April 15, 2010 • 19 mins
Everyone knows that video games are entertaining -- but could they have therapeutical value? Tune in and learn how Tetris may help victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice Madamok, the science editor at how stuff
works dot com. This is Robert Lamb, science writer at
how stuff works dot com. Today we're talking about post
(00:24):
traumatic stress disorder and Tetris. Yeah, this is one of
the maybe the only video game that me and you
can actually uh bond over. Yeah. I'm not much of
a gamer, but you are. Well, I'm not as certainly
not as much as a lot of people I know,
but I I enjoy playing uh, you know, stuff like
Fallout three, things of that nature. You know, Generally, I'm
more like I'll play a few games a year and
(00:44):
getting really get into maybe one or two games a year.
So you have played oh yeah yeah, back in uh
I guess JR. I think, Yeah, I headed on like
the original in ne e s um and like my
whole family would play it and then we would just
walk around the house just seeing blocks move around in
our head dream and at night um and then I
had it for I think I had it for PS
two as well, but I never got into didn't really
(01:07):
get into it as much for that because you know
it's not a I mean, it's an awesome game, but
there's only so much you can do to it to
revamp it, you know, your blocks falling down, reorganizing. I
went to neat Little Rose. Now there was a really
cool money Python version of it um that came out
for PC, where you know, it's like to bring out
your dad. So each block was a like a dead
(01:29):
medieval peasant bent into a certain shape and they would
fall down into this big mass grave and you would
move them around and then maybe squishy noises when they
lock into place. That was pretty awesome. I played a
ton of Touchris my senior year of college when my
thesis was do Yeah. I just remember thinking about the
thesis and then thinking, well, I think I'm just going
to play a little Tetris instead on Caroline, my roommates computer,
(01:51):
and I played a lot of chats, so much so
that I actually jumped about it. Wow, were you afraid
that you would turn in your paper and you look,
got that done, and you get it back and be
an f and you look at it. All you did
was just draw Tetris blocks for like thirty pages. Yeah, Yeah,
I wasn't thinking too much about my academics data at
that point in my life, although I should have been so.
Tetris has a use outside of the gaming world and
(02:13):
keeping us occupied. Um. A bunch of Oxford researchers have
postulated that Tetris might be useful for treating post traumatic
stress disorder. Yeah, this is pretty exciting. UM. Post traumatic
stress disorder, for those of you who don't know, is
a disorder that arises in the wake of a traumatic experience.
This could be um, you know, a combat situation in
(02:36):
a war. It could be UM experiencing some sort of violence.
It could be being in a car wreck. It could
be even like just being being diagnosed with a really
severe illness, the life threatening illness. Yeah, and children can
experience PTSD as well. And you can also get it
from just seeing like if you just see it a
(02:57):
traumatic car accident, you know, or or think about something
like not eleven you I mean, you didn't you saw it, right,
and a lot of or maybe you were acting in
a rescue capacity to post not eleven. But even if
you just saw it, you know on the TV. I
mean you're just you know, heard about it, you can
still you know, develop the same disorder. And if you
develop PTSD, your response to the event. Um. According to
(03:18):
the Mental Health Bible, the d S M four is
going to involve some sort of intense sphere or helplessness
or horror. And in children this tends to manifest itself
and disorganized or agitated behavior. And the characteristic symptoms of
PTSD are are probably ones which with which are familiar. Um.
The hallmark one being flashbacks. Right, yeah, this is the
(03:41):
you know we've seen everybody's seen this in a movie
or something. You know, you'll have like the great the
classic example as you have like a Vietnam bed, or
maybe he's in a racky or that, you know, Afghanistan
that and uh, you know it comes back home. He's
in like just a normal grocery store ride. He's going
around his business. He's he's picking out the groceries, and
then but he drops a can of soup. Here's a
(04:01):
loud noise, and then he's he's suddenly he's back in
the war again. You know, he's he's falling to the
ground and thinks, you know, thinks he has to grab
his gun. In that kind of a situation, a flashback
is a seriously intense experience. I mean, you're there, you're
reliving the moment. It's not just like, oh, hey, man,
I had a flashback when I saw that guy I
told her Monday in the nineteen eighties. I mean a
flashback in this sense, in the psychological sense, it is
(04:24):
a dissociative state. You're you're not present, it's fully sensory,
it's you're gone. Yeah. So if you have these symptoms,
they have to be present for more than a month
for you in order for you to be diagnosed with PTSD. Yeah,
it's it's not the same if you say, like, you
see a pretty shocking horror movie and you're like in
you know, for a week, you're like, man, that was
(04:44):
you know, to keep the scene keeps running over in
your mind because I've had that happened before. Yeah, me too.
