Tetris-based trauma intervention cuts intrusive memories for months

A video game from the 1980s may have done what much of modern trauma care often cannot: reliably shut up the mental “replay” loop.

A study highlighted by Euronews, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, reports that a brief intervention built around Tetris sharply reduced intrusive, sensory “flashback” memories among healthcare workers exposed to traumatic events during the COVID-19 pandemic. The protocol—called Imagery Competing Task Intervention (ICTI)—was developed at Uppsala University with the research body P1vital, and trialled with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.

The approach is simple. Participants first briefly reactivated a traumatic memory (without narrating it in detail), then performed a visuospatial “mental rotation” task while playing Tetris in a deliberately slow, controlled way for about 20 minutes. The idea is to occupy the brain’s visuospatial working memory so the intrusive image has less bandwidth to reconsolidate at full vividness.

The results, at least as described, are not subtle. The ICTI group reportedly dropped from about 14 intrusive memories per week at baseline to roughly one per week after four weeks—around ten times fewer than comparison groups who listened to classical music or received “treatment as usual.” At six months, 70% of those in the ICTI arm were reported to be completely free of intrusive memories. The study also found broader improvements in anxiety, depression, and general functioning by week four.

Two caveats deserve daylight. First, “treatment as usual” is often a moving target in mental health research, and the control condition matters when your intervention is structured, novel, and attention-grabbing. Second, the real test is replication in different populations, with transparent preregistration, effect sizes, and careful accounting for expectancy effects and differential adherence.

Still, the practical implications are hard to ignore. If a scalable, low-cost, largely self-administered protocol can measurably reduce a core PTSD symptom, why is trauma care still defined by long waitlists, credential bottlenecks, and expensive talk-based scarcity? One answer is that mental health systems are optimized for licensing regimes and reimbursement codes, not for interventions that can be delivered cheaply, quickly, and without extensive gatekeeping.

If ICTI holds up, it will raise an awkward question for the therapeutic establishment: what exactly are patients paying for—treatment, or the surrounding institutional process? The most radical element here may not be Tetris. It’s the implication that effective care can be standardized, brief, and decentralized—three words that rarely survive contact with healthcare bureaucracy.