CAN PLAYING TETRIS BE A VIABLE TREATMENT FOR THE DEVASTATING EFFECTS OF POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER and CHRONIC PAIN?

SCROLL DOWN TO READ ABOUT HOW TETRIS TAKE AWAY PAIN

In August of 2001, just before 911, our family was involved in a tragic event involving the drowning deaths of two 16 year old boys who were swimming in a waterfall pool with their younger brother and our 13 year old son. I can't even begin to tell you the whole horrible story but our whole family ended up with severe post traumatic stress symptoms: panic attacks, flashbacks, insomnia, depression, suicidal thoughts... especially our son who had witnessed the deaths. Even though he and the other kid made courageous and valiant attempts to save them, risking their own lives and sustaining serious head, back & brain injuries in the process, they both had the feeling of survivor guilt that often result from this type of accident. Their head injuries occurred when they tried, at 13 & 15 years of age, to drive the car they had been passengers in, to go get more help. The car sped out of control went off the road and hit a tree stump on the side of the road. Our son and his friend were cut up very badly and our son sustained a level 3 concussion.
When we arrived at the hospital, he was covered in blood an unable to remember anything about what had happened.
To say the least; we were about as freaked out as you can get.
Our son was sent home from the hospital the next day. We were the lucky ones we thought and tried very hard to focus on being grateful that our son and his friend had not been killed too.
Our sons' concussion prevented him from clearly remembering the horrific scenes he had been a part of. A blessing he said. But the PTSD symptoms were harsh anyway, even though he could not REALLY remember the events of that day. Flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks and suicide attempts became the activities of our days.
I remember the day that one of his friends brought over the new Playstation 2 console and the new Grand Theft Auto game. We all noticed right away that our son settled right down to business and could just zone out everything that was making him feel crazy. Over the next year or so, he played PS 2 a lot, though we did have to get games that did not involve car accidents. The car accident genre, like GTA naturally brought on PTS flashbacks around the car crash that had injured him. The other games of every kind, though, were what really saved us some days. I can recommend this for anyone going through a terrible time. It does not cure the problem, or change what happened, but the value of being able to take a nice long break from it can not be understated.

This is the abstract from the report or study that was done in Oxford, UK.

Can Playing the Computer Game Tetris Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science

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Can Playing Tetris Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks That Plague a Person With Post traumatic Stress Following a Trauma Incident?

A Proposal from Cognitive Science

Emily A. Holmes, Ella L. James, Thomas Coode-Bate, Catherine Deeprose

Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Background

Flashbacks are the most devastating symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In the medical community, there are successful treatments for full-blown PTSD, but early interventions are lacking. The group at Oxford proposed the development of a ‘cognitive vaccine’ to prevent PTSD flashbacks from starting in the first place, following a traumatic event or experience.

Their theory is based on two key findings:
1) Cognitive science suggests that the human brain has only selective resources with limited capacity at any given time.
2) The neurobiology of memory suggests a 6-hr window to disrupt memory consolidation and prevent the onset of long lasting PTSD flashbacks.
The rationale for this approach is as follows:

Trauma flashbacks are sensory-perceptual, visuospatial mental images. Visuospatial cognitive tasks selectively compete for resources required to generate mental images. Thus, a visuospatial computer game (e.g. Tetris) will interfere with flashbacks. Visuospatial tasks performed post-trauma, within the 6 hour time window for memory consolidation, will reduce subsequent flashbacks. The group hypothesized that playing Tetris for just 30 minutes immediately folllowing the trauma would reduce the frequency of flashbacks over a one week period.

Methodology/Principal Findings

The Trauma Film paradigm was used as a well-established experimental analog for Post-traumatic Stress. All participants viewed a traumatic film consisting of scenes of real injury and death followed by a 30-min structured break. Participants were then randomly allocated to either a no-task or visuospatial (“Tetris”) condition which they undertook for 10-min. Flashbacks were monitored for 1-week. Results indicated that compared to the no-task condition, the “Tetris” condition produced a significant reduction in flashback frequency over 1-week. Convergent results were found on a clinical measure of PTSD symptomatology at 1-week. Recognition memory between groups did not differ significantly.

Conclusions/Significance

Playing “Tetris” after viewing traumatic material reduces unwanted, involuntary memory flashbacks to that traumatic film, leaving deliberate memory recall of the event intact. Pathological aspects of human memory in the aftermath of trauma may be malleable using non-invasive, cognitive interventions. This has implications for a novel avenue of preventative treatment development, much-needed as a crisis intervention for the aftermath of traumatic events.

TETRIS GAME TAKES AWAY PAIN

This is actually my very own scientific discovery, made about 15 years ago when I herniated the L4-L5 disc in my back for about the 5th time. (I was a capital G Gardener back then)

I was in excruciating pain for months and one day while lying immobile on the couch just dying from the endless pain, I noticed that the4 kids gameboy had been abandoned, just like me; left to fall into the crevices of the couch with all the other stuff that no longer served its' purpose. The gameboy had been usurped by gameboy advance and I had been replaced by my very busy husband.

The kids had shown me how to play Tetris one day, when I thad ried to appear interested in their video game world of tiny screens with tiny insect like characters running around making tiny, yet annoying noises. I just did NOT get what could be SO captivating on such a tiny screen.

That day, lying on the couch unable to move and going out of my mind with pain, worry and boredom, I found Tetris. I was almost immediately captivated by the 4 square cubic shapes tumbling from the tiny sky of the tiny Tetris world. I'm a bit of a math and problem solving nut so I guess I got hooked on that. I'm not sure how long I played for that first time, but when I stopped, I realized that the pain in my low back was GONE! I t hadn't hurt for whatever length of time I was zoned in on Tetris and even when I stopped playing, the pain was still gone.

It returned shortly, but a new opening in my mind had appeared. The pain was in my back, but the place where I felt it was my brain. When my brain could be otherwise engaged, the pain just could not be felt. It reminded of the old horse veterinarian twitch trick for performing surgical procedures on the back end of our horse. The vet had a short stout stick, called a twitch, with a small loop of 1/2 inch rope on one end, which he circled around the soft part of the horses' nose and then twisted it tightly. It hurt the horses' tender nose a little, but while the nose hurt, the other end of the horse could not communicate with the horses' brain that it hurt more! Very interesting!

Tetris is not painful like the twitch on the horses' nose, but it still occupies that part of the brain that acknowledges pain. As long as I was playing Tetris, I did not experience the pain at all.

Over the months that it took to recover from the herniated disc, I became a champion Tetris player. My world of disability had caused me to enter into the world of Tetris where I could spend hours free of the pain. Sometimes, when I was getting back to my work load, I would rush to my Gameboy at the end of my painful day, in a huge hurry to stop the pain.

When I one day managed to break the 100,00 point level of the game, I was secretly thrilled with the tiny rocket ship that blasted off on the Tetris screen as a reward for my skill. And then, when I reached the next highest level and the tiny rocket ship was 10 X the size of the 100,00 point one, I actually jumped up and yelled right out loud. No wonder the kids were so engaged in the video game world; if these little block shapes falling into place could be this captivating, imagine what the big screen, full colour, intense action games could do.

These days, we all have a nice big screen to escape into and we use them to escape all kinds of discomfort besides pain. I often wonder how many people are lying on a couch somewhere in excruciating pain, unable to escape it. I hope they somehow hear about this and get themselves a little Nintendo DS, a PSP or even an old gameboy with a TETRIS GAME in it.

SHOP FOR TETRIS?... GO