But thankfully it goes away and you forget that you
ever saw that movie. Yeah, the CDC actually calls that
would probably call that a stress reaction. Um, And it's
just something immediately following a traumatic event. But this will
go We'll go away within ten days, um. Whereas you
just watch Total Recall again and it happens all over right.
(05:06):
So PTSD tends to stick around longer for that, and
it impairs your life. It impairs your ability to your job,
your ability to interact with family and friends. And of
course this has been in the news a lot less
several years because we've uh in the States, we've been
a kind of at war for the last several years,
so we have a lot of troops going overseas, encountering violent,
traumatic situations and then coming back home and trying to
(05:28):
readjust mental health is becoming more and more of a priority,
so we're trying to tackle these problems and treat them clinically. So,
according to the Associated Press, there's a fifty million dollar
five year study that the Army is conducting, and the
Army is doing this in concert with the National Institute
of Mental Health, and the idea is to give commanders
in the army a better idea of the troops mental health.
(05:50):
And then there's the other fact that you know, suicide
or you know, returning that who who winds up killing
himself or killing somebody else is gonna draw attentions, to
draw our attention to the problem, is going to grab
media headlines. Yeah, it's not the kind of thing you
want in a recruitment brochure, you know, join the army
be screwed up for life. So you should emphasize that
prevalence rates of PTSD among returning service members, you know,
(06:13):
really around the gamut um. I saw one fact sheet
that estimated, you know, that saw prevalence rates of as
low as one percent among returning service members and as
high as six And there's also the problem of PTSD
kind of being a big tent to you know, to
fall under, to diagnose, doesn't manifest itself the same way
with every patient, greg right, And there's you know, there's
(06:36):
such a number of reactions that can cause somebody to
develop PTSD, So it's it's just a very sort of
wide disorder at this point. The good news is that
we actually have some some good treatments for full blown PTSD.
One thing to keep in mind with post traumatic stress
disorder is that it's kind of like getting a stain
on a garment, all right, Like you're say, you're at
(06:57):
a party, right and you're drinking great do like we
all drink at parties, and you spill it on like
your white blouse or whatever. Are you wearing a white
blouse a party? Yeah? I frequently got a grape juice
drinking parties, and I foolishly always wear my best white blouse.
But but yeah, so like you, you spill grape juice
on this this garment, right. Um. Most of our treatment
(07:18):
methods that we have are aimed at like the next day,
we're like, oh, I got grape juice on my blouse.
It's that staining really seeped in. What can I do
to try and get it out? As opposed to Oops,
I just felt grape juice on my my blouse. Who
has some soda water? Who has something? What can I
do to sub this up before it spreads? Right? So,
to continue Robert's sort of autoology, that's what I'm here for.
(07:40):
To let's talk about the scenario in which the grape
juice has already you know, stained your shirt and you're
you know, it's full blown. This is when we're looking
to treat full blown PTSD. Uh. Yeah. One method we have,
and this is the most the most validated, is a
cognitive behavioral therapy with some sort of exposure con opponent.
(08:00):
And this can fall under under This can fall under
two categories, either like real life exposure or imaginary um
like say you get like one example of real Well, yeah,
one example of like a real life situation would be, uh,
there's a recent episode of This American Life. But a
guy who came back from uh from Iraq. Uh, he's
(08:21):
of that he's going to college, right, Yeah, he's us
that going to college. And he had just become he
had just had this post traumatic stress reaction to being
around anybody who looked like they might be in a
rocky um. And of course he's at a college, so
there are there are a number of students that are
either you know, of a Rocky descent or Middle Eastern descent.
And he would see these these people and he would
(08:43):
just start freaking out a little, you know, he starts
shivering and thinking about ways to like eliminate them. Um,
he chose, and I think it should be stressing. This
was against the advice of his u of the of
the the guy treating him at the time was that
he was going to join the college's Muslim students. So
the issue. Yeah, so that's very much a real life
(09:03):
um exposure, you know, and and a very drastic one.
