The Research on Blocks and Intrusive Memories

Several groups have tested whether playing a visuospatial game after a distressing event reduces later flashbacks. The findings are interesting and preliminary.

A line of psychological research has investigated whether playing a demanding visuospatial game shortly after a distressing experience reduces the frequency of later intrusive memories.

The reasoning is specific rather than vague.

The theory

Memories are thought to remain malleable for a window after they form, and again briefly after they are recalled. Intrusive memories of traumatic events are strongly visual — flashbacks are images, not narratives.

If a task competes for the same visual and spatial processing resources during that window, the theory goes, it may interfere with how vividly the visual component gets stored.

A falling-block puzzle is close to ideal for the experiment: intensely visuospatial, demanding of attention, easy to standardise, and requiring no language.

What has been found

Several studies, in laboratory settings using distressing film footage and in some real-world settings such as hospital emergency departments, have reported fewer intrusive memories in the following week among participants who played compared with controls.

The effects reported are on the frequency of intrusions in the days afterwards.

The important caveats

These are early findings. Sample sizes are often modest and replication is ongoing.

It is not a treatment. Nothing here suggests a game treats post-traumatic stress disorder. The research concerns a narrow, early intervention window and a narrow outcome.

The timing appears to matter. The proposed mechanism depends on a window after the memory forms or is reactivated. Playing at an arbitrary later time is not the same intervention.

Media coverage overstates it. Headlines have described this as a cure. It is not, and the researchers involved have generally been careful to say so.

Why it is worth knowing

Not because it makes the game therapeutic — it does not — but because it is a genuinely interesting example of a piece of entertainment being used as a precise instrument in cognitive research. The demands the game makes on the brain are specific enough to be useful experimentally.

Read next

• The Tetris Effect: Seeing Blocks With Your Eyes ClosedPlay long enough and the shapes follow you into sleep. It has a name, a literature, and a fairly mundane explanation.
• The Song Everyone Associates With Falling BlocksA nineteenth-century Russian folk tune about a pedlar, and how it became the most recognisable video game music ever written.
• Why This Particular Puzzle Is So Hard to Put DownClear feedback, a failure you can always attribute to yourself, and no ending. A design that keeps offering one more attempt.
• Does Playing Improve Spatial Reasoning?Some evidence, some overstatement, and a reasonable position between the two.
• How the Author Finally Got PaidThe rights reverted in the mid-1990s, and Pajitnov co-founded the company that has licensed the game ever since.
• How the Seven-Bag Randomiser WorksPieces are not drawn at random. Every group of seven contains each shape exactly once, which makes the queue countable.