How To Develop Razor-Sharp Focus With the Tetris Effect

In the movie Pixels, there is a scene where Tetris blocks suddenly fall from the sky, arrange themselves on buildings in the real world and thus destroy them.

Remember the image above, for it’ll be your guide towards razor-sharp focus.

The Result of Obsessive Play

In 1990, Vladimir Pokhilko wanted to stay at a friend’s house in Tokyo for a week. There was only one problem: They had a brand new Game Boy. And Tetris.

At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together. Dubiously hunting a job and a house, I was still there two months later, still jobless, still playing.

What Vladimir Pokhilko learned in those two months changed how we view video games forever. Being a clinical psychologist, he became obsessed with the idea that Tetris must have an impact on our neural system.

Some kind of…Tetris effect.

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One year later, at the University of California, Irvine, Richard Haier scanned the brains of Tetris players. He found the game initially raises cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMR), the amount of sugar your brain uses to perform.

But the more you play, the more efficient your brain becomes. After a few weeks, your GMR stays steady, while your performance increases seven-fold.

Tetris trains your brain to stop using inefficient gray matter, perhaps a key cognitive strategy for learning.

This initial finding lead to a waterfall of research on the subject:

• In 1994, Okagaki & French showed video games may improve spatial skills, such as mental rotation, spatial perception and spatial visualization.
• In 2000, Stickgold et al. saw even amnesia patients dream about Tetris after playing, indicating it comes with its own form of memory, likely related to procedural memory.
• In 2009, Oxford University researchers found Tetris reduces post-traumatic stress disorder when played soon after the traumatic event.
• Also in 2009, Stickgold did a follow-up study showing Tetris increased grey matter in the brain, which boosts your brain’s efficiency and memory capacity.

But what makes the Tetris effect special, compared to other findings from cognitive research?

When Games Turn Into Reality

The Tetris effect is one of very few biological phenomena that makes its benefits obvious to those it affects.

How?

When you play the game for a few hours straight, your GMR skyrockets and you feel like you’re on a high. It’s the biological connection to a well-known phenomenon in psychology: flow.

After you spend a certain amount of time in this state of optimal performance, your Tetris training spills over into the real world — just like in the scene from Pixels.

You might dream of Tetris, see Tetris blocks on your living room floor or even hallucinate about boxes and items organizing themselves properly on grocery store shelves or in the trunk of your car.

But how can you use all this to improve your focus?

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Here’s the real beauty of the Tetris effect:

Tetris is just a metaphor.

It’s not limited to video games. Whatever activity triggers flow for you you can use to boost your brain’s efficiency.

The Tetris effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next.

For most of us, what we do at work each day isn’t exactly exciting. But what you do in your free time is up to you. If you choose well, you can become a lot better at everything you do, not just work.

How do you become laser-focused?

Find Your Tetris

Your Tetris may not be a video game and it may not be what others think is fun. But whatever activity spreads through your entire life and makes you see the world as a space full of opportunity is your shot. And you can win so much more than just the game.

Some days I write for one hour. Some days for four. Some days for eight.

I’m not just a writer during those hours. I’m a writer 24/7. When I’m not writing, I spend most of my time thinking about writing or what to write about.

When I see text, I see opportunity. Each word is a way to improve, each line a chance to level up. I’m always focused, yet always open to new ideas.

That’s the kind of life I love to live — and it feels just like a game of Tetris.

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