And the unconventional yes, and unconventional and it based on
the story, Um, it turned out rather well for him
he was able to really grow from that. UM. An
example of a of an imaginary one would be if
your therapist like brings you through like a thought exercise,
you know, like talks you through and imagined scenario or UM,
(09:28):
you were to engage in some sort of like a
virtual reality treatment where UH, you know, you say you're
you're you have post traumatic stress from a combat situation,
if you played a video game that was tailored to
UH to simulate that that same situation over again. So
this is this is a pretty good way to treat
PTSD for for people out there affected by And then
(09:50):
there's another one, and this one may sound a little fringy,
but it's also a gained pretty widespread acceptance and it's
called e M d R and the E M d
R stands for movement Desensitization reprocessing UM. The originator was
somebody by the name of Francine Shapira back in So
this is a relatively new therapy and it's similar to
(10:13):
the cognitive behavioral therapy and that you might find yourself
talking through your traumatic event, but the differences while you're
talking through this traumatic event with a therapist who's qualified
in this particular kind of treatment e M d R.
Your eye is going to be moving bilaterally, it's gonna
be tracking this light, or you may find yourself hearing
audio tones or in fact feeling something like a kind
(10:36):
of tapping sensation on your palm. So you're feeling all
these external stimuli in addition to you know, talking about
the traumatic event with your therapist. And the idea behind
this kind of therapy is that E M d R
stimulates the brain's hemispheres and it helps your nervous system
reorganize those memories. Um, you're probably not going to just
do it in one session though, it's more more of
(10:58):
a process. Like I'm going to go in for M
d R session today. It's really interesting to watch. I
would think it would be distracting it It actually sounds
a little bit like a video game. It does. Yeah,
watching lights moved back and forth, something sort of vibrating
in your hands. Maybe, I mean that's yeah. So, like
Robert was saying, these are treatments that we'd use on
somebody who's already experiencing the symptoms of full blown PTSD,
(11:22):
but there are early interventions are sort of quick ways
to prevent um PTSD from developing or at least reduced
the incidence of flashbacks. Yeah, these are the this is
the sopping of the grape juice before it spreads. Messing
method um and one of those is to use morphineum,
which has been used in combat with combat casualties. Uh
(11:44):
you know some situations where uh, you know, you're having
to to treat some some injury as well. Yeah, there's
a big study on it just recently in two thousand
ten in the New England Journal of Medicine. And basically
you had a bunch of guys from the Navy reporting
that prompt treatment with morphine cut in half the chances
that troops would developed symptoms of PTSD later on. Of course,
(12:06):
it also cuts into your ability to remember what exactly
happened in some cases, which can be detrimental if you say,
need to testify in court about what happened. So that's
that's one big down. So and the other, of course
being that they're giving you morphine. So you know, there
are plenty of tales of people coming back from you know,
from from from the war and they're hooked on morphine.
(12:28):
You know, there's a whole song u Samstone by I
think John Prime sing it there's a hole in Daddy's
arm where all the money goes, et cetera. It's like
it really sad. It's about a guy who comes back
a little kid. It's like a song, I mean, not
a nice song, but it's really it's a good song,
but it's like the saddest song ever because it's about
the guy who comes back from the war hooked on
(12:48):
morphine and just slowly just kind of goes crazy and
his kid and the kid has to watch him lose
his mind. But you have a good voice. Well yeah,
well anyway, it's a that song. Look it up. I'm
sure it's on like YouTube or something. So that's kind
of the morphine route and the downfalls being right impaired
memory stuff like that. You know what about this tetris
(13:10):
we've been talking, there's not a song about like people
coming back from the war hooked on tetris. So you
know this is there's some possibility here, but how does
it work? Right? So this comes to us courtesy of
a study published in January two thousand nine in a
p L O S one the Journal. So what the
University of Oxford researchers did was they recruited forty participants,
and they split them into two groups of twenty, and
(13:32):
all of the participants watched this twelve minute pretty violent
film pass of death kind of deal, right, right, pretty
disturbing scenes of injury and death. And then everyone, all
forty participants sat idle for this thirty minute structured break.
You know, maybe they filled out some paperwork, um, and
they were actually shown short clips of the film just
to reinforce what they'd seen, just to drive it home.
(13:54):
It's terrible. I can't imagine participating an experiment like that.
I remember all sorts of bad stuff if that is
seen in movies for a long, long, long, long time.
So I don't think this would be the experiment for me.
