It's a chilly Tuesday morning and you're stuck waiting for the walk signal. You're running late for your 8:15 Cognitive Neuroscience class, but unfortunately the light it taking its sweet time about changing. You look both ways and don't see any cars coming from either direction, so you quickly hustle across the street. Suddenly there's a loud screech, a few even louder honks, and a flash of bright yellow; a step or two more and you would have been completely bowled over by a speeding taxi. On Thursday you are sure to wait for the signal, but as you take your first step onto the crosswalk your heart speeds up, your palms grow sweaty, and you can hear the blaring of a car horn in your mind. Your reaction is so bad that you have to completely change your route to class for the rest of the semester.
Your decision to jaywalk the first time was life threatening, but by all accounts you should have been safe the second time-- so why did you experience a similar reaction? In The Ravenous Brain, Daniel Bor contributes this phenomenon to our propensity towards "chunking". What was helpful in organizing our environment before now becomes maladaptive in the hands of an overactive amygdala. Our memories become linked together certain emotions, so that recollection of that memory can trigger the linked emotion. Similar experiences are "chunked" together so that sometimes, when our previous memories re similar enough to current stimuli, the linked emotion can be triggered. Usually our prefrontal parietal cortex can override this emotional response with rationality, but when the trigger exceeds appropriate activation, the amygdala can be a hard beast to tame. This leads to anxiety and stress even in safe, non life-threatening situations. New memories are linked with the trigger emotion, old memories are reinforced, and it's all packaged up together in our brain, waiting for the next similar experience so that it can start the cycle all over again.
We approached the subject of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in class, which is caused by this maladaptive chunking-- and possible ways of getting around the mechanism of linking the memories and emotions of negative experiences. Drugs could work, but they present a number ethical and logistical problems. So how about Tetris? That's right, as in match-all-the-blocks-together Tetris. A new study suggests that playing a game of Tetris for 10 minutes after a traumatic within 6 hours of experiencing the event helps reduce the number of flashbacks, as well as the potential clinical symptoms associated with flashbacks (read as: stress).
So, how does it work? The Tetris hypothesis is built on two theories: first, that memories of trauma are based on sensory-perceptual images with visual and spatial components, and second, that visual cognitive tasks compete for resources with these images. So playing Tetris interferes with the encoding of the traumatic memories. It doesn't erase them completely (so that voluntary memory remains and you can remember that last time you tried to jaywalk, you nearly got killed), but weaker recollection of the memories leads to a less active amygdala, and less stress.
More research needs to be conducted into investigating the possibility of visual cognitive tasks like Tetris as a means of easy, non-invasive stress moderators, but the implications could be very promising, especially given the fast-paced, stressful modern world that we all live in. And honestly, who hasn't felt totally zen after playing a few minutes of Tetris?
(( The article for the research referenced in this post can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153 ))
Considering how stressed out I usually get while playing video games, even Tetris, I would never expect them to help lower stress in day to day situations. However, after reading about the mechanism by which Tetris can help post traumatic stress reactions, it makes a lot of sense. The way that concentrating on playing the game interrupts encoding of memory reminds me of our class discussions about potential experimentation with interrupting encoding for memories of war in soldiers. Although Tetris may not be quite as strong an interruption as the Pentagon would like, the concept as a whole is likely appealing to them. If the military could design the perfect "interrupter" game or task (and let's be honest, they've almost certainly already thought of this) they could control their soldiers' post traumatic stress response without destroying useful voluntary memory, as Leanne mentions in her anecdote about crossing the street. While the ethics are always cloudy, this would certainly be more desirable than a more extreme method. Will we see this fun game that is useful for moderating the stresses of everyday life tweaked to be applied to the more extreme situations of stressful wartime memories? Maybe.
ReplyDeleteDoes this work for other kinds of video games? Minecraft for instance is very popular in youth now a days and while more complex it still uses "sensory-perceptual images with visual and spatial components" as you explore the world and solve puzzles I wouldn't be surprised if these children become completely absorbed into the game and as a result forget that they almost got hit by a car that day. IRB approval aside I think it would be interesting to see how children cope with traumatic experiences after playing minecraft. What they find in terms of intensity and difficulty of task being correlated with flashback frequency could be very insightful.
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