wikipedia | The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams.[1] It takes its name from the video game Tetris.[1]
People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.[1] They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.[1] They may see such colored, moving images when they are falling asleep, a form of hypnagogic imagery.[2]
Those experiencing the effect may feel they are unable to prevent the thoughts, images, or dreams from happening.[3]
A more comprehensive understanding of the lingering effects of playing video games has been investigated empirically as game transfer phenomena (GTP).[4]
The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.[5] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle, the checker pattern of a chess board (or imagining chess pieces in unrelated objects or phenomena), or the involuntary mental visualisation of Rubik's Cube algorithms common among speedcubers.
The earliest example that relates to a computer game was created by the game Spacewar! As documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers: "Peter Samson, second only to Saunders in Spacewarring, realized this one night when he went home to Lowell. As he stepped out of the train, he stared upward into the crisp, clear sky. A meteor flew overhead. Where's the spaceship? Samson thought as he instantly swiveled back and grabbed the air for a control box that wasn’t there." (p. 52.)
Robert Stickgold reported on his own experiences of proprioceptive imagery from rock climbing.[3] Another example, sea legs, are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such movements (see "Illusions of self-motion" and "Mal de debarquement"). The poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling describes the effect, resulting from repetitive visual experience during a route march:
'Tain't—so—bad—by—day because o' company,
But—night—brings—long—strings—o' forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up an' down again.There's no discharge in the war!
— Rudyard Kipling, Boots
Mathematicians have reported dreaming of numbers or equations; for example Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Friedrich Engel, who remarked "last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt-buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them".[6]
It is believed that the reason why these form constants appear has to do with the way the visual system is organized, and in particular in the mapping between patterns on the retina and the columnar organization of the primary visual cortex. Concentric circles in the retina are mapped into parallel lines in the visual cortex. Spirals, tunnels, lattices and cobwebs map into lines in different directions. This means that if activation spreads in straight lines within the visual cortex, the experience is equivalent to looking at actual form constants.[1]
Author Michael Moorcock once observed in print that the shapes he had seen during his migraine headaches resembled exactly the form of fractals. The diversity of conditions that provoke such patterns suggests that form constants reflect some fundamental property of visual perception.
Cultural significance
Form constants have a relationship to some forms of abstract art, especially the visual music tradition, as William Wees noted in his book Light Moving in Time about research done by German psychologist Heinrich Klüver on the form constants resulting from mescaline intoxication. The visual and synaesthetic hallucinations this drug produced resembles, as Wees noted, a listing of visual forms employed in visual music:
[Klüver’s] analysis of hallucinatory phenomena appearing chiefly during the first stages of mescaline intoxication yielded the following form constants: [emphasis original] (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel; (d) spiral. Many phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms. The tendency towards "geometrization," as expressed in these form constants, is also apparent in the following two ways: (a) the forms are frequently repeated, combined, or elaborated into ornamental designs and mosaics of various kinds; (b) the elements constituting these forms, such as squares in the chessboard design, often have boundaries consisting of geometric forms.[3]
These form-constants provide links between abstraction, visual music and synaesthesia. The cultural significance of form constants, as Wees notes in Light Moving in Time is part of the history of abstract film and video.
The practice of the ancient art of divination may suggest a deliberate practice of cultivating form constant imagery and using intuition and/or imagination to derive some meaning from transient visual phenomena.
Psychedelic art, inspired at least in part by experiences with psychedelic substances, frequently includes repetitive abstract forms and patterns such as tessellation, Moiré patterns or patterns similar to those created by paper marbling, and, in later years, fractals. The op art genre of visual art created art using bold imagery very like that of form constants.
In electroacoustic music, Jon Weinel has explored the use of altered states of consciousness as a basis for the design of musical compositions. His work bases the design of sonic materials on typical features of hallucinatory states, and organises them according to hallucinatory narratives. As part of this work, form constants feature prominently as a basis for the design of psychedelic sonic and visual material.[4]
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