So after this thirty minutes was up, um, twenty of
the people sat idle. You know, they just kind of
sat there and ponder that really terrible movie or whatever
(14:14):
they pondered. But I'm imagining they probably pondered this movie,
and the other twenty played Tetris for ten minutes. Which
group I would want to be a part of? I
absolutely know which group I would want to be part
of Tetris? So why did they suggest Tetris? What's the
deal behind playing Tetris after you see something traumatic, why
would they possibly do that? Well, it comes back to
the It comes back to what we were talking about
(14:36):
earlier about how you play a bunch of Tetris and
you start seeing the see the blocks when you're walking around,
or you used dream the blocks falling through space. And
that's because Tetris has been demonstrated to be a visio
videospatial task. It draws on mental rotation and the type
of processing we recruit when forming mental images. That's key
(14:58):
because there are two ways that we form memories. Okay,
There's the sensory perceptual processing of the trauma, all right,
These are the sights and sounds, experience steering, you know,
um in this violent encounter, this car wreck, etcetera. Okay,
and then there's the verbal or conceptual processing where you
make sense of it, you turn it into a story,
(15:19):
my story. So it's not just like trash black and blam.
It's like, oh my god, I was in a car wreck.
I could have died. That guy totally wasn't thinking about
what he was doing, and like that's where you form
that story, all right, and this is happening immediately after
the traumatic event. Right, But what if something we're competing
for that memory making function. What if you were saying
(15:39):
playing techs, which is also competing for those visual spatial resources,
and your brain can only execute on so many things
at once. All Right, here's an experiment for everybody. If
you want to test this tonight, when that special somebody
in your life is is telling you about their day,
try playing tetris at the same time and see what happens. Um,
you're gonna proba. We find that it's really hard to
(16:01):
pay attention and or remember what they're telling you. Yeah,
So that's it on a basic level, is that your
your brain has a limited capacity to make memories of
this traumatic event um and or play tetris. And if
you're actively playing tetris, chances are it's going to devote
its resources to Tetris. And this is what the researchers
hypothesized and in fact was proven true among the forty participants.
(16:24):
So what the researchers found was that um, after watching
this film, they tracked the participants for a week and
in the group that played tetris UM there was a
reduced incidence of flashbacks, while in the group that sat quietly,
you know, pondering that horrible film. They had a higher
number of flashbacks that they experienced. Wow, so it sounds
(16:44):
like this could really be a tool in the future
for immediately treating people who are in a traumatic situation.
Ambulance arrives on the scene, guys a little freaked out,
get him a game boy Tetris. Well, it's interesting you
say that because the thirty minute time period. You probably wonder, like,
why did they choose thirty minutes for you know, to
play Tutris, Because the researchers figured out that the average
(17:06):
time spent waiting an emergency room is in fact thirty minutes.
Really okay, so if they could get in there before,
you know, the emergency room folks, could you get to
the problem right? Or free touches for everybody in the
emergency room? Yeah, I mean I love Touchris. I used
to have it on my phone. Yeah, I'm thinking about
downloading it for for my phone. If I have a
really bad day now, I might play a game of Tetris.
So that's PTSD and Tetris, But what about other video games?
(17:28):
All right, you've read that article about you know, smokers
and oh yeah, yeah, I wrote an article for Discovery
News a few months back, and it was about an
interesting study out of Canada, um where um, you know,
like we're saying earlier, one way to to get over
your your stress situation, um um from a combat environment
(17:49):
is to put you in a video game to put
you in a combat situation. Well, these guys basically took
the same type of video game, like a first person shooter,
except instead of a gun, you have a little hand.
Instead of enemies, you have floating cigarettes. And so they
had a whole bunch of fairly heavy smokers. Uh. And
they did the same deal where they had one group
there was control, one group that was the experimental, and
(18:10):
they all came in and they did a bunch of like,
let's talk about our addiction kind of thing, and you know,
we're gonna rally together to beat our addictions. And then
one group when and did one thing and I think
played some sort of a game that was unrelated, and
then the other group Monopoly, and then they ended up
killing each other because it's Monopoly and it's a horrible
frustrating game. But now and then the other group and
they weren't smoking, so they're even more irritable but now.
