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IS PLAYING TETRIS THE PRESCRIPTION FOR
PTSD? -- The
Tetris experiment uses the game as a means to "jam"
the mental process of recording frightening events.
For more about veterans and PTSD, use the VA Watchdog
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Story here...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.co
m/booster_shots/2009/01/playing-tetris.html
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-------------------------
Playing Tetris: prescription
for traumatic memories?
Tetris Aficionados of the computer-based game Tetris describe the
manipulation of its geometric shapes as mind-bending, time-expending and
utterly absorbing. But an innoculation against the mental anguish of war
memories? Who'd have guessed it?
A study published in the latest issue of the online journal PLoS One found
that research subjects who played Tetris in the immediate
 wake
of witnessing a traumatic event were less likely than those who do not
play Tetris to experience disturbing, intrusive memories of the horror.
Such distressing flashbacks to horror are a key symptom of post-traumatic
stress disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis that as many as 1 in 5 U.S.
service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving. Those
PTSD victims are expected to overwhelm the resources of the Veterans
Affairs and civilian psychiatric establishment.
As a result, effective treatments for the disorder -- or better yet,
preventive measures -- are in high demand. The authors of the study
suggest that Tetris play represents a "cognitive vaccine" approach to
PTSD. It is one of many efforts to test the effectiveness of blocking the
process by which emotionally laden memories are preserved and stored in
the brain.
Other such efforts have focused on drugs -- including beta-blockers, which
slow the heart rate and in one study, disrupted the formation of painful
memories when taken in the immediate aftermath of trauma. The anesthesia
drug propofol, sometimes referred to as "milk of amnesia," has been tested
as a PTSD-preventive for patients who were anesthetized but were
frighteningly conscious during surgery. Some therapists have championed
the use of MDMA, the party drug better known as Ecstasy, as a means of
relieving PTSD symptoms by facilitating a patient's guided return to a
traumatic event.
In the study, conducted at Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry,
40 subjects between age 18 and 47 viewed a 12-minute film that included
horrific images of physical injury and death. After a half-hour break
during which subjects were kept busy filling out forms, 20 of the subjects
were set before a computer screen to play Tetris for 10 minutes. The
remaining 20 sat quietly with nothing to do.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Tetris players reported fewer flashbacks to
the gruesome scenes of injury and death than did the do-nothings in the
10-minute period of play. But in a daily
 diary
all subjects kept for a week after the viewing of the film, Tetris players
reported fewer flashbacks to the film's upsetting content than did the
group left to entertain themselves in the movie's wake. Tested for PTSD
symptoms in the lab a week after watching the film, the Tetris players
showed significantly less evidence of trauma than did the control group.
And yet, the Tetris-playing group's memories of the events in the film
were perfectly intact, the researchers found. Apparently, they had simply
lost their power to horrify.
What saved the Tetris-playing group from post-traumatic stress symptoms
was the limited powers of their brains to perform two similar operations
at the same time -- to multitask -- the authors wrote. In the hours after
witnessing a horrifying scene, a person would normally commit two
different versions of the scene to memory -- the sensory-perceptual
processing version, which records the upsetting sights, sounds and
physical sensation of the event -- and the verbal-conceptual version of
the event, in which the brain renders the events witnessed into a more
dispassionate narrative.
In the crucial period following the film, the Tetris players were too
engaged in the game-playing task -- which taxed their visual and spatial
processing skills -- to consolidate the upsetting memory of the film's
sights and sounds and their own physiological distress upon watching them,
the authors conjectured. These memories "provide ... the foundation for
the flashback images" common to PTSD sufferers. Without this stored
version of events, the Tetris players had only their more dispassionate
narrative memory of the film to draw upon.
As PTSD diagnoses have grown among troops, computer and video games have
been explored as a means of desensitizing soldiers to frightening
memories. But the Tetris experiment takes the use of video and computer
games in a very different direction -- as a means to "jam" the mental
process of recording frightening events. The authors say this approach
offers "an ethical, safe and economical way" to prevent those subjected to
horrors from the further pain of having to relive them.
-- Melissa Healy
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posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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