3. Playing Tetris for just three minutes stops your craving for sex, alcohol and food.A team of psychologists from Plymouth University and Queensland University of Technology have determined, after many hours of Tetris, that the game can be addicting and distract users from doing other stuff for a while like eating, drinking and having sex. It kind of makes you wonder how they managed to finish the study.“We think the Tetris effect happens because craving involves imagining the experience of consuming a particular substance or indulging in a particular activity,” said one researcher. “Playing a visually interesting game like Tetris occupies the mental processes that support that imagery; it is hard to imagine something vividly and play Tetris at the same time. As a support tool, Tetris could help people manage their cravings in their daily lives and over extended time periods."Tetris addicting? No way.
When I first saw this study I though it seemed ridiculous so I decided to use it for this assignment. I thought it seemed pretty far fetched to say that three minutes of a game could stop all cravings. It turns out that the study mentioned in this article was called “Playing Tetris decreases drug and the cravings in real world settings.” It was written by Jessica Skorka-Brown and published in Elsevier’s Addictive Behaviors book. The study was compromised of 31 undergraduate students who were supposed to report any kind of cravings over the course of the week. 16 students were supposed to play tetris for 3 minutes if they had a craving, and then report how they felt after playing. The conclusions were consistent throughout the whole week, and it did curb or lessen cravings. So the data in this study was actually pretty well represented. However it doesn’t say anywhere in the study that tetris definitively stops cravings for sex or anything else. So I looked up more studies on it to learn more about it. In other studies some cravings went away and some didn’t change at all even after playing tetris. But the overall point is that playing tetris creates imagery and the brain begins to problem solve on a very simple level. This distracts the brain from whatever it was craving before. However all these studies were done on just regular people who didn’t have addiction problems. It would be interesting to do this study on alcoholics or drug addicts and see how strong of an influence it has on them.
Citations-
Marks, G. (2016, May 05). These Are the 8 Dumbest Research Studies of 2016 (So Far). Retrieved November 07, 2017, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275060
Osborne, H. (2015, August 13). Playing Tetris for three minutes stops you craving sex, alcohol and food. Retrieved November 07, 2017, from http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/playing-tetris-three-minutes-stops-you-craving-sex-alcohol-food-1515379
Brown, J., Andrade, J., Whalley, B., & Mayab, J. (2015). Playing Tetris decreases drug and other cravings real world settings. In Addictive Behaviors (Vol. 51, pp. 165-170). Elsevier .