(18:31):
But then the other the other group, the experimental group,
they would play this game where the hand crushes the cigarettes,
and they found that the people who the group, that
the group that crushed the cigarettes had more long term
success overcoming and our addiction than the other group. But
the interesting part is that some of the people who
played the video game UM, they actually visualized themselves collecting
(18:53):
or recording the cigarettes and didn't work on those guys. Yeah,
they were just trying to you know, get more smokes. Yeah,
so that was a fascinating study as well. Yeah, so
we ask around some of our co workers about their
experiences with games UM having a therapeutic effect on them,
and we actually found several people. The main game people
mentioned was Tetris. So if you have any suggestions, comments, questions,
(19:16):
just shoot us an email at science stuff at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice Madamok, the science editor at how stuff
works dot com. This is Robert Lamb, science writer at
how stuff works dot com. Today we're talking about post
(00:24):
traumatic stress disorder and Tetris. Yeah, this is one of
the maybe the only video game that me and you
can actually uh bond over. Yeah. I'm not much of
a gamer, but you are. Well, I'm not as certainly
not as much as a lot of people I know,
but I I enjoy playing uh, you know, stuff like
Fallout three, things of that nature. You know, Generally, I'm
more like I'll play a few games a year and
(00:44):
getting really get into maybe one or two games a year.
So you have played oh yeah yeah, back in uh
I guess JR. I think, Yeah, I headed on like
the original in ne e s um and like my
whole family would play it and then we would just
walk around the house just seeing blocks move around in
our head dream and at night um and then I
had it for I think I had it for PS
two as well, but I never got into didn't really
(01:07):
get into it as much for that because you know
it's not a I mean, it's an awesome game, but
there's only so much you can do to it to
revamp it, you know, your blocks falling down, reorganizing. I
went to neat Little Rose. Now there was a really
cool money Python version of it um that came out
for PC, where you know, it's like to bring out
your dad. So each block was a like a dead
(01:29):
medieval peasant bent into a certain shape and they would
fall down into this big mass grave and you would
move them around and then maybe squishy noises when they
lock into place. That was pretty awesome. I played a
ton of Touchris my senior year of college when my
thesis was do Yeah. I just remember thinking about the
thesis and then thinking, well, I think I'm just going
to play a little Tetris instead on Caroline, my roommates computer,
(01:51):
and I played a lot of chats, so much so
that I actually jumped about it. Wow, were you afraid
that you would turn in your paper and you look,
got that done, and you get it back and be
an f and you look at it. All you did
was just draw Tetris blocks for like thirty pages. Yeah, Yeah,
I wasn't thinking too much about my academics data at
that point in my life, although I should have been so.
Tetris has a use outside of the gaming world and
(02:13):
keeping us occupied. Um. A bunch of Oxford researchers have
postulated that Tetris might be useful for treating post traumatic
stress disorder. Yeah, this is pretty exciting. UM. Post traumatic
stress disorder, for those of you who don't know, is
a disorder that arises in the wake of a traumatic experience.
This could be um, you know, a combat situation in
(02:36):
a war. It could be UM experiencing some sort of violence.
It could be being in a car wreck. It could
be even like just being being diagnosed with a really
severe illness, the life threatening illness. Yeah, and children can
experience PTSD as well. And you can also get it
from just seeing like if you just see it a
(02:57):
traumatic car accident, you know, or or think about something
like not eleven you I mean, you didn't you saw it, right,
and a lot of or maybe you were acting in
a rescue capacity to post not eleven. But even if
you just saw it, you know on the TV. I
mean you're just you know, heard about it, you can
still you know, develop the same disorder. And if you
develop PTSD, your response to the event. Um. According to
(03:18):
the Mental Health Bible, the d S M four is
going to involve some sort of intense sphere or helplessness
or horror. And in children this tends to manifest itself
and disorganized or agitated behavior. And the characteristic symptoms of
PTSD are are probably ones which with which are familiar. Um.
The hallmark one being flashbacks. Right, yeah, this is the
(03:41):
you know we've seen everybody's seen this in a movie
or something. You know, you'll have like the great the
classic example as you have like a Vietnam bed, or
maybe he's in a racky or that, you know, Afghanistan
that and uh, you know it comes back home. He's
in like just a normal grocery store ride. He's going
around his business. He's he's picking out the groceries, and
then but he drops a can of soup. Here's a
(04:01):
loud noise, and then he's he's suddenly he's back in
the war again. You know, he's he's falling to the
ground and thinks, you know, thinks he has to grab
his gun. In that kind of a situation, a flashback
is a seriously intense experience. I mean, you're there, you're
reliving the moment. It's not just like, oh, hey, man,
I had a flashback when I saw that guy I
told her Monday in the nineteen eighties. I mean a
flashback in this sense, in the psychological sense, it is
(04:24):
a dissociative state. You're you're not present, it's fully sensory,
it's you're gone. Yeah. So if you have these symptoms,
they have to be present for more than a month
for you in order for you to be diagnosed with PTSD. Yeah,
it's it's not the same if you say, like, you
see a pretty shocking horror movie and you're like in
you know, for a week, you're like, man, that was
(04:44):
you know, to keep the scene keeps running over in
your mind because I've had that happened before. Yeah, me too.
