A Painful Series of Tetris Shots

I've got to stop all this worrying about money. College funds, retirement funds, all the things the stock market took away this past few months. It's not good to dwell on it. It's not optimistic.
An optimist would be investing, now that it seems things are on the upswing. And so I'm going to start focusing on things that can give some hope--or at least a little entertainment--in weeks to come. Just as some turn to gambling (are all gamblers by default, optimists?) I'm seriously considering putting some of my teacher's mite on stocks. It's only money, right?
And the first thing I'll back, as soon as I can scrape a couple of sawbucks together, will be anything that has anything to do with the Tetris. Because dang! That video game can fix anything!
This comes up because I've recently become interested in brain waves and brain wave therapy (ask me later). In the course of reading about brain wave research, I came across Tetris again and again.
Exhibit A: Researchers at Harvard Medical School used Tetris to study how the brain uses dreams to learn things. The study's subjects, who were asked to learn to play Tetris every day, reported dreaming about the game, or seeing images of the game's colored shapes floating before their eyes just as they went to sleep. The scientists believed that their brains used the sleeping state to reinforce and review the things they needed to learn. To this day, the person who dreams about vexing problem he or she must solve is said to be experiencing the "Tetris effect." (Here's a report in Scientific American, 2000)
Exhibit B: Playing Tetris within a certain time after a traumatic experience may help alleviate "flashbacks" and other post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Oxford University scientists came up with these results after showing their subjects a disturbing film, then having some of them play the game. Those who played, later reported fewer or lighter memories of the stressful film.
(BBC report here)
The theory: If you busy yourself with Tetris soon after the traumatic event, you interfered with the brain's ability to form vivid memories of it. Therefore, these vivid memories will not come back so strongly in the form of flashbacks. Admittedly, this study still needs some follow-ups.
(And, I hate to admit it, but this seems to back up my grandmother's folk wisdom about "putting it out of your mind. Just keep yourself busy with something and forget about it." She can't be right about that. Can't, can't, can't.)
If it's true, though, I could see myself stocking up on hand-held Tetris--for emergencies. They'd be in my house, to play in the back of the ambulance after my husband's ladder and chain-saw accident. They'd be in my car, for after that truck driver almost kills me. (Well, wait. Maybe no Tetris in the car. That's what texting's for.) Who knows, maybe if I'd had Tetris, I would remember junior high as a land of rainbows and unicorns, where goodwill and kindness reigned over all and nerds and gearheads walked together in peace.
It would have helped this pas few weeks, for sure.

Here's a guitar version of the theme, in case it isn't already stuck like glue inside your head.