Tetris Improves Your Brain 145
An anonymous reader writes "Playing Tetris increases the density of the cortex and improves the efficiency of some parts of the brain, according to researchers investigating video games and other complex spatial tasks." Unfortunately, storing a half million copies of the song negates any practical functional gains beyond loading your trunk very efficiently.
Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Really (Score:5, Interesting)
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
This, says the doctors who undertook the study, shows that focusing on a "challenging visuospatial task" like a videogame can actually alter the structure of the brain, not just increase brain activity.
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole? Or, really, any sort of two dimensional puzzles like the mazes on the back of tray mats at a restaurant? Or maybe even -- *gasp* -- any game portrayed on a 2D surface like a TV or computer screen?
The study, funded by Tetris' makers ...
I understand now.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
The pretty pictures wouldn't happen to be statistically erroneous [slashdot.org] now would they?
Don't get me wrong, I grew up on Tetris 2 and The New Tetris. They both still have massive replay value and really spurred me to look into polyomino [amazon.com] based puzzles [amazon.com] which had increased fame in the mid 1960s until everyone realized that they had little real world application (but they still show up in papers [acm.org]). Still, it lead me to a book by Martin Gardner [wikipedia.org] who wrote Scientific American columns on Mathematical Games. If you remember those, I recommend this book [amazon.com]. So something good came out of studying tile theory and Tetris for me but there's no evidence yet it did anything more for me than say playing Gauntlet on the NES would have.
Video Games Improves Your Brain (fixed) (Score:3, Interesting)
T-spin triple (Score:5, Interesting)
So you're saying this is akin to jamming the square block in the square hole and the triangle block in the triangle hole?
No, it's shoving the T-shaped block past other blocks into a T-shaped hole. Almost every Tetris game since Tetris Worlds (2001), including Tetris DS, has allowed for this strange move [ytmnd.com].
It's called Korobeiniki (Score:5, Interesting)
Tetris has music?
Quick, before it gets flagged [youtube.com].
The OS kernel that links brain and mind (Score:2, Interesting)
Anybody else here played the MS Tetris much? (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a version of Tetris included with the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack (BOWEP). I've spent so many hours on that game it's not even funny... it went up to level 10 (the levels advanced according to how many lines you cleared... level 10 began after 93 lines), although you could start at any level (higher levels give more points).
It's kinda strict, though... it doesn't allow T-spins (where a T piece is rotated into a position that would be impossible for it to reach otherwise) or easy spin (which allows a piece to be rotated for a moment after it otherwise would have been locked down; some games allow you to continuously rotate a piece forever while others will still lock the piece after a certain point). After getting used to the easy spin on the Facebook version of Tetris, level 10 of MS Tetris is damn hard...
It had a couple of bugs, though, that the testers never found... apparently they weren't too hard-core (it takes a while to reach them)...
First, they used a 16-bit signed int to hold the score, which meant the highest possible score was 32,767 points – which was entirely possible for a good player to reach. So, if you manage to reach 32,767 points, it rolls to -32,768 points and starts counting upward toward zero again (my high score is -256 points, which comes out to 65,280 points, but I've also rolled it back up through zero on one occasion – the game didn't save that high score). The high score system also flaked out when you got negative scores: it sorted them correctly to the top of the high scores, but if the high scores had negative scores at the top it sometimes said you got a high score when you actually didn't and the high score table could get corrupted with positive scores on top of the negative ones. It asked whether to save the high scores when you exited the game, though, so whenever it incorrectly thought I got a high score I always exited the game without saving the high scores to make sure the list didn't get corrupted.
The second bug was even harder to reach... the routine to print the score on the screen didn't erase the old score, it just covered it. As long as the scores are increasing, it's fine, but -9999 won't entirely cover -10000, leaving one unchanging digit at the end of the score. The same thing occurs between -1000 and -999, etc, until finally when you roll the number back into the positive range the negative sign is gone. Since the negative sign isn't as wide as the numerals, there's half a digit cut off after the score after that. (If the window is entirely re-painted, such as by minimizing it and then restoring it, the score will be correctly shown.) The actual digit shown at the end will be arbitrary, since you get different amounts of points for different moves – whatever the final digit of your score was will remain if the new score is shorter than the old.
If anybody's interested, I posted a video on YouTube a while ago of myself playing the game and highlighting both of these bugs. I can't get the link right now but you should be able to get my channel [youtube.com] and there are only a few so you'll find it easily.
Turbo Button Hack (Score:4, Interesting)
How I miss the turbo button...
Actually, Tetris is the exception.. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's been quite a bit of previous research done on Tetris, which has found that just about the only thing playing tetris improves is your ability to play tetris. The spatial expertise acquired while playing tetris is highly domain specific (eg. see VK Sims, RE Mayer (2002) [wiley.com]). In fact Tetris has so few measurable changes on behavior that it's often used as the control game for action video game research (eg. Green CS, Bavelier D. (2003) [nature.com]).
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know whether it applies broadly or just to this particular game, but I can state that Tetris had a profound impact on my wife's quality of life. She was born with brain damage from a lack of oxygen due to pregnancy complications. This left her epileptic and with extremely poor muscle control/coordination. She used to get made fun of in school because kids thought she was mentally retarded because she moved slowly and awkwardly (just the opposite, really -- she was the first woman to ever get a scholarship to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). As a child, however, at the recommendation of her doctor, her parents encouraged her to play Tetris and other hand-eye-coordination / reaction time games a lot, something she continued all the way through college. The parts of her brain that affect motor control are still damaged, but EEGs now show that other parts of her brain have taken up the slack. You'd never know she used to have trouble with motor control.