But thankfully it goes away and you forget that you
ever saw that movie. Yeah, the CDC actually calls that
would probably call that a stress reaction. Um, And it's
just something immediately following a traumatic event. But this will
go We'll go away within ten days, um. Whereas you
just watch Total Recall again and it happens all over right.
(05:06):
So PTSD tends to stick around longer for that, and
it impairs your life. It impairs your ability to your job,
your ability to interact with family and friends. And of
course this has been in the news a lot less
several years because we've uh in the States, we've been
a kind of at war for the last several years,
so we have a lot of troops going overseas, encountering violent,
traumatic situations and then coming back home and trying to
(05:28):
readjust mental health is becoming more and more of a priority,
so we're trying to tackle these problems and treat them clinically. So,
according to the Associated Press, there's a fifty million dollar
five year study that the Army is conducting, and the
Army is doing this in concert with the National Institute
of Mental Health, and the idea is to give commanders
in the army a better idea of the troops mental health.
(05:50):
And then there's the other fact that you know, suicide
or you know, returning that who who winds up killing
himself or killing somebody else is gonna draw attentions, to
draw our attention to the problem, is going to grab
media headlines. Yeah, it's not the kind of thing you
want in a recruitment brochure, you know, join the army
be screwed up for life. So you should emphasize that
prevalence rates of PTSD among returning service members, you know,
(06:13):
really around the gamut um. I saw one fact sheet
that estimated, you know, that saw prevalence rates of as
low as one percent among returning service members and as
high as six And there's also the problem of PTSD
kind of being a big tent to you know, to
fall under, to diagnose, doesn't manifest itself the same way
with every patient, greg right, And there's you know, there's
(06:36):
such a number of reactions that can cause somebody to
develop PTSD, So it's it's just a very sort of
wide disorder at this point. The good news is that
we actually have some some good treatments for full blown PTSD.
One thing to keep in mind with post traumatic stress
disorder is that it's kind of like getting a stain
on a garment, all right, Like you're say, you're at
(06:57):
a party, right and you're drinking great do like we
all drink at parties, and you spill it on like
your white blouse or whatever. Are you wearing a white
blouse a party? Yeah? I frequently got a grape juice
drinking parties, and I foolishly always wear my best white blouse.
But but yeah, so like you, you spill grape juice
on this this garment, right. Um. Most of our treatment
(07:18):
methods that we have are aimed at like the next day,
we're like, oh, I got grape juice on my blouse.
It's that staining really seeped in. What can I do
to try and get it out? As opposed to Oops,
I just felt grape juice on my my blouse. Who
has some soda water? Who has something? What can I
do to sub this up before it spreads? Right? So,
to continue Robert's sort of autoology, that's what I'm here for.
(07:40):
To let's talk about the scenario in which the grape
juice has already you know, stained your shirt and you're
you know, it's full blown. This is when we're looking
to treat full blown PTSD. Uh. Yeah. One method we have,
and this is the most the most validated, is a
cognitive behavioral therapy with some sort of exposure con opponent.
(08:00):
And this can fall under under This can fall under
two categories, either like real life exposure or imaginary um
like say you get like one example of real Well, yeah,
one example of like a real life situation would be, uh,
there's a recent episode of This American Life. But a
guy who came back from uh from Iraq. Uh, he's
(08:21):
of that he's going to college, right, Yeah, he's us
that going to college. And he had just become he
had just had this post traumatic stress reaction to being
around anybody who looked like they might be in a
rocky um. And of course he's at a college, so
there are there are a number of students that are
either you know, of a Rocky descent or Middle Eastern descent.
And he would see these these people and he would
(08:43):
just start freaking out a little, you know, he starts
shivering and thinking about ways to like eliminate them. Um,
he chose, and I think it should be stressing. This
was against the advice of his u of the of
the the guy treating him at the time was that
he was going to join the college's Muslim students. So
the issue. Yeah, so that's very much a real life
(09:03):
um exposure, you know, and and a very drastic one.
