My friend Todd is a pho­tog­ra­pher in Bris­bane. He has a pho­to­blog. It’s cool. It fea­tures mostly wed­dings but his reg­u­lar “Fri­days on Foot” posts are crackers.

Here’s one that has had a lit­tle bit of clever post pro­duc­tion done.

The coolest thing about his post was the link to the Tetris Effect on Wikipedia.

Peo­ple who play Tetris for a pro­longed amount of time may then find them­selves think­ing about ways dif­fer­ent shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a super­mar­ket shelf or the build­ings on a street.[1] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit. They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hal­lu­ci­na­tion. They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drift­ing off to sleep. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hyp­n­a­gogic imagery.

Izaac and I have dis­cussed our Tetris effect prob­lem. I had no idea it was wide­spread enough to earn its own article.

Stick­gold et al. (2000) have pro­posed that Tetris imagery is a sep­a­rate form of mem­ory, likely related to pro­ce­dural mem­ory. This is from their research in which they showed that peo­ple with antero­grade amne­sia, unable to form new declar­a­tive mem­o­ries, reported dream­ing of falling shapes after play­ing Tetris dur­ing the day, despite not being able to remem­ber play­ing the game at all.[2] A recent Oxford study (2009) sug­gests Tetris-like video games may help pre­vent the devel­op­ment of trau­matic mem­o­ries. If the video game treat­ment is played soon after the trau­matic event, the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with Tetris shapes is enough to pre­vent the men­tal recita­tion of trau­matic images, thereby decreas­ing the accu­racy, inten­sity, and fre­quency of trau­matic reminders. “We sug­gest it specif­i­cally inter­feres with the way sen­sory mem­o­ries are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the num­ber of flash­backs that are expe­ri­enced after­wards.”, sum­ma­rizes Dr. Emily Holmes, who led the study.

I had read about (and posted) that study about Tetris and trauma. But this has opened up a whole new world of nor­mal­ness to me.

Do you suf­fer from the Tetris Effect?

I also used to suf­fer from the Gold­en­Eye effect — I’d be pop­ping bad guys in my dreams after extended ses­sions on the Nintendo64.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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