on-track shower protein cocoa 29g +
1/2 a PB wich ~10g
7:29 ofc open
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UNC Health Talk: Beginning CPAP Therapy
"...nothing is as good as CPAP. That’s why it’s important to try really hard to get used to it."
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A few months back I read somewhere that playing Tetris has demonstrated value in PTSD therapy.
This resonates with what we understand about EMDR; but why?
The primary Tetris interaction is with "Baddeley's Working Memory Model": the brain has a strictly limited capacity for processing simultaneous sensory streams. The "working memory" divides tasks between the "phonological loop" (verbal/auditory processing) and the "visuospatial sketchpad" (visual + spatial processing).
- Trauma flashbacks / intrusive memories are vivid visuospatial phenomena that hijack visual cortex function
- Tetris demands rapid spatial/geometric planning - also a visual cortex process
- Visual cortex processing capacity is limited, so Tetris crowds out the trauma-replay cognitive bandwidth
"Tetris therapy" is more than temporary distraction from intrusive memories.
It seems to effectively disrupt 2 distinct phases of memory storage:
- Consolidation: Playing Tetris within hours of a traumatic event blunts intensity of traumatic memory encoding
- Reconsolidation: Each recall of the memory is also an opportunity to disrupt / weaken the memory trace.
The clinical therapeutic sequence is:
- - Establish a safe environment
- - Have the client briefly recall the traumatic memory
- - Play a structured version of Tetris designed to maximize sensory memory trace disruption
In addition to prevention of encoding intensity in newly acquired traumatic memories, and attenuating intensity in established traumatic memories, there's a third value channel in "Tetris therapy": hippocampus regeneration. The hippocampus is a brain structure involved in context-processing, learning, and fear-reduction. There's a known connection between PTSD and under-functioning, or even physically shrunken, hippocampus. MRI imaging in clinical studies pairing "Tetris therapy" with more time-honored/standard protocols (e.g. EMDR) shows increases in physical hippocampus volume.
This therapeutic Tetris variant:
- plays slower
- is limited to a 10-20 minute window (corresponding to neuroscience's Memory Reconsolidation model)
- sustains/maximizes visuospatial engagement (rather than randomly presenting blocks)
- is monitored and adjusted by the therapist
- is part of a clinical protocol context (not just a standalone game variant)
A connection between eye-movement and PTSD relief was recognized way back in 1987. Subsequent investigation and development paved the way for EMDR's emergence in the late 90s-early 2000s as a demonstrated therapeutic tool, before neuroscience developed theories to explain "why it works".