Good for Your Brain

Tuesday, October 06, 2009
"Freetetris.org, the free online version of the classic puzzle game, may help cognition"

I found this report on Fox News and even though this article is rather short it packs a lot of punch when it comes to telling you how you can improve ones ability to possibly boost brain power. It is common knowledge that stimulating the brain cells early in life can help infants develop and advance cognitively far beyond their peers and advance faster in school, but now there is a study that is showing a certain game can help you to develop cognitively if you play it on a regular basis. Of course you need a computer, but it is free for the taking and it is suggested that the game Tetris can easily give you more brain function. Among the list of things you will gain are improved complex planning skills, critical thinking, reasoning and language.


I chose to look for some interesting enlightening articles this week and found this article to be stimulating me already. I am saving this game to my favorites and will give it a try in order to possibly give me a boost from the humdrums of daily brain activity I use now. We’ll see how this goes, but I am willing to check out this study's research.

I know that almost any puzzle game can stimulate the brain such as doing daily crossword puzzles and such, and being in the healthcare field, I know there is evidence of keeping the elderly from early dementia by stimuating their brains with reading and puzzle type games have been found to be helpful. The reason this sounded interesting is that they actually performed the study using MRI technology to see what effect playing games had on the brain. This game also does not require huge amounts of knowledge to play so almost anyone could play. The rules are to “think quickly enough to slot various-sized cascading blocks into homogenous shapes on the screen.” I’m sure there are other games out there that offer the same effect on the brain but this one is the first studied by MRI so I would pay more attention to using something proven. And apparently Tetris is not anything new to the market, as the article says it has been around for 25 years and is estimated to have been circulated to millions of people. In as short as three months the Mind Research Network found that “adolescent girls who played Tetris not only displayed greater brain efficiency but developed a thicker brain cortex, a sign of increased grey matter.”

Now I know the article said that the game so far has been found to improve your “attention, hand-eye co-ordination, memory and visual spatial problem solving” and I know that I am not an adolescent girl, but if the study indicates playing Tetris will increase my brain power I am all for it. Maybe I should play it before I write my next paper. Well at least it can’t hurt if not for writing content, the article said it increases grey matter in the motor areas of the brain and my typing skills could use some improvement.