The Tetris Effect: How Everything You Do Shapes Your Reality
In 1984, a software engineer named Alexey Pajitnov came up with a simple game that took the world by storm.
Obsessed with puzzles, Pajitnov imagined a scenario where he could assemble wooden shapes in a box. These boxes would fall from the sky and would be manipulated by the player to fit as nicely as possible into the box. It became the game we today as Tetris.
What happened next was unexpected. Fans of Tetris loved the game so much they started seeing it everywhere. For awhile, such thoughts were dismissed as symptoms of gaming addiction, but researchers eventually became to take notice of this phenomenon.
One player was shopping at a supermarket when he noticed how one set of cereal boxes could fit perfectly on the row below it. Another player started wondering if buildings would nicely between each other if they were rotated or flipped.
Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold was particularly curious. He had experienced the feeling of scaling rocks in his sleep after a day of mountain climbing. Like those who had played Tetris, he couldn’t get rid of those images no matter how hard he tried.
What if they were somehow interlinked?
