Summary and Analysis of The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World: Based on the Book by Dan Ackerman (Smart Summaries) by Worth Books

Author:Worth Books
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Worth Books
Published: 2017-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

BONUS LEVEL 3

22. The Cognitive Vaccine

Professor Emily Holmes from Oxford University was studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 2010 to see if its symptoms could be treated sooner after the traumatic event than had been previously thought. In her experiments, she was looking for a way to train the brain to remember the rote details of a traumatic memory, but not feel the emotional response or endure flashbacks.

She decided to try using Tetris as a spatial action that would help break up memory patterning, meaning that after watching a twelve-minute compilation of gruesome, violent film clips and taking a mood test, an experimental group of subjects would play Tetris during the time period when short-term would be consolidating into long-term memories.

Control group subjects who did not play Tetris ended up noting an average of three times as many flashbacks to the video during the immediate aftermath; after a week, Tetris players could still accurately recall the video with less emotional affectation than the control group.

Need to Know: The reason why this experiment seems to work is because the parts of the brain that use Tetris flood the same channel that processes memories, and only so much information can fit there at once. Professor Holmes has suggested that low-cost Tetris games be made available in hospitals and trauma centers to help reduce PTSD in patients.

Epilogue: The Final Bricks

Since 1989, the players in the Tetris narrative have gone in many directions, some better, some worse. In 1991, Robert Maxwell, who was accused of Israeli espionage and whose companies were $3 billion in debt, died; his sons Kevin and Ian tried to save the Mirror Group empire, but their father’s death precipitated its demise.

This was also the year the Soviet Union collapsed, leading Nikoli Belikov to turn ELORG into a privately owned company.

The same year, Henk Rogers helped his friend Alexey Pajitnov emigrate to the United States along with his family, where he has continued to design software and games with success.

In 1995, Rogers, who had earned millions of dollars since his success with Tetris, helped Pajitnov obtain partial ownership of the rights to Tetris; in 2005, they bought out Belikov for the rest of them. Rogers’s daughter Maya is now CEO of The Tetris Company, while Rogers and Pajitnov, with their old Nintendo friend Arakawa, run Tetris Online.

Need to Know: During the past thirty years, Tetris has remained one of the most popular video games of all time. It has sold more than $1 billion worth of copies, become cultural shorthand, and retained its orderly addictiveness regardless of the confusion that surrounds it. And Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov has finally been able to reap some financial benefit from the simple but wildly addictive game he created back in 1984.

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