Video games as anxiety treatment

This sounds like very cool research:

It’s too soon to load Tetris onto the equipment that soldiers carry into battle, but there’s an intriguing hint that playing that geometric game might act as what scientists are calling a “cognitive vaccine” against the horrible flashbacks that characterize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which more and more of those returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering.

The idea of using Tetris to vaccinate soldiers against PTSD rests on two facts. One, the brain has a finite processing capacity for each of two kinds of information: sensory/visual/spatial and narrative/meaning. Two, there is a window of about 6 hours to disrupt memory consolidation. What this implies, scientists led by Emily Holmes of the University of Oxford write in a new paper in the open-access journal PLoS One, is that a sufficiently demanding visuospatial task will keep the brain from retaining other spatial/visual information--that is, images, including traumatic ones. Tetris should be such a task, since recognizing the shapes and moving the blocks around places demands on the brain’s spatial-processing channel.

I'm imagining there might be ways these findings could be used to fight agoraphobia. By eliminating some of the "spooky mojo" that a panic attack can attach to a specific location or situation, playing Tetris after an attack might make it less likely that you'll panic the next time you're in a similar location or situation.

Play on, panicky gamers! Yours may yet be the last laugh!