Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: You know what that means. The vault door hangs open,
Speaker 1: the void is within, Will you walk in? Well, of
Speaker 1: course we're going to walk into the void. The question
Speaker 1: is what are we gonna find this week? Well, this
Speaker 1: week we're going to revisit an episode from Tuesday, December one,
Speaker 1: So this is a couple of years old. Now, this
Speaker 1: is the first part of a two part episode. So
Speaker 1: the first part is gonna rerun today and then the
Speaker 1: next part is going to rerun next Saturday. So if
Speaker 1: you want to hear part two of this older episode,
Speaker 1: you can go back in the catalog and and and
Speaker 1: get the old episode, or you can just wait till
Speaker 1: next Saturday and we'll put it back up for you.
Speaker 1: But this episode is called Tetris Syndrome, A Mind Made
Speaker 1: of Blocks. It's fun that this episode came out around
Speaker 1: Christmas time because I realized every Christmas I think back
Speaker 1: to Tetris because it was a game that I received
Speaker 1: as a Christmas gift and it had that wonderful chip
Speaker 1: tune version of the dance of the sugar plum Ferry. Dude,
Speaker 1: we talk about this in the episode. Don't spoil everything, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I'm just throwing it out there. If it's the perfect
Speaker 1: post Christmas listen as well well, even if you are
Speaker 1: not interested in puzzle games or video games or anything
Speaker 1: like that. I think this was actually a really interesting topic.
Speaker 1: We had a lot of fun exploring it, so we
Speaker 1: hope you enjoy the Tetras Syndrome episode. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Before we get going here,
Speaker 1: I just want to shot up quick reminder to everybody.
Speaker 1: Go on over to stuff of All your Mind dot
Speaker 1: com if you want to learn more about the show,
Speaker 1: You want to find old episodes, you want to explore
Speaker 1: our blog content, our video content, or links out the
Speaker 1: various social media accounts of just Facebook, Twitter, and tumbling.
Speaker 1: And also, hey, if you listen to us through items
Speaker 1: through the Apple system, what did you head on over there?
Speaker 1: Give us a little love on the review there. It'll
Speaker 1: help out the algorithm for our show and it's a
Speaker 1: good way to give back and ensure that we get
Speaker 1: to keep putting out this kind of content for you.
Speaker 1: So this episode today is going to be about Tetris,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be part one of a two
Speaker 1: part series that we're doing on the science of Tetris,
Speaker 1: the ancient mystery puzzle of the universe. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: first life is a mostly dealing with the power of
Speaker 1: Tetris and the history of Tetris. Second part is going
Speaker 1: to dive into some possible uses for that power and knowledge. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: I have a perhaps pretty weird question for you. All Right,
Speaker 1: hit me with a pretty weird question. If there were
Speaker 1: no thinking beings in the universe, would numbers exist? Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a great question. Yea, Our numbers a human
Speaker 1: discovery or human or are numbers of human invention? Right?
Speaker 1: Like the number seven? Is that an inherent feature of
Speaker 1: the universe or is that just sort of like an
Speaker 1: idea we've come up with to describe what happens when
Speaker 1: there are seven of something. I tend to see it
Speaker 1: as kind of a mix of the two. Like, yes,
Speaker 1: there is there is an inherent number sense to the universe,
Speaker 1: but obviously there's a there's a human ordering system layered
Speaker 1: on top of that so that we can interact with
Speaker 1: it and understand it. Yeah, I think that's a sensible
Speaker 1: way of looking at it. But there are certainly people
Speaker 1: who I think would be called Platonists in this sense
Speaker 1: that they're Platonic in the sense that they believe in
Speaker 1: the real existence of abstract objects that are inherent to
Speaker 1: the universe, like numbers, mathematical objects, the theorems that those
Speaker 1: things actually do exist as objects in some sense, even
Speaker 1: though they don't have physical matter in any way. And
Speaker 1: I sort of feel the same way the Platonists feel
Speaker 1: about numbers. I feel that way about Tetris. So tell
Speaker 1: me your personal Tetris history. Well, I think it is.
Speaker 1: I deal that this episode is publishing during December because
Speaker 1: for me, there's always something kind of Christmas e about
Speaker 1: Tetris because I got it back in the day on
Speaker 1: old school Nintendo. I think I got it for Christmas,
Speaker 1: so it arrived in the Christmas season, and some of
Speaker 1: the wonderful music um that was on that game included
Speaker 1: UM I believe danced with the sugar plumb ferries from
Speaker 1: the Nutcracker, which of course is a Christmas themed ballet.
Speaker 1: Ballet that I had to set through or or got
Speaker 1: to sit through. However you want to look at it
Speaker 1: many many times, as I had two sisters who were
Speaker 1: both involved in dance. Oh, it wasn't one of those
Speaker 1: things where your school took you to the Nutcracker every year. No,
Speaker 1: I had to, I think, go every year to see
Speaker 1: one of my two sisters performing it. And it and
Speaker 1: the Nutcracker is an interesting thing to have to sit
Speaker 1: through because the first is totally front loaded. The first
Speaker 1: half has a rat king, it has battles, it has
Speaker 1: a fabulous candy Land discovery, weird uncles with an eye patch,
Speaker 1: and then the second half is just just a slumber fest,
Speaker 1: various dances that are performed for the victors like they've
Speaker 1: already won. It's just all complete. Afterthought, that's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does have a lot of great hallucinatory imagery. I
Speaker 1: recalled though. I remember that there's a lady with a
Speaker 1: huge dress and a bunch of creatures come out from
Speaker 1: under her dresses. Yeah, but anyway, Yeah, the dance of
Speaker 1: the sugar Plum Ferry was on the any S version.
Speaker 1: I played the game Boy version, and I also associate
Speaker 1: this with Christmas. I think maybe because I associate most
Speaker 1: video games I played as a child with Christmas, because
Speaker 1: you know, Christmas is when you get the game and
Speaker 1: then you have that huge allotment of time and to
Speaker 1: vote to the game. You can just completely mild your
Speaker 1: brain to this game play at nine hours a day
Speaker 1: because there's no school and your you know, your parents
Speaker 1: don't want to deal with you during Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I totally had that. I had a couple other
Speaker 1: games for the Game Boy two back in the early
Speaker 1: nineties when I was a kid. I had Tetris, but
Speaker 1: also had Super Mario Land. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: played that on the game Boy. It involves weird it
Speaker 1: kind of like ancient Egyptian themes that are it wasn't
Speaker 1: like I played that one. It's sort of unique Mario game.
Speaker 1: And then I also had a video game called Altered Space,
Speaker 1: which involved isometric movements that was very hard to control,
Speaker 1: uh and mostly you would just fall on spikes and
Speaker 1: run out of air and die. You played a little
Speaker 1: astronaut who has limited care. Because that was initially imagining
Speaker 1: some sort of Timothy Leary tamed game. Oh no, that
Speaker 1: would have been wonderful, like as a kid, I had
Speaker 1: the game version of the William Hurt movie where he
Speaker 1: takes ayahuasca and gets in the sensory deprivation tank. You
Speaker 1: know another thing about about having it, I wonder if
Speaker 1: this is the case with you as well. I had
Speaker 1: some horrible Nintendo games on myf like I had Mission Impossible,
Speaker 1: which was an impossibly difficult game, and then a few
Speaker 1: other games that really had limited appeal even to me.
Speaker 1: But Tetris was a game that I played like crazy.
Speaker 1: My sister, I am sister who was old enough to
Speaker 1: play the other played like crazy, and even my my
Speaker 1: dad got in on the act and was playing Tetris
Speaker 1: and it just ensnared all to all of us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does have this very universal appeal, which has been
Speaker 1: chalked up to several different factors from people we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about later in this episode. But the reason I
Speaker 1: mentioned those other games I had on the game Boy
Speaker 1: was going back to this very first thing I said,
Speaker 1: which is that I sensed, even as a child, that
Speaker 1: there was something very very different between Tetris and these
Speaker 1: other games, even popular games like you know, the Mario game.
Speaker 1: I mean, like it didn't have to be a bad game.
Speaker 1: Other games to me, felt like human artifacts. They felt
Speaker 1: invented in the sense that you know that that a
Speaker 1: wheelbarrow is invented. Tetris to me felt like a fundamental,
Speaker 1: inherent aspect of the universe that was an ancient, secret mystery,
Speaker 1: and it just seemed to me impossible to believe there
Speaker 1: was ever a time when there wasn't Tetris woven into
Speaker 1: the fabric of physics and mathematics. So you're you're basically
Speaker 1: imagining a scenario where the the Hominids in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one of Space Odyssey are looking up instead of
Speaker 1: seeing a complete um monolith, they're seeing the long bar
Speaker 1: of seeing the Tetris shapes fall and form the monolith. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's got to be the long bar, because that's
Speaker 1: the most coveted piece among avid Tetris players as long
Speaker 1: as you've prepared yourself for it's insertion. Yeah, exactly, how
Speaker 1: true that is. No, I see what I see what
Speaker 1: you're saying. Exactly this, Uh, it feels perfectly natural, like
Speaker 1: playing Tetris is like coming home on some level. Um.
