A single dose psychological intervention, which includes using the computer game Tetris, can prevent the unpleasant, intrusive memories that develop in some people after suffering a traumatic event.
I wonder if there’s any research on that? It’s been a while since I read the study but iirc there’s something specific about Tetris that increases the effect, something to do with manipulating objects to fit into neat rows.
So maybe trying to fit the shopping in the back of a car would be as effective! Anyway I posted this hoping it would be of use to some of the people affected by the latest lemmy attack.
Probably to some extent, but there’s a few aspects that probably make Tetris exceptional for this
First, you have to pay attention and plan ahead, but in a simple enough way and fast enough that it discourages fully forming thoughts. You also can’t do it on autopilot - you can’t pattern match or rhythm your way through, so you can’t zone out. So while you’re playing, you probably can do very little to ruminate over the event and reinforce it
Second, it’s spatial reasoning, working + short term memory, and very visual. We encode long term memories like carving groves into wood - the longer we think about it while it’s in short term memory, the clearer the details. If ASAP you overwrite the short term spatial and visual memories with meaningless combinations of blocks, you lose a lot of detail. That’s going to result in a much weaker association of the emotions to a location or an image, making triggers less likely and easier to break
Third, it ties up your visual systems - as the primary sense of humans, visual processing is a huge portion of what our brains do. It’s tied up in complex ways with the way we predict things and access memories, and for reasons I barely understand that can be used to weaken triggers and dampen emotional response
So putting it together, it distracts you from effectively building a narrative by putting your thoughts into language. While that’s going on, it overwrites aspects of your short term memory over and over with meaningless junk data. Finally, it’s just soothing - you get little hits of dopamine and jolts of stress response
it’s a lie perpetuated by Big Tetris!!
jk, good to know. I assume this should work similarly for any game that doesn’t contain violent content and yet activates the brain.
I wonder if there’s any research on that? It’s been a while since I read the study but iirc there’s something specific about Tetris that increases the effect, something to do with manipulating objects to fit into neat rows.
So maybe trying to fit the shopping in the back of a car would be as effective! Anyway I posted this hoping it would be of use to some of the people affected by the latest lemmy attack.
Wait what lemmy attack? What happened?
I only know hearsay but apparently world was spammed with CSAM
Probably referring to the CSAM that was posted to one of the forums.
I would imagine crossword puzzles or anything similar in that nature could also apply.
Probably to some extent, but there’s a few aspects that probably make Tetris exceptional for this
First, you have to pay attention and plan ahead, but in a simple enough way and fast enough that it discourages fully forming thoughts. You also can’t do it on autopilot - you can’t pattern match or rhythm your way through, so you can’t zone out. So while you’re playing, you probably can do very little to ruminate over the event and reinforce it
Second, it’s spatial reasoning, working + short term memory, and very visual. We encode long term memories like carving groves into wood - the longer we think about it while it’s in short term memory, the clearer the details. If ASAP you overwrite the short term spatial and visual memories with meaningless combinations of blocks, you lose a lot of detail. That’s going to result in a much weaker association of the emotions to a location or an image, making triggers less likely and easier to break
Third, it ties up your visual systems - as the primary sense of humans, visual processing is a huge portion of what our brains do. It’s tied up in complex ways with the way we predict things and access memories, and for reasons I barely understand that can be used to weaken triggers and dampen emotional response
So putting it together, it distracts you from effectively building a narrative by putting your thoughts into language. While that’s going on, it overwrites aspects of your short term memory over and over with meaningless junk data. Finally, it’s just soothing - you get little hits of dopamine and jolts of stress response
Excellent explanation, nice.