In a remarkable experiment involving footage taken at the scenes of car crashes and clips of old public information films, Dr Emily Holmes is using the computer game Tetris to disrupt the processes in the brain involved in laying down painful memories, dramatically reducing the impact of recalled trauma.
“The biology of memory suggests you’ve got about six hours after a traumatic event while that memory solidifies,” she says.
“What we wanted to find was whether we could do something to disrupt that process of memory formation”.
Dr Holmes played clips of traumatic events, including a child drowning, to 40 volunteers. While one group was asked to sit quietly after viewing the films, another played the computer game Tetris.
The results showed that the volunteers who played Tetris experienced about half as many flashbacks as the control group, and that those memories were less vivid or disturbing.
The point about Tetris, Dr Holmes concludes, is that it employs many of the same areas of the brain – to do with visual processing and coordinating thoughts and actions – that are involved in laying down memories.
“Disrupting those functions by diverting the brain’s attention in this crucial six-hour window seems to dampen down the vividness of memory,” she explains.
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