Speaker 1: I definitely remember playing it and being obsessed with it,
Speaker 1: and and it was just startled to realize this was
Speaker 1: a new thing in the world. I couldn't believe. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a game that was invented in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: but it didn't feel that way. I even even old
Speaker 1: old games like go and checkers and chess, I mean,
Speaker 1: these old board games still felt like artifacts. They still
Speaker 1: felt invented by humans in a way that Tetris didn't.
Speaker 1: Tetris felt like an ancient mystery. And I'm still not
Speaker 1: quite sure exactly why that is. But I think throughout
Speaker 1: these couple of episodes we're gonna do on the science
Speaker 1: of Tetris, we we may have some leads about why
Speaker 1: it feels that way to me at least, and I
Speaker 1: think to to some other people too, Or simply the case,
Speaker 1: it could just be the case that God itself is
Speaker 1: the long bar or or some sort of multidimensional um
Speaker 1: shape that we can't quite understand, but that fits into
Speaker 1: all possible Tetris scenarios. But indeed, as we explore here,
Speaker 1: we're also gonna get into some of the recreational mathematical
Speaker 1: roots of Tetris, and even those don't go back tremendously
Speaker 1: far that they only go back into the early twentieth century. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: I insist there is an ancient mystery at the secret
Speaker 1: of this journey, and maybe by the end will unlock it.
Speaker 1: But I think we should actually look at the game
Speaker 1: Tetris now, it's history and where it comes from. And
Speaker 1: the first thing I've got to start with is uh,
Speaker 1: sort of incidental to the game of Tetris itself. But
Speaker 1: did you know that the famous Tetris music, that theme
Speaker 1: right there is based on a Russian folk song that
Speaker 1: actually has lyrics. I do not know the Tetris theme
Speaker 1: with lyrics. I love it so much I looked it up.
Speaker 1: This is the Wikipedia translation, so this may not be
Speaker 1: the most accurate. But but the first verses, oh my
Speaker 1: crate is so full, I've got chintz and brocade take pity,
Speaker 1: Oh sweetie, of this lad's shoulder nice seems kind of
Speaker 1: appropriate for the game where you're you're stacking the blocks
Speaker 1: drever my great, it overflows. That is a revelation for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but surely Tetris didn't just appear out of thin air.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously it grew out of some kind of
Speaker 1: puzzle tradition. Yes, yes, and so I mean certainly you
Speaker 1: can if you want to to take the roots of
Speaker 1: tetris and extend them back just completely geometrically. Yes, you
Speaker 1: can get back into the history of geometry itself, but
Speaker 1: for the most part, we can begin the birth of
Speaker 1: tetris with something that was called a pin tomino. This
Speaker 1: is an arrangement of five unit squares or cubes, all
Speaker 1: joined along their edges. Um they're twelve free pin tominoes.
Speaker 1: They're shaped roughly like the letters VT, W, x, U,
Speaker 1: z F, P I, N y L. That's funny. I
Speaker 1: looked up some of these designations of like the letter
Speaker 1: to the pintomeno, and some of them makes sense, Like
Speaker 1: the W pintomeno looks like a W, the Y pin
Speaker 1: tom you know, looks like a long bar with a
Speaker 1: lump on the side. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are
Speaker 1: a little a little more abstract. They're eighteen one sided
Speaker 1: pentomenos in sixty three fixed pintomenos. Okay, So essentially, though,
Speaker 1: the pentomeno is if you take some squares and you
Speaker 1: line them up so that the sides are touching in
Speaker 1: one way or another, how many different shapes can you
Speaker 1: make out of five squares? And that's what it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then you you had pintomeno puzzles that were all
Speaker 1: about arranging them together into a shape, usually something that
Speaker 1: you know, a rectangle, something fairly simple. Now, the first
Speaker 1: published pentomeno puzzle of this nature, even though it was
Speaker 1: not named as such, appeared in Henry Dadeny's The Canterbury
Speaker 1: Puzzles in nineteen o seven. That a companion to the
Speaker 1: Canterbury Tales. Um, if anything, it would be the section
Speaker 1: in the back with a crossroad puzzles too, I guess
Speaker 1: um no. This is basically a puzzle publication. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in this particular one that Dandenny put together, you had
Speaker 1: fit twelve pentomino shapes together with one square traumino. And
Speaker 1: I'll explain the terminology here in a minute. That's four
Speaker 1: squares as you know encounter in tetris later on. You
Speaker 1: have to join these together on an eight by eight checkerboard. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you've got like a puzzle space. That's the board,
Speaker 1: and the problem is you've got all these pieces that
Speaker 1: you've got to fit into the space so that they're
Speaker 1: not you know, poking out the sides or something right.
Speaker 1: And like any good game, um, there's a there's part
Speaker 1: of it is the mechanics, which I've described, but the
Speaker 1: other part was the fluff. And the fluff here was
Speaker 1: that William the Conqueror had, out of rage, broken a
Speaker 1: chess up board, and you had to have to reassemble
Speaker 1: the chessboard. That these each of these shapes is a
Speaker 1: piece of the shattered board. O the story behind the game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of love that when there's a game that's
Speaker 1: not like an adventure action game with characters, but it's
Speaker 1: a puzzle game, and yet it has a backstory. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's essential. I don't want to
Speaker 1: play a game that's just pure abstract mathematics and mechanics.
Speaker 1: I want some cool off in there. That's how I
Speaker 1: get engaged with. Of course, the exception would be Tetris exactly, yes,
Speaker 1: because there is well we'll discuss some that have some
Speaker 1: fluff added on, and sometimes the fluff is delightful, but
Speaker 1: for the most part, Tetris is the exception to the rule. Okay,
Speaker 1: but so William the Conqueror gets a chessboard, smashes it
Speaker 1: into a bunch of pentominoes, and you've got to fit
Speaker 1: them back together, right though of course they're not called
Speaker 1: pentominoes at the time. It's not until nine three that
Speaker 1: American professor Solomon W. Golam actually coins the term. So
Speaker 1: what he did is he took the word domino, which,
Speaker 1: of course we know is a little a little block
Speaker 1: that you line up a play dominoes, whether you do
Speaker 1: cascading domino, the guy who makes the pizza, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that that sort of domino. So he took the word domino,
Speaker 1: and then he and it. He treated it kind of
Speaker 1: whimsically as if it was die domino, as if omino
Speaker 1: were a shape, and die referred to the number of
Speaker 1: squares cubes making it up, because there are two squares
Speaker 1: in a domino exactly, So he said, what if there
Speaker 1: were other omino's, So in this case, a pent domino
Speaker 1: is penta or five plus domino. Likewise, we already mentioned tetromino,
Speaker 1: which would be tetra for plus domino, right, um and uh.
Speaker 1: And he also threw out just a general polyominos, a
Speaker 1: term for these various constructions depending on how many different
Speaker 1: square cute elements are making them up. So there could
Speaker 1: be like sex dominoes or sept dominoes exactly, though I
Speaker 1: imagine as you go higher and higher up the list
Speaker 1: of cardinal numbers. There, the number of possible shapes just explodes, right,
Speaker 1: because as you add more squares to move around in
Speaker 1: different positions, you could probably make an ultimately infinite number
Speaker 1: of shapes. Yeah, Like, I mean, the bigger ones are
Speaker 1: going to resemble full blown levels from video games or
Speaker 1: or dungeoning adventures from Dungeons and Dragons with each of
Speaker 1: the cubes, right. Um. Now, all of this comes to
Speaker 1: a head publicly with his nine article Checkerboards and Polyominos
Speaker 1: in Ameri Ken Mathematical Monthly. And this this really came out.
Speaker 1: This kick started a lot of interest in these shapes
Speaker 1: and the kind of puzzles you could have with them.
Speaker 1: So Pentomino puzzles good stuff, big business. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean its big business is you're gonna have in recreational
Speaker 1: mathematics in the mid twentieth century. But but it's certainly
Speaker 1: we're not talking about Marl Borrows here, right, But it's
Speaker 1: still it's catching on. It's it already has an addictive
Speaker 1: property to it. And then in night it actually launches
Speaker 1: off the pin and paper off the table and into
Speaker 1: the world world of computers. Because at this point, we
Speaker 1: end up with a computer program that generates solutions for
Speaker 1: an eight by eight polyomino puzzle. So we're all already obsolete. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're already getting the human element out of it, and
Speaker 1: we're already seeing it take off into the world of
Speaker 1: computer programming in a very early stage. So I imagine
Speaker 1: if you're just trying to cram pieces together into a checkerboard,
Speaker 1: and you've got a fixed number of pieces and a
Speaker 1: fixed board size, there are a limited number of solutions,
Speaker 1: right Yeah. According to the University of Victoria Department of
Speaker 1: Computer Sciences, it's now known that there are two thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred and thirty nine solutions for the six by
Speaker 1: ten rectangle, a thousand and ten solutions for the five
Speaker 1: by twelve rectangle, three hundred and sixty eight solutions for
Speaker 1: the four by fifteen rectangle, and two solutions for the
Speaker 1: three by twenty rectangle. So so yeah, this is you
Speaker 1: see this, this idea, this new um type of shape
Speaker 1: puzzle just taking off in the world of recreational mathematics. Uh,
Speaker 1: finding a warrant warm home there, and that's the sort
Speaker 1: of sort of soil from which this maddening tetris vine
Speaker 1: emerges and you can. The interesting thing here is you
Speaker 1: can even factor in some uh, some interesting non Tetris
Speaker 1: stuff here. For instance, John Horton Conway's seventy Game of
Speaker 1: Life cellular automaton simulation. Is that. Oh um. I think
Speaker 1: we may have mentioned it on here in some past episodes,
Speaker 1: and we should probably discover it in more depth later on.
