Study suggests Tetris may help brain efficiency

By Randiah Green, The Independent Collegian/UWire

Published Sept. 18, 2009

UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO -- Scientists at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently completed a three-month study that indicates playing the video game Tetris may increase brain efficiency.

The study took place in late 2008 to 2009 and was published by Biomedical Central Research Notes earlier this month, said Richard Haier, professor of psychology and pediatric neurology at the University of California, Irvine.

Haier said his research team used 26 adolescent girls, from ages 11 to 15. In the study researchers had one group of girls play Tetris for 50 days, while the other group did not.

“We took adolescent girls because their brain is still developing, and we used girls because these girls did not play computer games as much,” he said. “We brought them in and scanned them and then the experimental group practiced Tetris for three months and the control group did not practice Tetris.”

Sherif Karama, a Montreal Neurological Institute researcher who helped conduct the study, said the study had some interesting results.

“The group that practiced Tetris ended up with a thicker cortex in some areas of the brain presumably involved in visual-spatial processing tasks like Tetris,” Karama said. “Also, practice led to less activation and interpreted as suggesting greater efficiency in some areas of the brain.”

In addition to having a thicker cortex, Karama said, the group of participants who played Tetris had an increase of cerebral grey matter.

“Cortical grey matter is one of the seats of neuronal bodies and essential, among other things, to analytical and other types of reasoning skills,” he said.

Haier said he was approached by Blue Planet Software, the company that owns Tetris, asking him to repeat the study, which was originally done in 1992.

“We used Tetris back in 1992 to study learning. We were interested in what happened in the brain when you learn something. The Tetris company contacted me to see if I would be interested in doing a follow up, to study brain matter after playing Tetris,” he said.

Haier said that with this study he wanted to find out if there would be an increase in certain types of brain matter after three months of learning something.

Karama said, the results of this study reinforce how practice makes perfect and show that playing a video game, known to tap certain skills, can have a large impact on the brain.

”We all know that with practice, we get better. This is true for Tetris but also for most if not all cognitive tasks. Such improvements are obviously associated with changes in the brain that are related to this practice,” he said. “While our study was on Tetris, it is possible that intense practice on other cognitively demanding tasks would also lead to relatively gross brain changes similar to those observed here. If we go further, we could also speculate that stopping stimulation might lead to a reversal of the changes, but that’s for another study.”

Karama said what should interest people about this study is not that their brains change with practice, but that they get better with practice.

Haier said this is because it takes less brain activity to perform a task such as playing Tetris after three months.

Though the results of the study showed a thicker cortex and an increase in grey matter, Haier said, he is not sure whether it is a beneficial change or not.

“People are making inferences that playing games like Tetris would make changes in the brain that would be good for you. We don’t have any evidence of that in this study. That requires a different experimental design and we have not done that,” Haier said.

“The main point is that large, clear changes in the brain can be observed with stimulation. While it is well accepted that the brain adapts to stimulation, it was through that its gross structure was more or less fixed at a certain age,” Karama said. “Our findings further suggest that peak areas of functional changes do not necessarily overlap with the structural changes. The reason for that is still unclear.”