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I have been addicted to Tetris, that simple brick game that once costed RM99 on a dot matrix display.
But nowdays, you can play it anywhere, on your phone, on your computer, on the Internet, everywhere.
I had S-Tris 2 installed on my phone and have been playing it countless of time. It's amazing how when I first started, I was struggling to break that 3000 marks on the high score list and after months of playing, breaking 10,000 is the benchmark.
And today, it was reported that Tetris is good for our brain! Well, as if we didn't know already any brain teasing games, even Sudoku are good for our brain.
Tetris can alter the structure of your brain
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
The study, funded by Tetris' makers and authored by investigators at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico, shows that playing the classic puzzle game had two distinct effects on the brains of research subjects: some areas in the brain showed greater efficiency (the blue areas in the diagram above), and different areas showed thicker cortexes, which is a sign of more grey matter (red).
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.
Future benefits of this study, says co-investigator Dr Richard Haier, might be to "demonstrate that a player of Tetris does see lasting effects that generalise to other activity," showing for example that engaging in activities like playing some games might help fight off the mental decline that occurs with ageing.
The study's subjects, a group of adolescent girls, underwent MRI scans before and after a three-month Tetris practice period.
The study will be published on Thursday in BMC Research Notes.
While tetris might have altered the brain, supposedly to be better, it seemed like it had been otherwise for me with results going on a downslope for my F7, F8 and F9 papers.
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