Speaker 1: But it's essentially a very simple, uh, geometric based simulation.
Speaker 1: Many of you may have seen images from this where
Speaker 1: it basically looks like crazy little Tetris shapes moving around
Speaker 1: and changing form on a screen, sort of one of
Speaker 1: those uh cell evolution simulators along those lines. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: big one really um and uh yeah, it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: topic on to its own, so we may have to
Speaker 1: come back on on that one at a later date. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: you have laid the soil out of which you, as
Speaker 1: you say, the vines of Tetris grow. But I think
Speaker 1: we should turn to the vines themselves, because what fascinating
Speaker 1: vines they are, a lot of people might not have
Speaker 1: guessed this, so some people probably already know the story. Uh.
Speaker 1: The creation of Tetris, strangely enough, takes place in a
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Soviet computing lab in Moscow with a slightly
Speaker 1: board artificial intelligence researcher discovering the ancient secret of Tetris
Speaker 1: under the ruse of testing computer hardware capabilities um SO.
Speaker 1: The the creator of Tetris is named Alexei Petknov, and
Speaker 1: he was a computer programmer and artificial intelligence researcher working
Speaker 1: for the Academy of Science of the u S sr SO,
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union Zone Academy of Science. And he was
Speaker 1: working in a lab that would occasionally be sent a
Speaker 1: new piece of computer hardware, and in this case, in
Speaker 1: the case of Tetris, they were sent this thing called
Speaker 1: the Electronica sixty. It sounds fancy, yeah, wonderful. And a
Speaker 1: part of paget Knov's duties would be to create software
Speaker 1: to run on the new computers of the new hardware
Speaker 1: they're being sent in order to test what it was
Speaker 1: capable of, so to say like, oh, okay, yeah, this
Speaker 1: this computer is fine because it can run this demanding
Speaker 1: piece of software a okay. So in in paget Knov's
Speaker 1: own words, this became his quote excuse for making games,
Speaker 1: which I mean, that's gonna be a pretty cool job.
Speaker 1: Comparatively in the Soviet Union in Oh yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: that's a pretty great situation anywhere where you find the
Speaker 1: way to make your job even more engaging, or make
Speaker 1: it engaging to begin with, without actually just completely knocking
Speaker 1: off and doing your own thing. Right. So, Paget knobs
Speaker 1: in this lab testing the Electronica sixty, and what he
Speaker 1: comes up with to test it is Tetris. Tetris is
Speaker 1: one of these games he creates. And I don't know
Speaker 1: to what extent we really should try to describe Tetris,
Speaker 1: because I feel like almost everybody who's going to be
Speaker 1: listening to this has seen Tetris. If you haven't, you
Speaker 1: should go watch a video of somebody playing Tetris on you.
Speaker 1: Any number of official Tetris or Tetris knockoff versions that
Speaker 1: you can just play online. I found a free website.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is legal, it's probably not, actually,
Speaker 1: but I found a website that has an emulator that
Speaker 1: will emulate the any S version of Tetris that's in browser.
Speaker 1: And it's pretty great that the any S version. I
Speaker 1: really like the graphics. Yeah, yeah, it was a great
Speaker 1: use of the you know, simple graphics to deliver the
Speaker 1: Tetris experience, though I do still prefer the music from
Speaker 1: the game Boy version, but Dance of the Sugar Plumb
Speaker 1: Ferry is good to either way. You should you should
Speaker 1: play Tetris a little get in the mood for this episode. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can pause right here and go do that and
Speaker 1: come back if you like, otherwise we will continue. But basically,
Speaker 1: what Tetris is is you've got seven blocks of different
Speaker 1: shapes and these are the tetrominos that we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, and they fall from the top of the
Speaker 1: screen towards the bottom of the screen on a little
Speaker 1: playing area, and the player can move the blocks around
Speaker 1: left to right and can rotate them in increments of
Speaker 1: ninety degrees, so you can flip the piece and you
Speaker 1: can move it side to side, but what you can't
Speaker 1: do is stop it from falling. There's the inexorable creep
Speaker 1: towards the bottom of the screen. And so what the
Speaker 1: player does is arrange the blocks to form and then
Speaker 1: clear solid horizontal lines. Oh yeah, that's satisfying moment where
Speaker 1: you have blocks all the way across a single line
Speaker 1: and then that that line just anishes. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: if the blocks stack up all the way to the
Speaker 1: top of the screen the game is over. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: Paget and Nov said that originally the lines did not
Speaker 1: clear in the version of the game he was making,
Speaker 1: that you would just try to stack them, but he
Speaker 1: found that the screen filled up too quick. You know,
Speaker 1: you'd make these stacked rows, and eventually it reached the
Speaker 1: top of the screen. So then he came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of every time you created a solid row,
Speaker 1: having it vanish and and just turned into magical abstract points.
Speaker 1: Then I think it's interesting because it you can see
Speaker 1: the roots of the recreational mathematical puzzle there right, because
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have um that much space if you were
Speaker 1: just filling this out on a sheet of paper. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if if the blocks stack up all the way
Speaker 1: to the top of the screen, of course games over
Speaker 1: that that's your death in the game terms. And as
Speaker 1: the game goes on, the blocks begin to fall faster
Speaker 1: and faster, which of course makes it harder to fit
Speaker 1: them in as time goes on, and eventually in most
Speaker 1: versions of the game, you get to something that the
Speaker 1: players would call a kill screen or a death screen,
Speaker 1: which is in the any S version at least level
Speaker 1: twenty nine, or the transition between level twenty nine and thirty,
Speaker 1: where the blocks just fall so fast it's impossible to
Speaker 1: play anymore. You cannot continue though. Actually, before we did
Speaker 1: this episode, I watched a documentary called The Ecstasy of
Speaker 1: Order about Tetris Champions, that which I recommend if if
Speaker 1: you all at home, want to watch it. It was
Speaker 1: really interesting, and there are a couple of players who
Speaker 1: do manage to get to level thirty. In it, it's
Speaker 1: a very brief, fleeting victory does it so that the
Speaker 1: game itself does not stop and say, hey, you've won Tetris,
Speaker 1: but you've merely you've made it to a threshold of
Speaker 1: survivability that no one else has reached, right with a
Speaker 1: vast majority of players, you know, it's not like you've won.
Speaker 1: You've still died. You've just died a little bit farther
Speaker 1: along the track the trail, than anybody else has gone before.
Speaker 1: And that's an interesting thing about Tetris too. You can
Speaker 1: never win. There is no winning, there's only getting farther
Speaker 1: before you die, which makes Tetris a lot like life.
Speaker 1: It is, yeah, and been probably a good lesson for
Speaker 1: a young gamer to encounter where you especially if you're
Speaker 1: up against the impossibility of mission impossible, where there's just
Speaker 1: no getting to the end of it, you just feel
Speaker 1: constantly like the metal gear these dogs stop. Well, now
Speaker 1: I'll play Tetris. It's like the experience of the game
Speaker 1: is you're never gonna get your money's worth out of
Speaker 1: that game because you're not getting to the end of it,
Speaker 1: to the narrative end of the game. But there is
Speaker 1: no narrative in Tetris other than the simple narrative of
Speaker 1: shapes coming at you better stack them and try to
Speaker 1: stave off the inevitable. Yeah, so what happened when Alexei
Speaker 1: Pajitnov made this game? So he claimed he was inspired
Speaker 1: by his love of puzzle games like Pin tomino Is,
Speaker 1: the ones we were talking about before, and he he
Speaker 1: came up with the mechanics of Tetris with pentominoes in mind,
Speaker 1: but then he decided to go with tetrauminos to simplify things, basically,
Speaker 1: to make the game simpler. Uh fun fact, since the
Speaker 1: Electronica sixty that he was using had very little in
Speaker 1: the way of graphical capabilities, the original shapes were made
Speaker 1: out of text characters. I think they were brackets, so
Speaker 1: that would make sense. So falling shapes made out of brackets,
Speaker 1: I do want to throw in that there. There are
Speaker 1: plenty of other knockoffs of Tetris out there, and apparently
Speaker 1: some of them do use pin dominoes rather than tetrauminose,
Speaker 1: oh dude. In preparing for this episode, I played one.
