Stress exposure could be a significant problem for folk. Exposure to violence thru war, terrorism, rape or domestic violence can leave your psyche damaged and haunt you for years ahead. The prevalence of world conflict and our cognizance of it due to instant media access are causing therapists to seek excellent remedies for stress exposure to attenuate the harm.
a recent study looked at the probability of reducing post-traumatic stress disorder using the computer game, Tetris. While this might seem wonderful at first sight, we’ll take a better look at their reasoning and their findings.
traumatic experiences are often remembered in some visual and spatial way. The images of the event are reconstructed later by your brain as ‘flashbacks’ that may be triggered by some similar environment, a noise, a smell, or occasionally nothing in any way. However [*COMMA] these pictures aren’t bought by your brain right away. There appears to be about a 6 hour time window following the event when the memories are consolidated and stored.
This is the first fact that researchers and clinicians can possibly exploit. If you can somehow disrupt those memories from forming in the 6 hour window, you might be ready to moisten any long term harm, or even forestall it. In fact, strategies have been used to do this, regularly using drugs that temporarily interfere with the brain’s chemistry and prevent memory formation.
The difficulty with this approach is that it can make all memories of the event unreliable. Sometimes having such memory can be of use. First, it can help forestall exposure to such events in the future. Second, you may need those memories to aid the prosecution in a criminal case. So what other approaches could researchers try?
Enter Free Tetris. Tetris is a visual-spatial game so uses the some of the same brain resources used to encode memories of a dire event. This was the reasoning behind trying to use it as way to meddle with traumatic memory consolidation. So did it work?
researchers took 2 groups of healthy adults and showed them real videos of violence and death, which is the standard mental tool to mimic exposure to injury. After the videos, 1/2 of the participants did nothing, while the other half played Tetris for 10 mins. Then across the next week participants were asked to maintain a tally of any flashbacks they’d relating to the violent and annoying video exposure.
The Tetris player group had less than 1/2 of the flashbacks of the non-player group, suggesting that playing Tetris meddled with their capability to consolidate the traumatic memories. But here’s the cool part. There was no difference between the groups in their capability to remember things about the videos. This suggests that the emotional impact of the experience was dampened, but the power to recall facts about the experience wasn’t.
Now, this study isn’t claiming that they can cure post-traumatic stress disorder by having infantrymen or victims of violence play a little Tetris after a traumatic experience, while it may help a little bit. However [*COMMA] the study opens up the ability to develop new methods for helping victims of violence better cope in their future.
Current techniques, including debriefing, can sometimes amplify the experience and really make it even worse, so psychologists are on the lookout for new tools and this research may help lead to them.
In the short term, perhaps you should encourage your children to wind down with a little Tetris after a hard battle playing Call of Duty.
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