yo… everyone is laughing cause its kind of funny but I had a really intense and traumatic childhood… and I also played a lot of tetris as a kid. Like more than 12 hours a day of it.
Is that seriously why my trauma didn’t effect me like it would have with other people??
That’s fucking nuts. Like what.?.
So this is why I have trouble recalling the 90s.
Downside is, every time you play Tetris to prevent PTSD, it causes you to remember all the traumatic shit that ended up tucked away in the back of your brain from all those previous times you played Tetris to avoid PTSD.
I would guess that you are joking but with truth.
damn too late
My mum used to work with criminaly insane people in an asylym. I realize now why she frequently jacked my Gameboy to play Tetris.
Or have SDAM and not worry about trama.
Can’t have trauma if you can’t remember you have trauma 😎
The one plus side of me having SDAM haha
So you’re saying if my parents had let me play video games, my childhood traumas would have been easier to deal with. Those f%*&ers…
Can confirm it doesn’t help. You’re good.
Here is the actual paper; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5822451/
That is not what “the Tetris Effect” means. :P
lucky us Tetris wasn’t a thing back when Batman was a kid
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.
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.
I remember a podcast on NPR a few years ago mentioning something similar. The psychologist that was on the show was discussing how doing something that does something that requires your full attention reduces anxiety. It’s interesting to see that this can also be applied to reduce PTSD.
Can confirm, not just with the game but similar activities eg: stacking those body parts into a nice cube really takes away from the stress of killing someone
Oh, but be careful - stacking them however neatly won’t make the full rows disappear.
Depends on how good your friends are.
Nah, Post Traumatic Growth is where holy grail of human behavior lies. (Been there, done that)
What if Tetris is the source of my trauma?