Speaker 1: There's one online called pent Trist that uses not pent
Speaker 1: Trist but but pent Trists like Tetris, and it uses
Speaker 1: pin dominoes, and at least in the time I played
Speaker 1: it, it it was significantly harder than Tetris. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: imagine it would be just one more piece. Likewise, if
Speaker 1: you were to play Tetris with simpler shapes, I imagine
Speaker 1: it would the game would fall apart too easily. Like
Speaker 1: what if you were playing them with dominoes, that would
Speaker 1: be that would just be base level, way too easy,
Speaker 1: to the point if you would get bored of it
Speaker 1: almost immediately. Yeah, I think four really is the perfect number.
Speaker 1: I I will argue very strongly in that in that
Speaker 1: proposition's defense. But anyway, past Not recounts to The Guardian
Speaker 1: where he told his own story about this. He says,
Speaker 1: quote I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth,
Speaker 1: I just couldn't stop playing it. When other people tried it,
Speaker 1: they couldn't either. It was so abstract that was its
Speaker 1: great quality. It appealed to everybody. And I think this
Speaker 1: may be something about why so many people can get
Speaker 1: into Tetris, Even people who don't usually play video games.
Speaker 1: They can pick up Tetris and immediately feel at home
Speaker 1: and intrigued. And and I think it has something to
Speaker 1: do with the lack of representational nature of it. It's
Speaker 1: like geometrical art you might see in a mosque or something.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like it doesn't have characters or familiar objects.
Speaker 1: It's just shapes and space and time and movement. Utterly universal, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: completely devoid of any dependency on on its uh its
Speaker 1: similarity to a real world scenario. It's completely in its
Speaker 1: own universe. Yeah. So what happens when you create an
Speaker 1: amazing and addictive game while employed by the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: Well that was an interesting question for peasant Nov and
Speaker 1: he kind of feared what would happen if he tried
Speaker 1: to make money off of his game. So the game
Speaker 1: started getting passed around from place to place, in in Russia,
Speaker 1: there were floppy disks of it that people were taking
Speaker 1: two different workplaces, and then everybody would get addicted to
Speaker 1: it and not do their jobs, so it sort of
Speaker 1: posed a problem. Eventually it made its way to Hungary,
Speaker 1: and then from Hungary it made its way to the
Speaker 1: rest of Europe, the United States, Japan, and the whole world. Um.
Speaker 1: But for ten years Paget Knobs seeded the game rights
Speaker 1: to the government to the Soviet Union and so he
Speaker 1: didn't really see much money from Tetris for a long time.
Speaker 1: But eventually once that expired in the nineties, he got
Speaker 1: more involved. And uh, I'm not sure if how much
Speaker 1: money he eventually made off of Tetris. I I hope,
Speaker 1: I hope it did well for him. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hope so too. I certainly remember seeing his name on
Speaker 1: even the ne s because his ties. Your eyes were
Speaker 1: glued to the program and you couldn't help but notice
Speaker 1: anything in the system that resembled the outside world, such
Speaker 1: as such as his name or St. Basil's Cathedral which
Speaker 1: was on the loading screen. Yeah or yeah, if you
Speaker 1: did really well in the game, I think you could
Speaker 1: watch St. Basil's Cathedral being launched into space. Good goodness, gracious, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: why I haven't thought about that and forever I never
Speaker 1: really understood why that happens, but it was. Was it
Speaker 1: the idea that the cathedral is secretly an alien spaceship
Speaker 1: that has been planted on Earth? And yes, and it
Speaker 1: just it had to use our brain power, the collective
Speaker 1: brain power of a Tetris obsessed planet, to to actually
Speaker 1: launch it back into the stars. Yeah. But so, paget
Speaker 1: Of gives a pretty cool perspective on the role Tetris
Speaker 1: played in the early consumer adoption of the computer. Actually,
Speaker 1: he says Tetris came along early and had a very
Speaker 1: important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front
Speaker 1: of computers, which were scary objects to non professionals used
Speaker 1: to pen and paper. But the fact that something so
Speaker 1: simple and beautiful could appear on screen destroyed that barrier.
Speaker 1: I like to think that's true. Yeah, yeah, I would
Speaker 1: think so. I mean you think of if you think
Speaker 1: back to early computer games too, some many but not
Speaker 1: all of them. We're a bit abstract looking on the screen,
Speaker 1: to the point where I could see them being very intimidating.
Speaker 1: Like I remember as a kid, we were at somebody's
Speaker 1: house and they had at some sort of submarine simulation game,
Speaker 1: and only you really had to use your imagination to
Speaker 1: see the any kind of actual submarine uh simulation going on. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, have you seen any of the old TAR
Speaker 1: twenty hundred Star Wars games where they're trying to represent
Speaker 1: the characters from Star Wars or the ships from Star Wars,
Speaker 1: But you know they've got a an a T a
Speaker 1: T walker like in the Empire Strikes Back, and it's
Speaker 1: just it's a big dog, it's like, or it's a horse,
Speaker 1: it's a four legged animal of some kind, and you're
Speaker 1: just like some pixels flying around shooting at it. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to to criticize limited graphics and the
Speaker 1: importance of imagination because some of my favorite gaming experiences
Speaker 1: that have yet uh to be equaled by our our
Speaker 1: heavy graphics age are some of those where you had
Speaker 1: just enough graphics graph graphical detail to give you an
Speaker 1: idea of what it was, and the rest was your imagination.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that that's true. I just think that
Speaker 1: there's less of a gap when you're talking about using
Speaker 1: limited graphics to do something abstract versus to do something
Speaker 1: that's supposed to be representational of images you recognize. But anyway,
Speaker 1: Tetris after this went on to become big business all
Speaker 1: around the world. It was eventually licensed from the Russians
Speaker 1: by a video game licensor named Hank Rogers, which led
Speaker 1: to what was, as I've said, in my opinion, the
Speaker 1: definitive version of the of Tetris with the definitive music,
Speaker 1: Tetris on the game Boy. And so in nineteen nine
Speaker 1: Nintendo released Tetris for the game Boy and the nes
Speaker 1: and sold millions of copies. And then, of course in
Speaker 1: ninete Tetris became the central game in the Do you
Speaker 1: remember these the Nintendo World Championships. Oh this was there
Speaker 1: was the Fred Savage movie The Wizard. Huh. I think
Speaker 1: it was all promotion for that. Yes, so tech was
Speaker 1: Tetris in The Wizard. It's been I've seen you know what,
Speaker 1: I've never actually seen The Wizard. I remember virtually nothing.
Speaker 1: I think it was. Wasn't it just a commercial for
Speaker 1: the power of love pretty much? But this is the
Speaker 1: perfect game for for that kind of scenario, right, because
Speaker 1: it's a it's a test of a true test of skill. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think it makes perfect sense for this to be
Speaker 1: the central game and a video game competition, because, like
Speaker 1: I say, it's so universal, it feels so core, so ancient,
Speaker 1: it's like the ultimate game, and there's something about playing
Speaker 1: Tetris that is so inherently human. One of the things,
Speaker 1: an interesting fact I came across about Tetris is that
Speaker 1: Tetris is considered, it's in computational theory, a hard problem.
