After a long day at work, there’s not much more therapeutic than a round of blasting terrorists or aliens or zombies whatever your bad guy of choice. But if you’re looking for a video game to cure something a little more substantial than the frustrations of your cubicle, you might think you’re out of luck. Not if you suffer from a lazy eye, though! It turns out that can be treated with Tetris.
How can Tetris improve failing vision? Well, a lazy eye is where just one eye is underperforming, meaning that there are ways it can be trained back into shape. To bring the lazy eye back into sync with the healthier eye, researchers used a 2 lens system in which one eye only gets to see the falling pieces, while the other sees only the pieces that have already been placed.
By forcing the two eyes to work together, researchers induce the lazy eye to get its sorry carcass off the couch and get in the game, as it were. After two weeks of treatments, patients who were given the Tetris treatment improved more than those treated with the standard treatment, patching the healthy eye to force the lazy one back into service. The study is notably silent on how bummed out those patients were that they didn’t have an excuse to talk like a pirate for two weeks, but that’s probably neither here nor there.
(via Science Daily)
- Tetris on a Pebble smartwatch? We’re sold.
- Watch the gritty reboot of Tetris here
- There is Tetris in Hell, and you can play it now
