A new study says playing games that require visual analysis can help reduce the brain’s ability to access traumatic events. This can help trauma victims or people with post-traumatic stress disorder through painful memories and block out flashbacks.
Researchers based at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined subjects who had seen traumatic events, including fatal accidents, on video. They asked them to play Tetris as a way to clear their minds of the traumatic images, according to ABC News.
The goal was to lessen the “intrusive” memories, which can include uncontrollable flashbacks, associated with the trauma. Participants who played Tetris within 24 hours of seeing the disturbing, traumatic video had fewer “intrusive” memories in the days after they saw the video.
Since the brain focuses on both the memory of the film and the visual game, researchers theorized that playing Tetris reconstructed the visual memory.
“From Marcel Proust’s example of sudden childhood recall after eating a madeleine to flashbacks depicted in war films, involuntary memory has long held fascination,” researchers said. The study blends the work of animal and human neuroscience and clinical areas of public concern, researchers explained.
Emily Holmes of the U.K.’s Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit added that this study is the first that they know of that demonstrates a “simple cognitive blockade” reducing intrusive memories “of experimental trauma via memory reconsolidation processes.”
The lead author of the study stated that intrusive memories are the “hallmark of PTSD,” so the study’s results are “particularly interesting.”
The authors admitted that the study was obviously limited since experiencing something and watching something on a TV is completely different. However, they think that the experiments can be replicated in the future to help people who have had traumatic experiences.
Massachusetts-based psychologist and crisis intervention specialist Jaine Darwin also noted that the study was interesting but expressed skepticism. She compared the experiment to that of watching a horror film. She said that a person can watch a scary movie and be scared for days, but the person would still lack the “tactile association” of the event.
