The Tetris Effect

Here’s something I learned today: There’s a symptom called “The Tetris Effect” that can be brought on by repetitive playing of the game, Tetris.

In layman’s terms, this means that the brain can be so addicted to playing the game that the mind starts to see and hear elements of the Tetris game without actually playing the game.

The term “Tetris Effect” not only describes the effect from the game. It is used to describe any repetitive task that has taken over the thoughts of an individual.

From Tetris at Wikipedia:

According to Richard Haier, et al. prolonged Tetris activity can also lead to more efficient brain activity during play. When first playing Tetris, brain function and activity increases, along with greater cerebral energy consumption, measured by glucose metabolic rate. As Tetris players become more proficient, their brains show a reduced consumption of glucose, indicating more efficient brain activity for this task. The game can also cause a repetitive stress symptom in that the brain will involuntarily picture tetris combinations even when the player is not playing the game (the Tetris effect), although this can occur with any computer game showcasing repeated images or scenarios.

In 1994, a WIRED article on the Tetris effect said this:

No home was sweet without a Gameboy in 1990. That year, I stayed “for a week” with a friend in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together. Dubiously hunting a job and a house, I was still there two months later, still jobless, still playing.

When a person first starts to play Tetris, their brain’s glucose metabolic rate increases (it’s how the brain is measured for energy consumption). But as time spent playing prolongs, the intake decreases, and yet the player’s performance doesn’t necessarily go down. What this says about the brain is that it has the ability to retain patterns of information if it engages in a certain activity for a very long time. The reason why the brain’s glucose metabolic rate doesn’t increase over time is because the brain has sort of hardwired Tetris into itself.

Here’s a video on the Tetris Effect. I hate videos that can’t be embedded.

If anybody can recall, back in July I wrote about how I was starting to see and hear Tetris while not actually playing Tetris at all. Who knew that what I was experiencing was actually a real symptom of the Tetris Effect!