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