It’s hard to believe today, but not so long ago there was a time when half of humanity was obsessed with an unquenchable obsession: Tetris. Created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, the video game was introduced to homes all over the world with deadly secrecy. In the early 1990s, his dominance was indisputable. Lots of children, teenagers, and adults spent hours at his disposal, searching the corners of his memory for geometric shapes to fit together.

At that time, humanity was experiencing an unprecedented fever for the video game. The eighties left a legacy of some of the most memorable productions in the industry. Many were simply tied to physical sites, immovable consoles, or arcade machines located in specific spots. When Nintendo bought the video game in 1989, it gave the obsession a mobile character. It was possible to spend the whole day at home or anywhere else putting the puzzles together.

And so Tetris became a video game. It became a prism for observing the universe, a tool for reflecting. dreams Y wishes. This is not a metaphor, it is a real phenomenon. Many of your hottest players will understand what we’re talking about.

This is the Tetris Effect. The baptismal date goes back to 1994, when a journalist from Wired, an American cultural magazine, tried to find out the effect of video games on our brains. There were many players who admitted to dreaming of Tetris pieces at the time, walking down the street and placing some cars over others, some shorter and taller and thinner buildings on top of their logs. The puzzle had become a mental spring, not a pastime:

I spent a week with a friend in Tokyo in 1990 and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes were falling in the dark as he lay on the tatami floor. During the day I would sit on a lavender suede sofa and play Tetris furiously. During the rare trips outside the house, she visually mingled with cars, trees, and pedestrians.

It didn’t take long for science to take up the issue. What was hidden behind Tetris’ mighty magnetism, its endless downward blocks? in 2000, Robert Stickgold, one of the most involved psychiatry researchers at Harvard University at the time set out to discover it. He gathered about thirty people, five of whom had amnesia, and had them play Tetris for long hours of the day. At night, when sleep overtook them, he would wake them up every two hours to question their dreams.

The results were remarkable. 63% of respondents admitted to visualizing shapes and patterns similar to those of Tetris. When they closed their eyes after spending long hours in front of the screen, the mechanisms and protocols absorbed by their brains were reliably reproduced in their dreams, in their dreams. The experiment served Stickgold to reaffirm an idea long suspected by science. These dreams are nothing more than a way of reinforcing our daytime learning.

“The purpose of sleep is to restore the processing of information received during the hours of the day. When we are awake, the parts of the brain devoted to it are not present because they are engaged in other tasks,” he explained. an interview after her training.. “That’s why we sleep to lie down all day long. It helps clear the brain’s inbox and integrates this information into memory. Throughout history, people have taken naps for this purpose.”

So the dream becomes a way of organizing our ideas. And even more decisive: discarding the less relevant, the environmental noise that surrounds us, and absorbing the very important ones. When we sleep, our brain is faced with the long list of events that fill our day like an industrious civil servant. Your task is to filter them and send the most relevant bits of information to our memory centers. All this turns into dreams. And in the case of our obsessed players, Tetris is the compass of their lives.

“Busy people are familiar with the feeling that their head is filled with complex facts throughout the day,” Stickgold added. “Such people often say: i need to sleep on it. They do and they perceive their heads less messy the next morning. Most of the extra details have evaporated, and the most important facts seem clearer.” When we dream, we select relevant information. For this reason, many students consolidate their knowledge in bed after long hours of rest.

I see Tetris everywhere

Strickgold’s findings helped us understand two things: the effect sleep has on our brains, and the underground nature of Tetris, its long-term effect while we sleep. But what about its everyday influence when we are awake and imagine that its shapes and figures falling from the sky fit into the empty spaces of urban geography?

Although generally applied to video games, other studies have explored this topic. This phenomenon is known as the “game transfer phenomenon” (GTR). In 2011, a group of researchers published one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject. To understand the extent of this phenomenon, they analyzed the behavior and daily experiences of 42 players, often between the ages of 15 and 21. What they discovered is far from surprising. many of these Unified elements of their favorite video games in their daily lives go beyond mere visual projection.

Such items consisted of “fantasies, thoughts, and actions,” some automatic and some voluntary. The researchers concluded that it is a form of “entertainment” and entertainment, a way to emulate the content of the video game into the physical world and continue with it when it is no longer possible. But likewise, these projections “evoked unmediated thoughts, sensations, impulses, reflexes, and optical illusions.” They affect the brain.

The publication of the research caused sensational headlines in the media (“video game players cannot distinguish the real world from fiction”, etc.). But the truth is that such behavior was normal, at least in relation to what we already know about human behavior. In The Guardian, the study’s author, Mark Griffiths, will explain this with the most famous example of psychological research:

They are conditioned responses. Consider Pavlov and his dogs. If you do something repetitive in a game, you use the controls automatically, just as an experienced driver would instinctively do. So if you exit the game and encounter a similar situation in real life, for a second or two the conditioned response will come. It is clear that players are aware that they are not in a video game; situations simply come back to them.

It’s not even exclusive to gamers. When we spend long hours completing a puzzle or squaring the colored sides of a Rubik’s cube, we develop similar visual patterns and automatic responses. Strickgold would admit to a similar phenomenon as a result of his hobby. to climb. Once he started climbing the walls, any vertical surface could become a canvas on which to place ropes and hatches.

It’s not modern either. The most paradigmatic example of the “Tetris effect” is found in sailors. When many come ashore after months of working in the open sea, they adjust their bodies to the natural fluctuations of the ocean. They sense the ship’s movements in the ocean, but are on land. Accountants who spend ten hours a day looking for errors in Excel spreadsheets? They do the same when they come home, maximizing it. falls against the achievements of their relatives or children.

And even almost organically our brain is always interpret or reacting to external stimuli due to the learning or training we instill in it. Lawyers tend to identify argumentative flaws when they talk to someone; engineers, whatever their profession, identify problems and try to fix them; and teachers tend to be didactic and effective even when they leave the classroom.

Our obsessions shape the way we understand the world. The Tetris effect is the most extreme result of this process. Being obsessed with a video game, we literally see reality through its blocks and little puzzles. To imagine them.

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