Speaker 1: It's considered MP complete, meaning that even a computer cannot
Speaker 1: play perfect Tetris. You can't write a computer program that
Speaker 1: automatically optimizes Tetris moves and always makes the best move
Speaker 1: because there is no known strategy for always determining the
Speaker 1: optimal move. And this is not the case for a
Speaker 1: lot of games. There are games like Connect four or
Speaker 1: you know, play many of other puzzle games where there
Speaker 1: is inherently a best move you can make that you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of times humans might not have enough computational
Speaker 1: ability to know what it is, but a computer can know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we can all relate to that and from
Speaker 1: our Tetris playing experience. Because you start off with the
Speaker 1: definite strategy in mind, generally you want to build it
Speaker 1: up so that you can shoot down a vertical um
Speaker 1: tetramino and just clear four rows at once, and then
Speaker 1: do that again. Do that as many times as you can,
Speaker 1: but you're gonna reach that point where that's no longer
Speaker 1: an option. Where each shape, each new shape as it comes,
Speaker 1: and maybe you have the preview box that tells you
Speaker 1: what the next one is going to be. You can
Speaker 1: try and crunch that data as well, but it's very
Speaker 1: much a real time problem from from block to block. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the preview boxes actually, I think a really important part
Speaker 1: of Tetris strategy. I don't know if I mentioned that
Speaker 1: when I was describing Tetris earlier. I mean, you've played Tetris,
Speaker 1: you know. But the big thing about Tetris strategy is
Speaker 1: it will show you not just the block that's currently falling,
Speaker 1: but what the next block up is. But after that
Speaker 1: it's a big mystery. And and even the computer can't
Speaker 1: solve this problem. There is no computer that that can
Speaker 1: solve Tetris. It's a it's a mystery. It's an ancient mystery,
Speaker 1: I insist it is. Okay, So in this episode, we're
Speaker 1: eventually going to talk about the neurological effects of Tetris
Speaker 1: on the human brain, the sort of the psychology and
Speaker 1: neurology of Tetris. But before we get into that, we
Speaker 1: got to mention one more thing about Tetris and culture,
Speaker 1: which is all of the wonderful Tetris knockoffs that have
Speaker 1: that have come from this game. Because, like anything that
Speaker 1: sells millions and millions of copies and becomes up a
Speaker 1: phenomenon like Tetris, you're gonna see other people want to
Speaker 1: get in on the on the action and put their
Speaker 1: own particular spin on it. And a lot of many
Speaker 1: of them are great, They're perfectly serviceable. They're just complete
Speaker 1: rip offs. Sometimes they try and add their own thing,
Speaker 1: like trying to use a different polyomino in order in
Speaker 1: order to spice things up. But one of my favorites
Speaker 1: is just pure fluff on top of a traditional Tetris game,
Speaker 1: and that's the release Monty Python and the Quest for
Speaker 1: the Holy Grail, a PC game which included a Tetris
Speaker 1: mini game called drop Dead that involved fabulously throwing plague
Speaker 1: victims into a mass grave. So so they were shaped, Yes,
Speaker 1: each Tetromino is shaped like a medieval peasant, and sometimes
Speaker 1: their body has been you know this way or that,
Speaker 1: or they're just completely straight, but you're throw you're throwing
Speaker 1: those into the mass grave, and the bodies keep piling
Speaker 1: up and they're falling faster like any kind of a
Speaker 1: Tetris game, with the added feature that sometimes one isn't
Speaker 1: quite dead yet and makes it makes moving it around
Speaker 1: more challenging because it's you know, fighting back and trying
Speaker 1: to to wiggle free, and you just want to throw
Speaker 1: as many bodies into the mass grave as possible, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got a job to do. Yeah, So that's that's
Speaker 1: the best I've I've ever seen. Um, you have been
Speaker 1: various other attempts to spice it up. There was a
Speaker 1: particularly it was a two thousand four mini game in
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat Deception. Oh man, they're still making Mortal Kombat
Speaker 1: games in two thousand four. Yeah, they still make them today,
Speaker 1: I guess. So. Yeah, in Mortal Kombat X just came out.
Speaker 1: I don't think. I don't think everyone beyond Mortal Kombat
Speaker 1: three in the arcade game version, well there was. You know,
Speaker 1: four was kind of a I think a dark point
Speaker 1: for a lot of people. But I know that they
Speaker 1: put up They've put out some great games in recent times. Uh,
Speaker 1: but the Tetris mini game in two thousand four was
Speaker 1: not actually so great. It was just like typical Tetris
Speaker 1: with some little bobble head Mortal Kombat characters. I think
Speaker 1: they would have been far better off just ripping off
Speaker 1: Monty Python's take on it and just have you know,
Speaker 1: dead monks and ninjas falling into a pit. Yeah, so, uh,
Speaker 1: Katana's out there doing finishing moves on people and throwing
Speaker 1: all their dead body parts into the I can see that,
Speaker 1: but they were probably you know, pressed for time, So
Speaker 1: that seems like they've got uh, just violent variations on
Speaker 1: Tetris basically. Yeah. But then there's also the sexy take.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to leave you the listener to explore
Speaker 1: this more on your own. I don't know if there
Speaker 1: is a definitive sexy Tetris, but it looks like they're
Speaker 1: various scenarios that involve humanoid tetraumino's interlocking with each other.
Speaker 1: So it's it seems inherently disturbing, like stacking sex. I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of a Kama Sutra um group sex
Speaker 1: take on Tetris. It's out there if you want to
Speaker 1: explore it. Uh, and then I think they also just
Speaker 1: have Tetris with a backdrop of a naked person or something,
Speaker 1: so that exists as well, um an interesting attempt to
Speaker 1: put some sort of fluff on top of of this
Speaker 1: most perfect game. You don't need that. That would be distracting.
Speaker 1: It's Tetris, That's what I'm thinking. I mean, are you
Speaker 1: trying to mess with Tetris. Yeah, it seems like you
Speaker 1: would have only that's the kind of game, and you
Speaker 1: would only play for a few minutes and go like
Speaker 1: ha ha, that's clever, or oh, that's not really clever,
Speaker 1: and then you'd move back to just playing pure Tetris. Right.
Speaker 1: One of the Tetris arcade games I saw in the
Speaker 1: in the documentary I was talking about earlier, the Ecstasy
Speaker 1: of Order is invisible Tetris. I didn't know about this before,
Speaker 1: but that's where you can only see the blocks while
Speaker 1: they're falling, but once they land, they become invisible. I
Speaker 1: can't even imagine trying to play that. That sounds really
Speaker 1: frustratingly hard. I would again, I'd rather just play regular Tetris,
Speaker 1: And of course would be remiss if we didn't mention
Speaker 1: the various three D forms of Tetris that have come
Speaker 1: out where you're using three dimensional tetrominos and trying to
Speaker 1: assemble them, and I've played those before. Those those I
Speaker 1: feel like those are also fun for a limited amount
Speaker 1: of time, and then you want to go back to
Speaker 1: good old two dimensional Tetris. We keep saying Texas instead
Speaker 1: of Tetris. It makes me think that there should be
Speaker 1: a geographical representations or like you know, US States represented
Speaker 1: as as as square block formations that you try to
Speaker 1: fit together. Yeah, yeah, the United States as an assemblage,
Speaker 1: like how does Tennessee fit into Texas? And I guess
Speaker 1: you couldn't do it proportionally because every time in Alaska fell,
Speaker 1: the game would just be over. But we should take
Speaker 1: a break to hear from our sponsor, and then when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to talk about some of
Speaker 1: the brain science of Tetris, some of the science that
Speaker 1: has been done on how Tetris affects our minds. Hey,
Speaker 1: we're back, So it is time to talk about something
Speaker 1: that has been called in the media the Tetris effect
Speaker 1: or Tetris syndrome, which I like that one even more
Speaker 1: because it has a slotting, nefarious air to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I have talked about how I think Tetris is
Speaker 1: an ancient mystery, But have you ever noticed how the
Speaker 1: six rectangular pains on each half of a home window
Speaker 1: and form all of the Tetris blocks, except, of course
Speaker 1: the most beautiful and most cherished of all blocks, the
Speaker 1: long bar. But all the other blocks, you know, you
Speaker 1: with you've got the six pains arranged in the two
Speaker 1: by three formation. You can make the T, you can
Speaker 1: make the L, you can make the S and the
Speaker 1: Z and the square. And how the corners of the
Speaker 1: coffee table in your house are kind of like L
Speaker 1: blocks that just fits so nicely against the square block.
Speaker 1: That really is the essence of this foot rest. And really,
Speaker 1: when droplets of water bed together on a rain splashed
Speaker 1: window and eventually flow away, it really is a lot
Speaker 1: like how the stacks of blocks will away from viewing
Speaker 1: Tetris once you've completed four solid lines. And then of
Speaker 1: course you begin to see how the Tetris blocks do
Speaker 1: come creeping down from the darkness at night when you
Speaker 1: lie in bed, and they follow you into your dreams.
Speaker 1: And how I'm going to stop you there, Joe, because
Speaker 1: this sounds like, if not Tetris in drone, or the
Speaker 1: Tetris effect, perhaps even Tetris madness, full blown Tetris madness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what most people have described as the Tetris effect.
Speaker 1: It's in short, when Tetris players have dreams or mild
Speaker 1: hallucinations about the game, the mechanics and visual aesthetic of
Speaker 1: the game follow you beyond the game play itself into
Speaker 1: your life. You see Tetris in the world, You hallucinate
Speaker 1: blocks and places where they're not, and you dream about
Speaker 1: them as you're falling asleep at night. I definitely remember
Speaker 1: this from that Christmas that we got Tetris, playing it
Speaker 1: for ab certain a number of hours, and then afterwards
Speaker 1: you close your eyes and then against the darkness, you
Speaker 1: see the blocks falling. And then you're trying to sleep
Speaker 1: at night and you see the blocks following, and you're
Speaker 1: dreaming and the blocks are still falling. And it was
Speaker 1: never frightening, but it was just it was like unlike
Speaker 1: anything I'd experienced before. It was essentially a paranormal experience, uh,
Speaker 1: but but one that was so abstract, so so with
Speaker 1: out narrative. It wasn't like I was seeing space, aliens
Speaker 1: or anything. You were just seeing the pure uh, geometric
Speaker 1: wonder of Tetris playing through your your vision, you know.
