The Tetris effect « a deeper silence

The Tetris effect

10Nov07

I’m sure everyone remotely familiar with videogames has played Tetris in the past. There have been several studies around the game in the past 20 years now, and apparantly one of the things this game is doing to your mind is training your brain to make snap decisions and react on impulses. If you played the game long enough and you’re in your attic trying to recognize shapes in the cardboard boxes that are stacked on top of eachother there, and trying to organize them into a straight line, then you are under influence of the Tetris effect. If you’re in a supermarket and are suddenly visualising fruit as Tetris blocks, trying to stack them, then you have probably eliminated a line too many in the game.

And the effect doesn’t stop there. To draw the line further to my personal situation; There have been moments where I’ve been spending the last 8 hours before going to bed on coding a class in PHP. When I make it to my bed however I still see bits & pieces of code flying in front of my eyes, still feel my brain buzzing with what seems a continuous search for a solution. Often in the middle of the night that solution hit me like a lightning bolt, or I woke up in the morning and immediately looked for a piece of paper to write down what I came up with when I opened my eyes.

On occasions I have been known to do daily actions like going to the fridge while trying to phrase them into code (mysql_query(“SELECT food FROM fridge WHERE name=’cheese’”) ). This is also classified as ‘the Tetris effect’; Being so hooked into something that it literally starts to dominate your mind and way of thinking.