An Unsuspected Usefulness

Tetris was launched by a Russian scientist in 1984. 30 years later, 70 million games were sold, Tetris has been downloaded to 130 million mobile phones and over one billion people have tried it (3 million per day on facebook some says) !

Yet it is so simple, shapes fall from the sky and you have to fit them into each other as you can.

Researchers from the University of Plymouth have demonstrated the usefulness of Tetris: playing this game reduces the intensity and frequency of symptoms of persons suffering from withdrawal. Recent studies have shown that withdrawal symptoms (such as encountered by drug addicts or alcoholics, for example) can be correlated to images formed in our brain. The team from Plymouth showed that playing Tetris reduces these images related to withdrawal.