Speaker 1: I looked up online to see if this had happened
Speaker 1: with any other games, and it certainly has, I think,
Speaker 1: maybe not to the same extent as Tetris. But I
Speaker 1: googled Minecraft hallucinations. I've never played Minecraft, but I just
Speaker 1: wanted to see what you'd come up with, and oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I found some Yahoo q and Yahoo answers and some
Speaker 1: forum threads where people are like, I'm I'm dreaming about
Speaker 1: things from Minecraft and I'm seeing Minecraft blocks all over
Speaker 1: the place. This does seem to be a way in
Speaker 1: which our brains are susceptible to visuospatial tasks or images
Speaker 1: that we have to manipulate in a virtual world, especially
Speaker 1: in something as addictive and engrossing as Tetris. And this
Speaker 1: has been reported on for a while now. The earliest
Speaker 1: reference I can find to the term the Tetris effect, uh,
Speaker 1: and this seems to be Most people say that this
Speaker 1: is the first time the term appears is in article
Speaker 1: called this is Your Brain on Tetris from Wired. Yes,
Speaker 1: great article, it's still off online, you can still access it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it was written by Jeffrey Goldsmith and if you're
Speaker 1: too young to remember the this is your brain on
Speaker 1: drugs commercials, And I don't know how widespread that reference
Speaker 1: point is anymore. Uh. It was, well, it was one
Speaker 1: of the most charming touchstones of the nineteen eighties propaganda
Speaker 1: war against narcotics. But guy's got an egg. He holds
Speaker 1: up the egg, he says, this is your brain. He
Speaker 1: cracks it, drops it in a pan, fries it says,
Speaker 1: this is your brain on drugs. Yeah. Great, great marketing. Uh,
Speaker 1: but but the the effectiveness of that marketing is a
Speaker 1: is a topic unto itself for sure. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: obvious implication is of Goldsmith's title this is your Brain
Speaker 1: on Tetris is that he's sort of accusing Tetris of
Speaker 1: being a hallucinogen or some kind of psychotropic agent. Uh.
Speaker 1: Yet he also brings over the associations with addictiveness or
Speaker 1: compulsive behavior. And I would just want to read a
Speaker 1: quote from his article. He says, no home was sweet
Speaker 1: without a game boy. In nineteen that year, I stayed
Speaker 1: for a week with a friend in Tokyo. For a
Speaker 1: week in quotation marks I think meaning longer. Uh, And
Speaker 1: Tetris enslaved my brain at night, geometric shapes fell in
Speaker 1: the darkness as I lay on the loan to Tommy
Speaker 1: floor space days I sat on a lavender suede sofa
Speaker 1: and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house,
Speaker 1: I visually fit cars and trees and people together, dubiously.
Speaker 1: Hunting a job in a house. I was still there
Speaker 1: two months later, still jobless, still playing. My friend, an economist,
Speaker 1: threatened a battery deprivation, but he knew my habit ran deep,
Speaker 1: knew that I could always tilt, blinded by sunlight, to
Speaker 1: a convenience store to save face. I would buy a
Speaker 1: box of tiny chocolate filled bears, as if double A
Speaker 1: power cells were an afterthought, not the meaning of my
Speaker 1: wretched life. Uh. And he also refers to Tetris later
Speaker 1: in the article as an electronic drug or and this
Speaker 1: is a great term, a pharmatronic pharmatronic. I like it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that later appeared in like William
Speaker 1: Gibson novels or something, but it sounds like it should.
Speaker 1: But anyway. Goldsmith then reports on some research we're going
Speaker 1: to describe in in just a minute about what the
Speaker 1: brain of a Tetris player looks like. But the term
Speaker 1: Tetris effect shows up later in his article where he says,
Speaker 1: the Tetris effect is a biochemical reductionistic metaphor, if you will,
Speaker 1: for curiosity invention. The creative urge to fit shapes together
Speaker 1: is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix,
Speaker 1: to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities
Speaker 1: are now all guess each as potentially addictive as the next.
Speaker 1: So once again we see that tetris it's a perfect
Speaker 1: metaphor for just about everything we do in our life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean not only just the inevitability of of annihilation,
Speaker 1: but just the it's just our the basic way that
Speaker 1: we tackle mental tasks. It combines the the seeking order effect,
Speaker 1: like we're trying to create solid blocks out of these
Speaker 1: you know, disordered, unfitting shapes, and so we're seeking to
Speaker 1: create order to impose order on a chaotic universe. But
Speaker 1: it also has the uh, the task clearance type of
Speaker 1: mechanic that we use throughout our daily work lives. You know,
Speaker 1: you have a you have a to do list, and
Speaker 1: the most satisfying part of every day is crossing that
Speaker 1: thing off your to do list, which in Tetris, you get,
Speaker 1: you get to do constantly. You know, every some number
Speaker 1: of seconds you clear a line and it disappears and
Speaker 1: quite literally disappear years and and being crossed automatically off
Speaker 1: your to do list. So it Tetris again mimics life,
Speaker 1: and sometimes life throws some bad blocks at you and
Speaker 1: you just have to accept that you're not going to
Speaker 1: fit into your order. But maybe that next block will
Speaker 1: help you work this one out and it is eventually
Speaker 1: you'll create some sort of order around it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's entirely true. And if you listen to these
Speaker 1: professional Tetris players, the one who are the ones who
Speaker 1: get really deep into it, you know they'll they'll talk
Speaker 1: about the sort of the fortune goddess of Tetris, the
Speaker 1: Tetris god who doles out good blocks and bad blocks,
Speaker 1: and you know they to a certain extent, the blocks
Speaker 1: you get are randomized, um, but they're randomized in a
Speaker 1: particular way. There's this thing referred to as a bag
Speaker 1: that keeps a certain number of blocks in it and
Speaker 1: you get you get the blocks from the bag and
Speaker 1: then it's re randomized. But uh that like you can
Speaker 1: get a good run where they'll get view lots of
Speaker 1: long bars, and it's very nice happy times to be
Speaker 1: to to be irritating though, if you've got too many
Speaker 1: long bars, Like, why am I getting all these long
Speaker 1: bars now? I'm just having to just throw them on
Speaker 1: top of each other horizontally at the bottom. I need
Speaker 1: these later to to really drive home and kill Yeah,
Speaker 1: why wasn't I getting these long bars when I was
Speaker 1: getting like seventeen s and Z bars. Uh? Those S
Speaker 1: and Z bars really are the worst. They're the ones
Speaker 1: that make the game as as cruel as it is.
Speaker 1: But there was another quote I wanted to read, actually,
Speaker 1: that was from a psychologist, Russian psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko,
Speaker 1: and this sort of addresses the Tetris effect. Pokilko was
Speaker 1: a friend and partner of Alexei Pechetna, of the creator
Speaker 1: of Tetris Tetris and he was one of the original
Speaker 1: patients in the first outbreak of Tetris madness in Russia
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. He he got to play it
Speaker 1: before it was a commercial item, back when it was
Speaker 1: a secret brain infection being traded on floppy disks around
Speaker 1: in Moscow. And he says about Tetris quote. The main
Speaker 1: part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and
Speaker 1: it happens almost immediately. Insight means emotion, small but many
Speaker 1: of them every two three seconds. The second mechanism is
Speaker 1: unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions that force you
Speaker 1: to continue and make it very addictive. The third is automization.
Speaker 1: In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit,
Speaker 1: a motivation to repeat. So, yeah, you've got some explanations
Speaker 1: there for maybe some of the cognitive appeal of constantly
Speaker 1: returning to thoughts of Tetris. Of it's sort of taking
Speaker 1: over your brain because you've got the pleasing feeling of
Speaker 1: solving a visual problem. You've got in the constant reward
Speaker 1: every time you solve it. You've got the unfinished action
Speaker 1: always drawing you back to the problem. There is no
Speaker 1: conclusion to Tetris. You never finish it. It's impossible, and
Speaker 1: so failure is never super frustrating because failure is inevitable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then, of course the thirty says is automization. Eventually
Speaker 1: it becomes uh, not so much a deliberate action, but
Speaker 1: just an automatic part of your brain. You do it
Speaker 1: without even thinking. Yeah, I do also want to mention,
Speaker 1: while researching the articles about the Tetris effect in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, that I came across some frankly hilarious or
Speaker 1: at least retrospectively hilarious scare articles about games and technology
Speaker 1: destroying your brain. Uh there, Oh man, it was so
Speaker 1: funny about talking about this theory from the ninety nineties
Speaker 1: called cyber sickness. There there was a paper from the
Speaker 1: Technology Review in the nineties called cyber Sickness Virtual Reality's
Speaker 1: dark Side. It's really funny looking back on the techno
Speaker 1: paranoia of a previous age, especially when it's addressed at
Speaker 1: things that we now consider to be so inherently harmless.
