Tetris against psychological trauma. Free Technical Library News

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Tetris against psychological trauma

27.07.2015

Bad memories often take root in memory and become uncontrollable - if something very bad happened to us, then the constant emotional return to this event leads to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Psychologists and neuroscientists are trying to find a way that would allow you to edit memory, weaken the strength and influence of emotional "negativity".

The process of transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory is called consolidation. In such a consolidated form, it is very difficult to act on the memory, but it makes itself felt, forcing you to react painfully to some completely ordinary phenomena (for example, a person who survived an air raid will experience horror when he hears the roar of a bus engine - because it will remind him of war ).

As part of therapy, they try to reconsolidate memory, that is, they help a person to remember a bad episode in all details and realize that everything is in the past. There are also medication methods designed to reformat memory; many laboratories are investigating the molecular genetic mechanisms that perpetuate traumatic experiences. However, often both psychotherapeutic and drug treatments, despite all their sophistication, are ineffective.

All the more unexpected are the results obtained by an international team of psychologists from Oxford, Cambridge and the Karolinska Institute: in their article in Psychological Science, they recommend the well-known Tetris game as a therapeutic tool for post-traumatic syndrome.

Back in 2010, Emily A. Holmes, along with colleagues, discovered that if a person plays Tetris within the first six hours after a traumatic experience, then no strong “negativity” will be deposited in his memory. Of course, he will remember what happened, that he was very ill, but his emotions will smooth out and he will not have to experience that horror, fear and pain again and again, like the first time. Most likely, the toy has such an effect because, by stacking the falling blocks, we use some of the same parts of the brain, because of which we remember so well, in all details and emotional details, what happened. In other words, due to the competition of two processes for the same neural resources, the memory is not consolidated in its original form and loses much of its brightness.

However, it is unlikely that a person who survived the shelling, or, for example, who spent some time under the rubble of a house after an earthquake, will rush to play Tetris, even if he knows that it is good for the psyche. So the psychologists decided to test whether the game would work after the traumatic memory had hardened into long-term memory. The experiment involved several dozen people who were shown videos with scenes of disasters, with injured and dying people. The next day, the memory of what they saw was revived by showing especially difficult fragments of the film. A few minutes later, some participants in the experiment were allowed to play Tetris, some were asked to distract themselves with something else, some were left with painful memories, and some simply played Tetris - they were not shown anything for the second time.

Over the next week, volunteers had to record how often images of what they saw returned to them, and at the very end of the experiment they were tested on how well they remember certain fragments of the film. It turned out that involuntary "flashbacks", obsessive negative memories returned to those who played Tetris much less frequently than to those who did not play Tetris. At the same time, the game itself did not affect the memory itself: both those who played and those who did not play the same remembered scenes from an unpleasant video when they were specifically asked about it. That is, the researchers conclude, a negative memory does not disappear, but weakens, ceases to plague a person with a random and unpredictable appearance.

Of course, showing a film, no matter how gruesome in content, is only a faint semblance of a real traumatic experience. However, at least now psychologists can test their hypothesis on real patients, and, in addition, nothing prevents using Tetris to fight, if not with severe psychological trauma, then at least with very unpleasant and intrusive memories.

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