Context

You’ve probably heard this Zen story.  A seeker of enlightenment visits a monk with a bunch of questions.  The monk offers the seeker a cup of tea but as he pours it full he lets it spill over.  The visitor is startled.  The monk explains: a mind that is full has no room for anything else.

News

Emily Holmes, with University of Oxford, is an author of a paper on the potential use of Tetris (that’s right, Tetris!) on mediating the onset of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms (1).  Holmes has found that playing Tetris for 10 minutes after watching graphic violence (scenes of traffic accidents) reduced occurrence of flashbacks by 42% in comparison to a control group.  Holmes suggested that such use of Tetris could be possibly a “cognitive vaccine.”

Possible Explanation

So, what’s the possible explanation?  “By playing Tetris right after trauma, the visual cortex becomes so busy that the brain doesn’t encode the horrific visual imagery” in its usual way (1).  In other words, the cup of the mind is too full!

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) might work along the same lines.  I have used EMDR therapy for PTSD in my own clinical work and have been repeatedly impressed with the results of this intervention.  Read more about EMDR.  The “cup is full” hypothesis for countering flashbacks implies that overloading the visual cortex shortly after the trauma will minimize the encoding of the traumatic information. 

EMDR, which involves both visual and other forms of bilateral stimulation in parallel with recalling the traumatic information, implies a kind of Archimedean displacement of one type of information with another.  Note this is not an official explanation of how EMDR works but merely my own hypothesizing.  Say, you have a cup of water.  If you pour a heavier liquid into it or a solid (e.g. sand), the heavier material will eventually displace the less dense material, water out of the cup, right?  Bilateral stimulation during the EMDR could be seen as potentially heavier, i.e. more vivid, more immediately given information that competes with stored traumatic information.  The result is that more vivid, immediate, albeit neutral sensory information displaces the previously stored traumatic information. 

Information-Processing Lessons

Mind-ful-ness to the rescue?  An empty mind is a vulnerability? What do you think? 

Tangentially-Related Postscript Trivia

In the late 80s, while training in a Luzhniki swimming pool in Moscow (Russia), some shady kid asked me if I wanted to invest in Tetris.  “Tetris?” I asked.  He explained that it was a new video game developed by some Russian guy.  I knew he was trying to scam me – in the last days of the Soviet Union that was pretty common.  So, I paid him no mind.  I didn’t believe either side of the story: that a) there was a game named Tetris that had been designed by a Russian guy, or b) that there was an investment opportunity.  It turns out that, at least, part of the story checked out.  Indeed, Tetris, one of the most recognizable video games on the planet (with falling bricks), was developed by Alex Pazhitnov in 1984.

References:

1. Treating PTSD with Tetris by Clive Thompson, The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 13^th, 2009