Tetris effect

The Tetris effect is the ability of an activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game "Tetris". In the game a player rotates and moves different falling tetrominoes, or shapes made up of four square blocks. If the player can arrange the shapes so there are complete horizontal lines of blocks without any gaps, those lines are eliminated. The object of the game is to eliminate as many lines as possible before the shapes fill the screen.

People who play Tetris for a long time might then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.Earling, A. (1996, March 21-28). The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? "Philadelphia City Paper" [http://www.citypaper.net/articles/032196/article038.shtml] ] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit.

They might also see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.Earling, A. (1996, March 21-28). The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? "Philadelphia City Paper" [http://www.citypaper.net/articles/032196/article038.shtml] ] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hallucination.

They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep.Stickgold, R., Malia, A., Maguire, D., Roddenberry, D., & O'Connor, M. (2000). Replaying the game: Hypnagogic images in normals and amnesics. "Science" 290: 350-353. (free abstract) [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/5490/350] ] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hypnagogic imagery.

Other examples

The Tetris effect can occur with other video games,Terdiman, D. (January 11, 2005). Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick "Wired" [http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/01/66225] ] with any prolonged visual task (such as classifying cells on microscope slides, weeding, picking fruit, assembling burgers, or even playing chess), and in other sensory modalities. For example, there is the tendency for a catchy tune to play out unbidden in one's mind (an "earworm"). In kinesthesis, a person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may move with an unbidden rocking motion, having become accustomed to the ship making such movements (known as sea legs or mal de debarquement). Computer programmers and developers sometimes have similar experiences, and report dreaming about code when they sleep at night, and return to work the next day feeling like they had never left.

Place in memory

Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing "Tetris" during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.

History of the term

According to Earling (1996),Earling, A. (1996, March 21-28). The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? "Philadelphia City Paper" [http://www.citypaper.net/articles/032196/article038.shtml] ] one of the first references to the term is by Garth Kidd in February, 1996.Kidd, G. (1996). Possible future risk of virtual reality. "The RISKS Digest: Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems" 17(78) [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.78.html#subj1] ] Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia.

In popular culture

The Tetris effect appears in some works of literature, although not so named. For example, Ian McEwan, in the novel "Atonement" (2001) described an example of a Tetris hallucination: "He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. When he closed his eyes he saw moving asphalt and his boots swinging in and out of view." (p. 260)

The Tetris effect appears in several examples of popular culture. For example, the ability of Tetris to dominate one's thoughts was parodied in The Simpsons episode Strong Arms of the Ma, in which Homer Simpson uses his Tetris skills to fit several hundred dollars worth of garage sale products in his sedan. The comic Perry Bible Fellowship made light of the Tetris Effect in the strip entitled "Game Boy". The ability of Tetris to dominate one's dreams appeared in a cartoon on a t-shirt in 2007] and in 2007.]

See also

* Earworm
* Fixation
* Highway hypnosis
* Neuroplasticity

References

External links

* [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris.html "This Is Your Brain on Tetris"] — Wired magazine, May 1994
* [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001F172-55DA-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21 "Tetris dreams"] - Scientific American magazine, October 2000