And the unconventional yes, and unconventional and it based on
the story, Um, it turned out rather well for him
he was able to really grow from that. UM. An
example of a of an imaginary one would be if
your therapist like brings you through like a thought exercise,
you know, like talks you through and imagined scenario or UM,
(09:28):
you were to engage in some sort of like a
virtual reality treatment where UH, you know, you say you're
you're you have post traumatic stress from a combat situation,
if you played a video game that was tailored to
UH to simulate that that same situation over again. So
this is this is a pretty good way to treat
PTSD for for people out there affected by And then
(09:50):
there's another one, and this one may sound a little fringy,
but it's also a gained pretty widespread acceptance and it's
called e M d R and the E M d
R stands for movement Desensitization reprocessing UM. The originator was
somebody by the name of Francine Shapira back in So
this is a relatively new therapy and it's similar to
(10:13):
the cognitive behavioral therapy and that you might find yourself
talking through your traumatic event, but the differences while you're
talking through this traumatic event with a therapist who's qualified
in this particular kind of treatment e M d R.
Your eye is going to be moving bilaterally, it's gonna
be tracking this light, or you may find yourself hearing
audio tones or in fact feeling something like a kind
(10:36):
of tapping sensation on your palm. So you're feeling all
these external stimuli in addition to you know, talking about
the traumatic event with your therapist. And the idea behind
this kind of therapy is that E M d R
stimulates the brain's hemispheres and it helps your nervous system
reorganize those memories. Um, you're probably not going to just
do it in one session though, it's more more of
(10:58):
a process. Like I'm going to go in for M
d R session today. It's really interesting to watch. I
would think it would be distracting it It actually sounds
a little bit like a video game. It does. Yeah,
watching lights moved back and forth, something sort of vibrating
in your hands. Maybe, I mean that's yeah. So, like
Robert was saying, these are treatments that we'd use on
somebody who's already experiencing the symptoms of full blown PTSD,
(11:22):
but there are early interventions are sort of quick ways
to prevent um PTSD from developing or at least reduced
the incidence of flashbacks. Yeah, these are the this is
the sopping of the grape juice before it spreads. Messing
method um and one of those is to use morphineum,
which has been used in combat with combat casualties. Uh
(11:44):
you know some situations where uh, you know, you're having
to to treat some some injury as well. Yeah, there's
a big study on it just recently in two thousand
ten in the New England Journal of Medicine. And basically
you had a bunch of guys from the Navy reporting
that prompt treatment with morphine cut in half the chances
that troops would developed symptoms of PTSD later on. Of course,
(12:06):
it also cuts into your ability to remember what exactly
happened in some cases, which can be detrimental if you say,
need to testify in court about what happened. So that's
that's one big down. So and the other, of course
being that they're giving you morphine. So you know, there
are plenty of tales of people coming back from you know,
from from from the war and they're hooked on morphine.
(12:28):
You know, there's a whole song u Samstone by I
think John Prime sing it there's a hole in Daddy's
arm where all the money goes, et cetera. It's like
it really sad. It's about a guy who comes back
a little kid. It's like a song, I mean, not
a nice song, but it's really it's a good song,
but it's like the saddest song ever because it's about
the guy who comes back from the war hooked on
(12:48):
morphine and just slowly just kind of goes crazy and
his kid and the kid has to watch him lose
his mind. But you have a good voice. Well yeah,
well anyway, it's a that song. Look it up. I'm
sure it's on like YouTube or something. So that's kind
of the morphine route and the downfalls being right impaired
memory stuff like that. You know what about this tetris
(13:10):
we've been talking, there's not a song about like people
coming back from the war hooked on tetris. So you
know this is there's some possibility here, but how does
it work? Right? So this comes to us courtesy of
a study published in January two thousand nine in a
p L O S one the Journal. So what the
University of Oxford researchers did was they recruited forty participants,
and they split them into two groups of twenty, and
(13:32):
all of the participants watched this twelve minute pretty violent
film pass of death kind of deal, right, right, pretty
disturbing scenes of injury and death. And then everyone, all
forty participants sat idle for this thirty minute structured break.
You know, maybe they filled out some paperwork, um, and
they were actually shown short clips of the film just
to reinforce what they'd seen, just to drive it home.
(13:54):
It's terrible. I can't imagine participating an experiment like that.
I remember all sorts of bad stuff if that is
seen in movies for a long, long, long, long time.
So I don't think this would be the experiment for me.
