Playing Tetris stimulates the area (red) that is necessary for the visuospatial memory, but barely affects the areas that are responsible for movement (blue). | Image:

Could playing a little Tetris help to relieve emotional trauma? Well, it’s not that simple. But pilot studies now suggest that this popular computer game can indeed help people to cope with bad experiences. “The idea is that Tetris engages the same regions of the brain that are responsible for storing traumatic images”, says the psychologist Laura Singh.

Singh is a postdoc researcher from Switzerland who is currently working at Uppsala University. She has been conducting studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and has shown that playing Tetris mostly activates areas associated with visuospatial memory. What is important to her research is the fact that players have to plan actively turning the shapes in their head in advance of making a move.

Larger-scale studies are now underway to see if Tetris can be used in interventions to help alleviate disturbing images of pre-existing trauma – such as was suffered by hospital staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.

T. Agren et al.: The neural basis of Tetris gameplay: implicating the role of visuospatial processing. Current Psychology (2021)