Canadian researchers use Tetris videogame to correct lazy eye

A game of Tetris can be a great way to escape boredom or stress, but this venerable video game is also gaining a reputation with medical researchers — not to relieve boredom, but in how it can help people escape from disorders such as amblyopia — also known as lazy eye.

Doctors usually treat lazy eye by giving the patient an eye-patch to cover up their 'good' eye, forcing the 'lazy' eye to do all the work. For adults, this usually isn't a problem, but with children and teens, the researchers note that the patch doesn't get used, because of social pressures and fear of teasing.

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"It's hated," said Dr. Robert Hess, the Director of the McGill Vision Research Unit, at McGill University in Monteal, according to The Canadian Press. "It's universally hated because kids firstly don't want to be condemned to the poor vision of their amblyotic eye. They don't want to be teased. And it's annoying to have on. So there's lots of psychological and social reasons that have led to a low compliance."

However, playing a video game is going to be a lot more fun for a child or teen, so it's a perfect alternative to the patch. The specific benefit of Tetris, as opposed to other video games, is that it's simple, it's repetitive, it involves using the visuospatial parts of our brain (some of the highest-order parts of our brain), but it also includes two distinct aspects — the mostly-static blocks that the player has already dropped, and the moving blocks that the player manipulates.

This last point is what Hess and his team used to put the game to work in helping those with lazy eye. Outfitting a set of goggles so that the tetris screen was projected independently for both eyes, with each eye only seeing part of the game.

"Using head-mounted video goggles, we were able to display the game dichoptically, where one eye was allowed to see only the falling objects and the other eye was allowed to see only the ground-plane objects," said Hess, according to CP.

Participants in the study were separated into two groups. One got to play the dichoptic Tetris game for an hour a day for six weeks, and the other played a regular game of Tetris for the same time, but while wearing a patch over their good eye. Those participants that played the game while patched did show some improvement in the vision of the weaker eye, but those that played the dichoptic game showed significantly more. The patched participants were then switched to the dichoptic game afterwards, and they too showed significant improvement.

"The game itself is sort of incidental in a way," Hess said in the interview. "It just provides us with a platform to administer this training that we need to do in a way that's enjoyable."

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This isn't the only example of using Tetris for medical purposes. Researchers have already used the game in studies of how it can help post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks, and in studying how playing the game can improve the cortical thickness and efficiency of the brain.

Hess and his colleagues, who published their study in the journal Current Biology hope to start clinical trials for their new dichoptic therapy later this year.

(Photo courtesy: Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press)

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