In pursuit to help trauma victims, researchers at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, progress a study to find out if playing the 90s Tetris game, immediately after an upsetting event, can lower the number of flashbacks. They believe the effect is quiet powerful, and it can help even after a day of the event, when the memories should well-established and harder to shift.
Their goal was to reduce disturbing memories that is linked with the trauma as these memories can generate paralyzing flashbacks that cannot be controlled. Traumatic memories like, a car crash, or being the victim of a violent crime can be stuck to the mind within hours.
52 participants, aged between 18 and 51, were asked to watch a 12-minute traumatic film featuring 11 scenes involving death, by the scientists from the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. Scenes involved; a young girl hit by a car with blood dripping out of her ear, a man drowning in the sea, and a van hitting a teenage boy while he was using his mobile phone crossing the road
The participants were all instructed to write a diary for the following week recording how often they suffered from upsetting memories. These memories seem to form on their own as a flashback, rather than memories that the participants actively recalled.
The group returned to the lab, and was split into two, the day after watching the videos. The ‘reactivation-plus-Tetris group’ was given a memory-reactivation task in which they were shown 11 film stills followed by a filler task for 10 minutes in which they were asked to rate classical music. After that, they played Tetris for 12 minutes.
The other group, which was the control group, was not given the memory-reactivation task and did not play Tetris. They were instead led to a 10-minute filler task before being given a 12-minute break.
Participants were required to fill in a questionnaire, and complete memory tests to confirm how much they remembered of the film’s content, when they returned to the lab on day seven. The Tetris playing group had 51 percent fewer intrusive recollections compared to the control group. The Tetris players also scored lower on the intrusive memory section of a questionnaire used to diagnose PTSD.
The researchers pointed out that the memories were virtually eradicated by playing the computer game Tetris following a memory-reactivation task 24 hours after initial exposure to experimental trauma. Jaine Darwin, a Massachusetts-based psychologist who specializes in trauma and crisis intervention, believes the study to be interesting but, she doubts that it could be applied to actual trauma victims.
