reaction paper 5

Part 2 of the happiness advantage further explains the seven principles.

The Tetris Effect is the third of those principles. The author begins this part of the chapter by giving the very simple analogy: someone who plays a game (the author gives a personal anecdote of his related to Grand Theft Auto) for hours and hours on end suddenly starts seeing it wherever they go and whatever they do. They start dreaming about it, working it around their daily lives, and become obsessive. Their brain makes everything connect somehow with the pattern they’re used to, the game in this case. In the same way, our brain can become stuck in a certain pattern that we are used to, and it becomes difficult to view the world in any other way that the one that it has been repeating incessantly. This pattern is not only the result of being obsessed with a game, but it can be caused by something as impactful as our profession. The author shares research that shows that people who have professions where they are used to looking for mistakes, from being an accountant to being a lawyer, had a tendency to only see negatives in their lives the same way they do at their jobs.

As a solution to this, the author proposes that the pattern be flipped: if our brains are so adamant at making connections and being stuck on patterns, it simply needs to be rewired. We should start training our brains to start making positive connections instead.

I do believe that the “Tetris effect” that happens in our brains is not a myth, but I was irked by the author’s first story in this chapter. When he says that he almost stole a police car because his brain was so accustomed to that pattern, I thought this idea played too much into the now old-fashioned idea that video games were the cause of violence, drug use, etc. This would mean that nothing would ever be anyone’s fault, and murders that were committed in a similar way to some video games, as it happened with “Slender Man”, would just be unfairly justified as the video game’s fault and not the person who committed the crime. However, I understand that this was just a story that the author wanted to share to illustrate his point, which ultimately does not take away from the rest of his arguments, which I mostly found valid and logical. For example, his argument for how someone’s job can affect their entire worldview is something that I see happen constantly. I know of a lawyer who has seen so many cases where tragedy occurs to young women that he forbids his adult daughter, who lives at home, to ever go out outside of going to her job. It’s an extreme case, but I think it shows the importance of knowing how the “Tetris Effect” can affect not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us.