Response to Jeffrey Goldsmith Article

According to Jeffrey Goldsmith Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov. As a Russian AI man, he had designed games for fun and suddenly arrived to the idea for the game known as Tetris. A researcher discovered that on higher levels of Tetris the brains of the players required less energy. I found it interesting that according to Haier Tetris has a huge learning curve. He found that in first time users, Tetris increases cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMRs) which means that brain energy consumption soared. According to Haier, “Yet, after four to eight weeks of daily doses, GMRs sink to normal, while performance increases seven-fold, on average. Tetris trains your brain to stop using inefficient gray matter, perhaps a key cognitive strategy for learning. In fact, the lowest final GMRs are found in the best players’ brains, the ones most efficient at dealing with Tetris’s Daedalian geometry” (11). This is intriguing because I think this can be applied to all videogames. For a videogame that one has never played before it would require the player to learn how the game functions which would stimulate brain activity. However, after the player has become accustomed to the game it becomes almost reflexive in a way where the player goes off instinct. He explains that the GMRs are used to learn the trick to Tetris so that the player does not have to constantly learn about the game.

It is interesting how he talks about the Tetris effect and its impact on the brain and how gamers play the game. It is intriguing how he believes that “all of our mental activities are analogous and each as addictive as the next” (13). Does he believe that every single mental activity we do is by making some kind of comparison and that we cannot help but think in those ways? In a way I can kind of see that because in order to form sentences (also known as complete thoughts) we use multiple words or images to construct a larger picture or a singular idea. One of the most difficult things to do in the world is create an original idea. A wise man will tell people that there is nothing new under the sun, and in many cases that is true. However, humans as a whole can build improvements of things based off the foundations of an idea that was already there. In all the years humans have existed not one human has ever discovered an adequate answer to the origin of language. Some people say it came from God, others said we evolved over time to develop it. But the one thing that has occurred to me is that language as a whole is an incredibly unnecessary skill to have for survival. However despite how unnecessary language is to survive in the world it is also the reason why humans became the most dominant species on the planet. Without language humans would have never made it so far as to create videogames and Tetris itself. Furthermore without language there would never have been a study to research the brains reaction to games like Tetris and this article would have never existed. Language itself is humanity’s greatest strength.