first study, one of the things they wanted to point
out that they were not saying people who already of
PTSD can get better by playing Tetris, though they speculate
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 in a bit,
but just a couple of comments. One of the things
(35:18):
is it's hard to test something like the formation of
traumatic memories leading to PTSD because for obvious ethical reasons,
you can't expose somebody to life shattering trauma for the
sake of the experiment. So the best they could do
was show somebody a really disturbing movie. And even that
seems kind of weird. I mean when you read the like, yes,
they were showed the graphic images of death, and then
(35:40):
we asked them how troubled they were. Now you could
imagine a scenario where they are trauma metic rushes out
begins treating the individual who is is down on the
ground with that and is wounded, and then passing out
game boys exactly 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
(36:02):
or something and then give them Tetris. But these findings
have been followed up on in subsequent studies. So the
same group did another study in two thousand ten where
they they attempted to answer the questions would all games
have this effect via distraction or enjoyment or might some
(36:23):
games even be harmful? And then second, would the effects
be found if administered several hours post trauma? 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,
(36:46):
And yeah, I looked at a video of somebody merely
playing pub Quiz two thousand eight pub Quiz Machine two
thousand eight on YouTube, and I think that alone could
cause traumatic memories. But but anyway, they had those too,
and they concluded that no, the pub Quiz did not
do as well as Tetris. In fact, they found that
(37:07):
the pub quiz made the traumatic experience flashbacks more intense.
So if you if you have a 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,
(37:29):
so you can wait four hours after the event play
some Tetris and supposedly this discourages flashbacks. 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 Foo or something like it,
does does the game have to provide a certain level
(37:51):
of challenge? Is there a difference between the effects on
experience Tetris players and on novices. So there are a
lot of questions 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
(38:14):
tasks can block traumatic memories even after the memories are
already formed. So remember 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
(38:35):
is they had people after the memory formation had already
taken place, recall the memories, 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
(38:56):
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 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
(39:16):
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 visual visuospatial uh 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,
(39:38):
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 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 signal
(40:00):
effiicantly weakened the hold it has over you. So anyway,
I would love to see more research in that area,
and it seems very interesting 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
(40:22):
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 vision in an eye that
otherwise appears normal. Or out of proportion to associated structural
problems with the eye. So up to three percent of
the population suffers from amblyopia and it's a It's ultimately
(40:45):
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 treating this has always
been patching, So you wear an eye patch over the
a I um and uh and and eventually brings things
back back to order. But um, this is this is
(41:09):
generally more helpful with younger cases and not with older
individuals who are suffering from lazy eye. So two thousand thirteen,
a research team led by Dr Robert Hess from mcgel
University and the Research Institute of the mcgel University Health
Center looked in to possible use of tetris as a
means of treating uh individuals are suffering from the yeah
(41:34):
once more so, they they found that by distributing information
between the two eyes in a complimentary fashion, catris 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
(41:54):
in the brain and allows UH the the the individual's
brain to relearn, essentially 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
(42:15):
ground plane objects. So this forced the two eyes to
work together, so you have to be they have two
eyes have to be working together to get the full image. Wait,
which I could see the preview box 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
(42:38):
in the other episode, it's called the Ecstasy of Order. Again,
I really liked it, so I recommended. There's a Tetris
champion 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
(42:59):
block while the other watches the preview box to tell
you which block is coming next. I think he's joking,
but 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 the very
thing about the tatris experience that is being uh utilized
potentially treat lazy in this case. So uh as as
(43:22):
far as this particular research goes, clinical trials worse at
least initially scheduled for 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,
(43:47):
such as their game dig Rush, which 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 less abstract. Yeah.
But the thing is that it utilizes a tablet and
three D glasses, so you get that red and blue,
(44:08):
um 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, which 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 ambliotech dot com. That's a m b
(44:30):
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, I don't feel any
(44:52):
closer to articulating what that that ancient mystery or that
secret is. What's because the Holy Tetromino stands out side
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 up with
some kind of astronomical metaphor or or the stars Tetris blocks,
(45:16):
but they're not really unless you start thinking about it. Yeah,
and then there's no Indian thinking about it. Wait a second,
Yeah they are, Yeah, they are. Do you ever notice
how the Maria on the moon, the lunar oceans, that
it's all Tetris blocks. Yeah, yeah, I'll buy into it.
(45:40):
It sounds good to me. It's a 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 block. So
it's it's a storm because it's the troubling Z shaped block.
Those blocks are the devil. All right. Well, we know
that this is a topic that resonates with a lot
(46:02):
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
you know the ancient secret of Tetris and you understand
why it is the strongest potion in the in the
(46:22):
Digital Sorcerer's potion bag, you should let us know. That's right.
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(46:44):
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