Could Playing Tetris Help Reduce Your Cravings? - http://clapway.com/2015/08/15/could-playing-tetris-help-reduce-your-cravings456/

Tetris Mania

Today entertainment of all kinds can be found throughout the world from games, outdoor activities, and arts, etc. However, nothing beats entertainment like the classics. Those youthful days of playing Donkey Kong on your Gameboy, or Tetris on your computer. Tetris is still everywhere, and the iconic colored blocks are still just as easily recognizable. Available on virtually all handheld devices, Apple and Android products alike, and most gaming consoles. Tetris will always be a fun game, but could playing Tetris end harmful addictive behavior for good?

How Tetris and Science collide

In recent news, a press release from Plymouth University on the 13th of August, describes how Tetris may help overcome cravings. The cravings can be drugs, food, or sex, and such. The research was published in Addictive Behaviors. There it highlighted that playing Tetris when one had a craving for one of the aforementioned things above, or similar negative habits, Tetris helps to weaken the craving in a natural setting. Furthermore, the effect lasted for over a week’s time. It was also noted that the effect was more influential when intoxicated or under the influence of alcohol.

Other interesting Things About Tetris

In the same press release on the research of how Tetris can help manage cravings, Professor Jackie Andrade said that that playing Tetris decreased craving strength from 70% to 56%. The effect the gameplay is having may be due to the mental process being kept busy and indulged in the gaming experience. Thereby, taking one’s mind off the craving or reducing it in the process. Another professor also mentioned that the effect did not wear off even as the gameplay increased and the effect remaining consistent. This may be important to note because as one becomes familiar with a particular intervention, one acclimates to it and the effect starts to diminish as a tolerance builds up to it. However, with this the effect doesn’t seem to be diminishing as one would expect, but instead has remained consistent as previously mentioned. So, playing Tetris could potentially help in further intervention studies, but also help those with cravings manage their cravings in everyday life.

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Could Playing Tetris Help Reduce Your Cravings?

Able to Imagine the Smell of Food? You Might be Predisposed to Obesity! - http://clapway.com/2015/07/08/able-to-imagine-the-smell-of-food-you-might-be-predisposed-to-obesity-126/

For many of us the smell of some kinds of food makes it difficult to stop from eating, even if we shouldn’t. Even if people are more and more scared of obesity, anyone able to smell but refuse a chocolate cake, for example, is considered to be quite a strong person.

It is a known fact that the smell of food can give us cravings, even if the body doesn’t feel the need to eat something. However, recently a new fact has been discovered: It appears that even an imaginary fragrance can give people insatiable desires.

According to an early research, obese people were likely to have overwhelming cravings based on smell. In addition, on the authority of a new study, obese people are predisposed to imagine the taste of food in a more vivid manner than people who are skinny. Also, the differences in visualizing smells can actually be an important explanation for cravings.

CAN IMAGINATION GENERATE OBESITY?

The researchers who applied D.J. Kavanagh’s elaborated intrusion theory of desire, which states that a mental image of cake might trigger a craving that’s quite hard to pay no attention to, conducted the new study at the John B. Pierce Laboratory and the Yale School of Medicine.

The experiment was based on more than 80 people and each of them had to complete a questionnaire. All questions were related to their ability to imagine visual and odor cues. They were asked to rate the vividness they experienced.

In accordance with the results, people who can imagine the smell of foods at a more vivid rate, have a considerable risk of obesity. This study was created to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behaviour (SSIB) in Denver and it gives us interesting results.

However, the ability to smell food is the tricky business, when it comes to obesity and this is the reason why, according to researchers, future studies will focus on measuring smell ability and not self-reported ratings.

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Maybe Pavlok could train you to not be so into those food smells?:

Able to Imagine the Smell of Food? You Might be Predisposed to Obesity!