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A game of Tetris could be used to block PTSD flashbacks, even after memories of the trauma have been consolidated.

The claim is the result of an experimental trial that saw "intrusive memories... virtually abolished by playing the computer game Tetris", when the memories in question were reactivated in subjects the day after exposure.


That 24-hour timeframe is key. Although there are many avenues for combatting PTSD in the months after the event, the multidisciplinary team from the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the Karolinska Institutet points out that "effective mental-health interventions soon after trauma are lacking" -- a huge problem, considering "most people will experience a traumatic event during their life". "Disaster-response aid can be mobilised 24 to 48 hours after an event, but within the first 6 hours, emotional memories are already consolidated and change resistant," reads the paper. "Procedures that could alter a consolidated trauma memory are critical for reducing post-traumatic symptoms. It is time to profit from advances in the science of memory to devise innovative psychological treatments."

Those recent advances refer to studies carried out into memory reconsolidation, whereby a targeted memory -- if it can be reprised -- becomes malleable. At this point, different interventions can be trialled to either weaken or strengthen that memory. This has been done with drugs, to varying degrees of success. But the team behind the Tetris report, published in Psychological Science, wanted to explore the benefits of less intrusive cognitive task-led interventions. Specifically, based on what they already knew from prior experiments, they wanted to use a visuospatial task that would compete with working memory and "interfere with the reconsolidation of intrusive memories". Tetris came to mind, of course, being the most all-consuming, compelling visuospatial task out there.

The team had already proven its worth, having shown in a prior study that playing Tetris within four hours of trauma reduced the frequency of future flashbacks. This is of course not a practical approach to combatting PTSD, however. Combatting those future flashbacks tends not to be a priority in the aftermath of a trauma, and once the six-hour window has passed the memories are consolidated -- to a greater degree after a night's sleep. We need an approach that can work after this period.


In the latest experiment, 52 people were asked to watch a 12-minute film showing traumatic scenes, including car accidents and drownings. After ensuring the memories were consolidated, the team asked the subjects to return the next day and they were shown stills from the same films. All 52 participants were then allowed a ten-minute break where music was played. Then, half the group were asked to sit quietly for 12 minutes, while the other half played Tetris for the same period. All participants had already been asked to keep a diary related to the traumatic memories -- they were asked to keep this up for a further week.

Looking at those diary logs and a PTSD questionnaire, the team saw all participants reported similar flashback frequencies in the 24 hours after watching the film. In that week after the intervention, though, those that had had a game of Tetris for that 12-minute period experienced an astonishing 51 percent fewer flashbacks and scored far lower on the PTSD questionnaire.

The study is, the authors claim, the first to investigate this kind of cognitive intervention for reducing PTSD flashbacks. There's obviously plenty more work to be done to find out if this kind of therapy can really be effective in real world scenarios. But perhaps equally intriguingly, the authors sign off their paper with the hanging question: "Conversely, could computer gaming be affecting intrusions of everyday events?" Could casual gaming be impacting our day-to-day consolidation of memories? Anyone who's played a lengthy stint of Tetris and then seen geometric blocks everywhere, ready to be toyed with, wherever they go in the streets, might agree.