I stumbled across a study just now that suggests that playing tetris after experiencing a traumatic event may reduce the chance of developing post-traumatic-stress-disorder, or at least soften the blow. Sounds a bit crazy, right? Well the idea behind it is that by otherwise employing your visuospatial skills, you effectively disrupt the consolidation of the traumatic memory – in other words, playing tetris distracts your mind from the offending event and makes it less likely that you will encode it in a deep and damaging way. Here is a little excerpt from the researchers:
After leaving the laboratory, participants then kept a daily diary in which they recorded their flashbacks to the trauma film over a period of 1-week. Crucially, we found that participants [who played 10 minutes of Tetris] experienced significantly fewer flashbacks over the week than those [who didn't]. Furthermore, at 1-week, participants returned to the laboratory and participants in the game condition had significantly lower scores on the measure of clinical symptomatology of trauma.
Maybe all that tetris I played when I was younger is what saved me from the perils of being a teenager in suburban America!!?!?
