A new therapy that uses the cult computer game Tetris helped rid traumatic stress disorder sufferers of distressing flashbacks, according to the latest research on the potential of digital interventions to disrupt damaging brain activities.
The approach, involving 20-minute sessions rotating Tetris’s variously shaped and coloured blocks, led to the disappearance of symptoms in more than two-thirds of users and required much less clinician time than existing treatments, scientists found.
The method is part of a widening effort to harness the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, or the brain’s capacity to rewire itself, to ease mental health conditions that are resistant to traditional drug and talking therapies.
“Even a single, fleeting intrusive memory of past trauma can exert a powerful impact in daily life by hijacking attention and leaving people at the mercy of unwanted and intrusive emotions,” said Emily Holmes, research leader and a psychology professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University.
“By weakening the intrusive aspect of these sensory memories via this brief visual intervention, people experience fewer trauma images flashing back.”
The researchers tested their novel therapy on a group of 99 healthcare workers who had been exposed to trauma during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a paper published in The Lancet Psychiatry late on Wednesday. The treatment, known as imagery competing task intervention (ICTI), involved “far more than just playing Tetris” and had been made as “gentle, brief and practical as possible to fit into people’s busy lives”, Holmes said.
Participants first briefly recalled an unwanted flashback they were experiencing. They were then taught how to use the cognitive skill of “mental rotation”, or visualising and moving objects in the mind’s eye.
They used mental rotation to play a slow-speed game of Tetris, which involves manipulating digital geometric blocks to form complete horizontal lines. The scientists compared the results with those from two other groups, one receiving their usual PTSD treatments and the other a therapy that included listening to Mozart’s String Duo No 1 K 423.
After four weeks, the Tetris-based therapy participants were experiencing greatly fewer intrusive memories than both the active control group and the treatment-as-usual cohort. By week 24, 70 per cent of the Tetris-based therapy participants reported no intrusive memories, compared with 20 per cent for the treatment-as-usual group and 13 per cent for the Mozart listeners.
One theory why Tetris may be an effective mental health tool is that it engages the same parts of the brain active during flashbacks. If the organ is preoccupied with playing the computer game, it is less able to focus on the traumatic PTSD imagery. The memory thus becomes more malleable and, over time, more manageable.
“If we can get similarly strong results in bigger trials, this could have an enormous impact,” said Tayla McCloud, research lead for digital mental health at Wellcome, the philanthropic foundation that funded the study. “It’s rare to see something so accessible, scalable and adaptable across contexts. It doesn’t require patients to put their trauma into words and even transcends language barriers.”
The researchers acknowledged limitations in the study. One was the opportunity for participants to self-refer to the therapy featuring Tetris, which could introduce biases in the cohort and the results. The Tetris-based approach would now need to be further tested for longer timescales “in the real world and for diverse groups within the general population”, the scientists said.