Understanding The Tetris Effect

The Tetris Effect is an interesting psychological phenomena, which can arise from extended periods partaking in mental or physical activities.

Images on repeat

Over the last two decades, the Tetris effect has worked its way into gaming vernacular, but considering how many people play video games, it may be surprising how little the phenomenon has been studied.

“The Tetris effect is actually not well covered in scientific research,” said Karolien Poels, a researcher at the University of Antwerp. “It was in the popular media and a lot of people recognized it but there were just a couple of studies mentioning it.”

Perhaps the most famous example is a 2000 study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold. He wanted to know why, after a day of mountain climbing, he kept having the sensation of feeling rocks under his hand when he was falling asleep at night, even when he tried thinking about something else. As Stickgold told Australia’s ABC News in an interview, this made him think there must be something going on in the brain that is producing these intrusive images. To study the phenomenon in a lab, he turned to Tetris.

He found that students who were made to play Tetris reported, quite consistently, that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep. Stickgold also included five amnesiacs in the experiment who could play Tetris just fine, but due to a specific brain damage, couldn’t later recall playing it. But they, too, said that they saw blocks floating or turning on their side—even though they couldn’t explain the origin of those shapes. One patient, for example, reported seeing “images that are turned on their side. I don’t know what they are from. I wish I could remember, but they are like blocks.”

This result helped narrow down the underlying mechanism behind the Tetris effect. The brain has two main memory systems: the hippocampus deep in the brain registers the explicit memories of actual life events, or episodic memories, while the cortex holds onto implicit memories—the stuff we learn but don’t necessarily have conscious access to. The amnesiacs had damage to their hippocampus, so their Tetris dreaming suggested the effect doesn’t rely on the explicit memory system, and that unbeknownst to the patients, their brains were still extracting critical information from the day’s events.

Games leaking into life

The brain goes through a nightly rehearsal of what it has learned during the day to consolidate the memories and keep the useful ones. It may be that the Tetris effect is a manifestation of this process. But it describes only one of the diverse experiences people have after spending hours playing a game.

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