Speaker 1: I mean, who is worried about a virtual reality because
Speaker 1: it turned out to be such a bust and be Tetris? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: I think you could. There is a case to be
Speaker 1: made that certainly there are destructive elements to obsessive video
Speaker 1: game playing. So well sure, I mean if it comes
Speaker 1: at a if you spend enough time on it, that
Speaker 1: it's at a cost to your life. But that's certainly
Speaker 1: not that. Yeah, nothing that would that that that really
Speaker 1: matches up to that headline cyber sickness. Virtual reality is
Speaker 1: dark side. Yeah, but I think now we need to
Speaker 1: look at some neuroscience and psychiatry to see what's going
Speaker 1: on when you play Tetris and how it affects your brain. Yes,
Speaker 1: certainly the research underlying these Tetris observations that we've been
Speaker 1: discussing here. So one of the first big ones came
Speaker 1: out in ninet This is from a Richard Hare of
Speaker 1: the University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and
Speaker 1: Human Behavior. So they did what you not expect. They
Speaker 1: scanned the brains of Tetris players. Okay, this is interesting
Speaker 1: because it's not just psychology here. They're not just getting
Speaker 1: people to reflect subjectively on their Tetris experience, but they're
Speaker 1: gathering physical evidence about playing Tetris. What does it actually
Speaker 1: look like? Yeah? So yeah, they're looking and and actually
Speaker 1: looking at brain behavior during the playing of Tetris at
Speaker 1: varying stages. So hair is suspected and ultimately found that
Speaker 1: the brain requires less energy to play higher levels of
Speaker 1: tetris um as opposed to lower levels, which which sounds
Speaker 1: crazy at first because we all know how how easy
Speaker 1: those early levels are and when you first start playing it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's pretty easy going higher levels. That
Speaker 1: gets so fast. Yeah, that's when the stress really you
Speaker 1: think that would be when it was just you'd have
Speaker 1: maximum cognition levels going on. But uh, so, this is
Speaker 1: what they found in first time users. Tetris significantly raises
Speaker 1: cerebral glucose metabolic rates or g m rs. So brain
Speaker 1: energy consumption soars as your head cheese tackles this puzzle
Speaker 1: for the first time. So your your brain is it's
Speaker 1: it's dealing with a difficult task and it says, I
Speaker 1: need sugar, give me energy. Yeah, and especially with Tetris,
Speaker 1: and I imagine especially for someone who is, you know,
Speaker 1: a novice to puzzle games of this nature, you're suddenly
Speaker 1: encountering this game that is easy to get into but
Speaker 1: drastically different in its presentation compared to anything else you've
Speaker 1: done before. Yeah, so you said this was funny. You
Speaker 1: said in first time users, I assume you meant players,
Speaker 1: But I don't know if you were making a drug
Speaker 1: joke there. I can't remember you have users the term
Speaker 1: that I threw in or if I picked that up
Speaker 1: from the original study. But um, but so, so those
Speaker 1: were the novices. What happened after that? Okay, So after
Speaker 1: four to eight weeks of daily doses of Tetris, uh,
Speaker 1: g mrs sink to normal while performance increases seven fold. Okay,
Speaker 1: and so ultimately Tetris masters have the lowest final g
Speaker 1: mrs of all. So as your skill increases and you
Speaker 1: get more and more, you become the Tetris master. The
Speaker 1: thing it tells you at the end, if you do
Speaker 1: really good, congratulations, you are Tetris master. Um, your brain
Speaker 1: uses less energy to get you there. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: in effect, Tetris tain't trains your brain, uh and become
Speaker 1: to become more efficient at carrying the cognitive load required
Speaker 1: to solve the puzzle. Man, that seems so counterintuitive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but here's the thing. Those high GMR levels they leave
Speaker 1: you feeling all amped up and uh and this is uh,
Speaker 1: this is your brain amped up to learn something new
Speaker 1: and guzzling down that energy to make it happen. And uh,
Speaker 1: once it has acquired the skills, it ceases to guzzle
Speaker 1: all that glucose. So so yeah, it's your brain crunching
Speaker 1: this new problem, figuring out how to how to solve it,
Speaker 1: and figuring out how to solve it, uh with with
Speaker 1: a with a lower energy expenditure. Yeah. So, as Hair says,
Speaker 1: the brain might just become more efficient as the tet
Speaker 1: trisp becomes or the Tetris solving program in your brain,
Speaker 1: as he says, becomes more unconscious and automatic. Yeah. Alright,
Speaker 1: So the next study we're gonna look at answers that
Speaker 1: question that many of you might have. What if the
Speaker 1: dude from Memento, the guy, the Guy Pierce character, what
Speaker 1: would happen if he played Tetris? Okay, so you're not
Speaker 1: talking about Joe Panaliono. No, we're talking talking about Guy
Speaker 1: Pierce's uh no short no, no new memories, dude, Interiro
Speaker 1: grade amnesia. He can't form new episodic memories and things
Speaker 1: that have recently happened. Yeah, what would happen if he
Speaker 1: played Tetris? Well, Luckily there's a study that examines this.
Speaker 1: This is a two thousand study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert
Speaker 1: Stitt Gold. So he set out to study a similar
Speaker 1: feeling to that of playing Tetris, uh, that of a
Speaker 1: mountain climber who continues to feel the rocks beneath his
Speaker 1: or her hands after a day of climbing, and I
Speaker 1: imagine this is similar to you know, that feeling as
Speaker 1: you lay in bad after a day on the beach
Speaker 1: and the surf, where you still feel the surf, or
Speaker 1: certainly something that comes to my mind and also and
Speaker 1: also reminds me of of Tetris hallucinations and Tetris dreams
Speaker 1: is that when I worked in newspapers, I did a
Speaker 1: lot of pagination in design to build these pages in
Speaker 1: the paper, sort of a form of tetris. Really yeah.
Speaker 1: I would often refer to it as word tetris, because
Speaker 1: it's just words and images articles, and you're blocking all
Speaker 1: the pieces together and a lot of times they are
Speaker 1: shaped like Tetris blocks to form this complete whole. And
Speaker 1: of course there's the added stress though that this is
Speaker 1: a product that is eventually going to be printed and
Speaker 1: sent out to all these people, and you don't want
Speaker 1: there to be any errors. And there's so many, so
Speaker 1: many places that there can be an error if only
Speaker 1: you could have the crutch of adjusting the kerning on
Speaker 1: a real Tetris block. So the uh, yeah, a little
Speaker 1: little pagination humor for for everyone out there. Um, But
Speaker 1: but I remember having dreams at night where I was
Speaker 1: in my bed, laying in my bed, and the pillows
Speaker 1: in the bed were either illustration or articles on a
Speaker 1: on a on a page and in design, and that
Speaker 1: if I moved in the bed at all, it would
Speaker 1: upset the arrangement of the front page of the newspaper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's that sort of thing. Or if you're if
Speaker 1: you're a Tetris player, it's Tetris hallucinations. If you're a
Speaker 1: rock climber, it's uh, it's kind of rock hasustinagency experience
Speaker 1: after the fact. Yeah, So I gotta mention talking about
Speaker 1: the study the title of it, because the title is
Speaker 1: too good to miss. It's called replaying the game hypnogogic
Speaker 1: images in normals and amnesis normals, normals, normals, alright, normals.
Speaker 1: This is how it all went down. So stick Old
Speaker 1: asked twenty seven participants to play seven hours of Tetris
Speaker 1: over the course of three days. There are three groups
Speaker 1: involved in the study, twelve novices okay, okay, novice Tatris players,
Speaker 1: ten experts they're referred to as Tetris masters, and five
Speaker 1: amnesis with extensive bilateral medial temporal lobe damage. These five
Speaker 1: individuals were absolutely unable to learn and retain new episodic memories. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if you sat them down and taught them how
Speaker 1: to play Tetris and then met them again the next day,
Speaker 1: they would not remember that that had happened exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is what they found. So the novices and
Speaker 1: experts all reported that they saw Tetris pieces floating down
Speaker 1: in front of their eyes as they were going to
Speaker 1: sleep at night. Not surprising, we know that's how it works.
Speaker 1: It's expected. However, the even the amnesics saw the blocks
Speaker 1: at night, even though they could not remember playing the game,
Speaker 1: and as it turns out, they actually could play it.
Speaker 1: Just find the quote. The performance of the amnesic patients
Speaker 1: showed only minimal, albeit significant improvement over seven hours of play.
Speaker 1: So their brains were still learning to play Tetris even
Speaker 1: though they had no memories. Yeah, they weren't learning as
Speaker 1: well as the other novices, right, but they still were learning. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh strange And and this gets in of course, into
Speaker 1: the fact that there are numerous ways that memory works
Speaker 1: in the brain. There are different forms of memory. The
Speaker 1: two most important ones here for our purposes are as follows.
Speaker 1: First of all, in the hippocampus you have. This is
Speaker 1: the area that registers those episodic memories, the very memories
Speaker 1: that the musics here could not form, explicit memories of
Speaker 1: actual life events, episodic memories, Yeah, what happened yesterday? What
Speaker 1: did I do? What was it like? Playing tetris? But
Speaker 1: then the cortex registers implicit memories. This is stuff we learned,
Speaker 1: but no, don't necessarily have conscious access to. So might
Speaker 1: this be something like how to ride a bike or
Speaker 1: things like that? Yeah? Things uh? Or imagine many of
Speaker 1: you encounter this with with passwords or things you type
Speaker 1: into the computer. Sometimes you can't you can't say what
Speaker 1: it is. You have to do it too and then
Speaker 1: rediscover what you're actually doing. You've made that method memory,
Speaker 1: but but you don't have a direct recall of the event.
