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Playing Tetris will get rid of painful memories

11.05.2012

For a long time, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only a problem for survivors of violence, car accidents, natural disasters, trauma, and so on. However, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were so many patients with PTSD (at least 25% of returned soldiers) that the Pentagon had to pay attention to this and allocate a lot of money to solve this problem.

Unfortunately, behavioral changes caused by severe stress have proven difficult to treat. It is especially difficult to find a simple and effective therapy immediately after a psychological trauma. However, the study, conducted by Oxford researchers, offers a completely new approach to treating the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

It turns out that the old Tetris game can help. Scientists have found that playing Tetris in a specific way loads the brain and prevents it from fixing traumatic memories. Thus, if you immediately sit down to play Tetris after a hard experience or a terrible incident, then the game will prevent the recent experience from turning into vivid lasting memories.

During the experiment, psychologists invited 60 volunteers to watch videos with scenes of injury or death. After 30 minutes of watching, the group was divided into three parts: the first sat down to play Tetris, the second took part in a small 10-minute quiz, and the third just sat and did nothing. The participants were then allowed to go home and asked to record all their memories of the scary video for a week.

As a result, it turned out that people who played Tetris had an average of 2 memories of a scary video, while others had 4-5.

Of course, weeks of monitoring and video cannot be compared to a full recovery after a horrific experience of combat or other events directly related to the death and injury of people. However, the results of 'Tetris-therapy' are encouraging, and scientists are going to continue research in the field - directly in the field of combat operations. Apparently, the experiments will be carried out with soldiers who have just returned from a serious alteration.

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