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Study shows that digital treatment with Tetris gameplay can dramatically reduce trauma memories
19 February 2026
New research involving Oxford researchers has shown that a simple digital intervention that includes gameplay can dramatically reduce intrusive memories of trauma in a month, even to the point of being symptom-free after six months. This treatment was also very effective at reducing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more generally. The findings have been published this week in The Lancet Psychiatry.
The ground-breaking study, funded by Wellcome, carried out a randomised controlled trial of 99 healthcare workers exposed to trauma at work during the Covid-19 pandemic. The results demonstrate huge potential to implement a highly scalable, low intensity, easily accessible digital treatment that could transform how we prevent and treat PTSD for people who have been exposed to trauma worldwide.
St Peter’s College Senior Research Fellow Professor Mike Bonsall (Professor of Mathematical Biology, Department of Biology, Oxford University) led on the design and statistical analysis for the trial – and in particular the focus on the mechanistic understanding of how reactivation of intrusive memories, their vividness, and use of the intervention interact to determine outcomes. He said: ‘What is shown is that reactivation of intrusive memories with intermediate levels of vividness achieve the best outcomes in reducing these memories – a finding that fits with theoretical predictions.’
Read the full news story here.
Professor Mike Bonsall is a Senior Research Fellow at St Peter's College and Professor of Mathematical Biology in the University of Oxford Department of Biology. His research focuses on applications of mathematics to problems in the life sciences (and beyond). In detail, he is interested in population biology (population dynamics, community ecology, evolutionary ecology). Research in his group focuses on a wide range of questions such as the population and evolutionary dynamics of life history strategies (e.g. the evolution of longevity), the role of spatial structure on shared enemy and competing enemy interactions, the effects of enrichment on the diversity of ecological communities, the interplay between noise and dynamics in multispecies interactions and the evolution of resistance to microbes. Many of these projects involve the development of theoretical models in conjunction with experiments or observations in the field or laboratory. To this end, his group aims to test different ecological and evolutionary ecology theories by fitting relevant mathematical models to appropriate ecological experimental (or observational) data.