Speaker 1: So this study the experiences of the amnesics here's suggests
Speaker 1: that tetris syndrome is as much a matter of implicit
Speaker 1: memory as anything else, and that the brain is extracting
Speaker 1: memories from our experience even subconsciously. Um. And then furthermore
Speaker 1: that as memory consolidation UH takes place during sleep, tetris
Speaker 1: divisions may stand out as a manifestation of that process.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think this is taken as evidence in
Speaker 1: favor of the hypothesis. I don't know to what degree
Speaker 1: it's a hypothesis or a widely accepted theory, but the
Speaker 1: idea at least that memory consolidation is what dreaming is
Speaker 1: largely about, yes, in sleep. Do you know how accepted
Speaker 1: that idea is? I mean, is that pretty solid or
Speaker 1: it's pretty solid based on an episode recorded earlier in
Speaker 1: the year where I was researching the power of naps
Speaker 1: and the importance of naps at the Nott. Memory formation
Speaker 1: came up a lot in that, so I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty accepted. Huh. Okay, Well, that's interesting because the idea
Speaker 1: that memory consolidation takes place during dreams and sleeping is
Speaker 1: going to come into play in a paper that I'm
Speaker 1: going to reference in the next episode, which will also
Speaker 1: be Tetris themed. So this science is fascinating because, uh,
Speaker 1: it explains something that is disturbingly common. I mean, one
Speaker 1: of it would be one thing if every now and
Speaker 1: then some weirdo said, well I I hallucinated Tetris blocks.
Speaker 1: But this seems to be completely normal, completely widespread for
Speaker 1: people who play the game. It takes over their brain
Speaker 1: in this way and sticks with them, and they hallucinate
Speaker 1: the blocks later. So I decided, as I said earlier,
Speaker 1: to search around and see if this happened with other games.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, there are people talking about Minecraft hallucinations,
Speaker 1: and there are people who talk about hallucinations related to
Speaker 1: other games. So the principle of seeing the world in
Speaker 1: terms of visuo space, show game elements, or even experiencing
Speaker 1: hallucinations of auditory and visual elements from games is not
Speaker 1: unique to Tetris, though with Tetris it might be stronger
Speaker 1: than average, or maybe even much stronger than average. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that leads some experts to want to group what we're
Speaker 1: calling the Tetris effect under the broader category of what's
Speaker 1: called game transfer phenomenon. Uh So, there has been some
Speaker 1: research on this, but essentially it's been based on interviews
Speaker 1: and interacting with people who play video games and cataloging
Speaker 1: their experience to see if they transfer elements of game
Speaker 1: content or game interface into their real lives. I've seen
Speaker 1: accounts of individuals claiming to see health buyers from playing
Speaker 1: a World of Warcraft, and I definitely remember like the
Speaker 1: only other game transfer um phenomenon that I can attest
Speaker 1: to my own life would be from playing way too
Speaker 1: my grand Theft Auto Vice City, and I can't for
Speaker 1: the life of me, I can't exactly remember what I
Speaker 1: was seeing, but I would go from playing a lot
Speaker 1: of that too, then driving to work, which was stealing
Speaker 1: cars also well luckily I didn't go that far, but certainly,
Speaker 1: the the experience of driving the cars in the game
Speaker 1: was was what was was impacting the way that I
Speaker 1: observed driving a car in real life, which was a
Speaker 1: little scary considering all the things you do with cars
Speaker 1: in that game. That is a little scary. And that
Speaker 1: figure is big into how the media has covered this, uh,
Speaker 1: this scientific recognition of video game of game transfer phenomenon.
Speaker 1: But there there are much smaller, more innocuous versions of this.
Speaker 1: I mean, have you ever said, let's press pause or
Speaker 1: I just leveled up on something about a real world situation,
Speaker 1: achievement unlocked exactly? Yeah, somebody somebody tweets achievement unlocked Swedish
Speaker 1: meatballs for breakfast. I mean, uh, that is that is
Speaker 1: an example of game transfer phenomenon. You're you're porting something
Speaker 1: about the game content or experience into your daily life
Speaker 1: outside the game. It kind of goes back to our
Speaker 1: techno religionist episodes that we recorded where we talked about
Speaker 1: how you can't help but incorporate technology into your symbolic
Speaker 1: metaphorical understanding of reality. And so I often think of
Speaker 1: like in many different topics that apply to the human experience.
Speaker 1: I often think in terms of the health bar and
Speaker 1: some of the type of bar or whether you're talking particularly.
Speaker 1: I remember in researching willpower and how willpower works, and
Speaker 1: it in its state at status, is this kind of
Speaker 1: depletable resource in the human mind. You end up thinking
Speaker 1: about video games. It's the logical way to make sense
Speaker 1: of that and to picture it. Yeah, so some media
Speaker 1: coverage about exactly the kind of thing you're talking about
Speaker 1: the intersection of of science and video games is of
Speaker 1: course not so sensible. And and as we've said, this
Speaker 1: example is no exception. In response to the game transfer phenomenon,
Speaker 1: I know UK newspaper ran the headline gamers can't tell
Speaker 1: real world from fantasy, and generally much coverage has focused
Speaker 1: on sensational, violent implications of this kind of faulty premise.
Speaker 1: The researchers themselves disown that kind of coverage. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: that's not what we're saying. Almost all of this is harmless,
Speaker 1: and they sort of they compare it to the ways
Speaker 1: we incorporate other metaphors from other types of content and
Speaker 1: media we consume into our lives. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: you could express things in terms of a TV show
Speaker 1: you watched or a book you read. When you participate
Speaker 1: with media, you you get some metaphors or some uh
Speaker 1: you know, cognitive sticking points from it. Yeah, Like it's
Speaker 1: not that weird. Yeah, Like I think of any other
Speaker 1: phrases that we have, you know, fast forwarding through something again,
Speaker 1: pot something, or let's put a pin in this, which
Speaker 1: of course indicates that the speaker likes to torture insects
Speaker 1: in the spare time. So keep that one in mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the malevolent lepidopterist of your office. Yeah. So while
Speaker 1: the using the phrase achievement un locked or something isn't
Speaker 1: all that weird, I do still think the Tetris effect
Speaker 1: is remarkable and strange. The idea of these uh these
Speaker 1: consistent and nearly universal Tetris hallucinations and dreams, and that
Speaker 1: makes me wonder, well, does the Tetris effect belong in
Speaker 1: this category of game transfer phenomena or is it something unique,
Speaker 1: is it something on a separate at a different level.
Speaker 1: Pretty much, I feel like it might be. And in
Speaker 1: the next episode that we that we're doing on Tetris,
Speaker 1: I think we'll see elements of that now. I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about it in terms of Tetris being the purest
Speaker 1: form of the drug, and you can, certainly and maybe
Speaker 1: you should dilute the purity of that drug when you're
Speaker 1: applying it in certain scenarios, right, because, like spice, it
Speaker 1: may enable you to to have some precognition and to
Speaker 1: stand at the top of the dune of the universe
Speaker 1: of space time and see beyond what normal humans can.
Speaker 1: But you've got to keep coming back. Oh man, I
Speaker 1: wonder how spice would affect your ability to play Tetris, Like,
Speaker 1: what would you see the entire bag your preview screen
Speaker 1: would have hundreds of blocks in it, and then what
Speaker 1: what well the guild navigator, of course would you would
Speaker 1: would make sure to pick the best block possible for
Speaker 1: the next turn, whatever the safest block choices. But as
Speaker 1: we've showed, there is no such thing. There is no
Speaker 1: optimal Tetris play. There there's better and worse Tetris play,
Speaker 1: but there's no perfect Tetris play. So would you be
Speaker 1: able to find that golden path and through Tetris? You couldn't,
Speaker 1: I guess an unsolved game. Yeah. Anyway, we are so
Speaker 1: excited about the science of Tetris that we're going to
Speaker 1: come back next time to talk about some very fascinating
Speaker 1: Tetris research, more about how Tetris interacts with our brains.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about why Tetris feels so good
Speaker 1: to play, but we're also going to talk about Tetris
Speaker 1: based therapies for the Tetris cure. Essentially. Yeah, so we're
Speaker 1: going to continue to dive into the power of Tetris.
Speaker 1: But then what can we do with that power? How
Speaker 1: can we utilize it? How can we harness Tetris and
Speaker 1: use it to improve our lives? In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you haven't played Tetris in a while, I encourage you
Speaker 1: to unlock that ancient secret yet again, open the puzzle box,
Speaker 1: play a little bit of Tetris, and then come back
Speaker 1: and visit with us again next time and and share
Speaker 1: in the deep mystery and wonder of the Platonic puzzle
Speaker 1: universe with us, So until next time, check out stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind dot com. That's where we find
Speaker 1: all of our blog posts are podcast episodes are videos,
Speaker 1: and indeed the landing page for this episode will include
Speaker 1: links out through some related materials on the site as
Speaker 1: well as some of the resources we've been discussing here
Speaker 1: with you today. And if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us and let us know your personal Tetris
Speaker 1: history or your thoughts about cognition, human neurology and in
Speaker 1: video gameplay, you can email us at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. The