8 Bizarre Psychological Disorders Affecting Modern Man

5. The Tetris Effect

Here€™s a little experiment for you; shut your eyes and think about what you can see. Probably not much. That€™s good. It means you€™re not suffering from the Tetris Effect. Named after the classic arcade game, the term can actually be applied to a number of stimuli but was first reported in those who spent prolonged periods of time watching those familiar, pixelated shapes falling down the screen. Such behaviour can result in Tetris blocks entering a person€™s dream or even manifesting themselves as a series of conscious hallucinations. The sufferer might see shapes falling from above when they shut their eyes or spot them in the corner of their vision while they go about their day-to-day lives. Many patients report a desire to determine how everyday objects, such as furniture, could fit together to form tidy lines for the ultimate high score. These kinds of symptoms can occur for all sorts of stimuli that a person may be overexposed to. Computer programmers may see lines of code when their eyes are shut, professional Rubik€™s cube solvers can be afflicted with mental images of the 3D puzzle flipping around in mid-air and one report even describes multiple cases of drivers forgetting that their cars weren€™t equipped with weapons in the mid-90s thanks to prolonged sessions with a video game called Descent. A similar effect that can be caused by video gaming is known informally as Guitar Hero eyes or scientifically as the motion aftereffect. Put simply, staring at a constant scrolling stream of guitar notes for too long can cause a visual illusion in which the whole world appears to still be scrolling even after the game has been switched off. The effect does not normally last more than a few minutes and can also be caused by staring out of a train window or travelling down a straight road. Nevertheless, it probably wouldn€™t hurt to take those gaming health warnings a little more seriously.