So after this thirty minutes was up, um, twenty of
the people sat idle. You know, they just kind of
sat there and ponder that really terrible movie or whatever
(14:14):
they pondered. But I'm imagining they probably pondered this movie,
and the other twenty played Tetris for ten minutes. Which
group I would want to be a part of? I
absolutely know which group I would want to be part
of Tetris? So why did they suggest Tetris? What's the
deal behind playing Tetris after you see something traumatic, why
would they possibly do that? Well, it comes back to
the It comes back to what we were talking about
(14:36):
earlier about how you play a bunch of Tetris and
you start seeing the see the blocks when you're walking around,
or you used dream the blocks falling through space. And
that's because Tetris has been demonstrated to be a visio
videospatial task. It draws on mental rotation and the type
of processing we recruit when forming mental images. That's key
(14:58):
because there are two ways that we form memories. Okay,
There's the sensory perceptual processing of the trauma, all right,
These are the sights and sounds, experience steering, you know,
um in this violent encounter, this car wreck, etcetera. Okay,
and then there's the verbal or conceptual processing where you
make sense of it, you turn it into a story,
(15:19):
my story. So it's not just like trash black and blam.
It's like, oh my god, I was in a car wreck.
I could have died. That guy totally wasn't thinking about
what he was doing, and like that's where you form
that story, all right, and this is happening immediately after
the traumatic event. Right, But what if something we're competing
for that memory making function. What if you were saying
(15:39):
playing techs, which is also competing for those visual spatial resources,
and your brain can only execute on so many things
at once. All Right, here's an experiment for everybody. If
you want to test this tonight, when that special somebody
in your life is is telling you about their day,
try playing tetris at the same time and see what happens. Um,
you're gonna proba. We find that it's really hard to
(16:01):
pay attention and or remember what they're telling you. Yeah,
So that's it on a basic level, is that your
your brain has a limited capacity to make memories of
this traumatic event um and or play tetris. And if
you're actively playing tetris, chances are it's going to devote
its resources to Tetris. And this is what the researchers
hypothesized and in fact was proven true among the forty participants.
(16:24):
So what the researchers found was that um, after watching
this film, they tracked the participants for a week and
in the group that played tetris UM there was a
reduced incidence of flashbacks, while in the group that sat quietly,
you know, pondering that horrible film. They had a higher
number of flashbacks that they experienced. Wow, so it sounds
(16:44):
like this could really be a tool in the future
for immediately treating people who are in a traumatic situation.
Ambulance arrives on the scene, guys a little freaked out,
get him a game boy Tetris. Well, it's interesting you
say that because the thirty minute time period. You probably wonder, like,
why did they choose thirty minutes for you know, to
play Tutris, Because the researchers figured out that the average
(17:06):
time spent waiting an emergency room is in fact thirty minutes.
Really okay, so if they could get in there before,
you know, the emergency room folks, could you get to
the problem right? Or free touches for everybody in the
emergency room? Yeah, I mean I love Touchris. I used
to have it on my phone. Yeah, I'm thinking about
downloading it for for my phone. If I have a
really bad day now, I might play a game of Tetris.
So that's PTSD and Tetris, But what about other video games?
(17:28):
All right, you've read that article about you know, smokers
and oh yeah, yeah, I wrote an article for Discovery
News a few months back, and it was about an
interesting study out of Canada, um where um, you know,
like we're saying earlier, one way to to get over
your your stress situation, um um from a combat environment
(17:49):
is to put you in a video game to put
you in a combat situation. Well, these guys basically took
the same type of video game, like a first person shooter,
except instead of a gun, you have a little hand.
Instead of enemies, you have floating cigarettes. And so they
had a whole bunch of fairly heavy smokers. Uh. And
they did the same deal where they had one group
there was control, one group that was the experimental, and
(18:10):
they all came in and they did a bunch of like,
let's talk about our addiction kind of thing, and you know,
we're gonna rally together to beat our addictions. And then
one group when and did one thing and I think
played some sort of a game that was unrelated, and
then the other group Monopoly, and then they ended up
killing each other because it's Monopoly and it's a horrible
frustrating game. But now and then the other group and
they weren't smoking, so they're even more irritable but now.
(18:31):
But then the other the other group, the experimental group,
they would play this game where the hand crushes the cigarettes,
and they found that the people who the group, that
the group that crushed the cigarettes had more long term
success overcoming and our addiction than the other group. But
the interesting part is that some of the people who
played the video game UM, they actually visualized themselves collecting
(18:53):
or recording the cigarettes and didn't work on those guys. Yeah,
they were just trying to you know, get more smokes. Yeah,
so that was a fascinating study as well. Yeah, so
we ask around some of our co workers about their
experiences with games UM having a therapeutic effect on them,
and we actually found several people. The main game people
mentioned was Tetris. So if you have any suggestions, comments, questions,
(19:16):
just shoot us an email at science stuff at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page.
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