Unwind with a game of Tetris

20:00 9th January 2009

According to researchers at Oxford University, playing classic video game Tetris after a traumatic experience can reduce the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Tetris challenges gamers to arrange different shaped objects into uniform square blocks at the bottom of the screen as they fall from above at gradually increasing speeds. Researchers found that people who played the immensely popular game for ten minutes shortly after watching a series of traumatic images, were less likely to suffer flashbacks of the trauma in the days afterwards.

Catherine Deeprose, one of the people who worked on the study, said: "We have shown that in healthy volunteers, playing Tetris in [a six-hour] time window can reduce flashback-type memories without wiping out the ability to make sense of the event."

The researchers have theorised that recognition of the shapes within the game competes in the gamer's brain with the traumatic images witnessed shortly before.

Tetris has become one of the most popular and enduring video games in the world, and was originally created by Alexey Pajitnov in mid-1985.