Page 636 - Total War on PTSD

clients that if they wanted to recover their brain function and everyday skills, they would have to put in the same amount of effort into rehab exercises as they would to learn to play the violin!
However, one day the lightbulb went off thanks to one of my younger patients and his Nintendo Game Boy. I was always struck by watching kids who played video games for hours on end and imagined, “What if you could get a patient engaged in similar well-produced sophisticated game-based content to do their rehab for that period of time?” Then one day, one of my patients came in with a new Gameboy and I watched him literally glued to playing the game, “Tetris” for more time that I was ever able to get him engaged with a traditional cognitive rehab task. If we could leverage the motivating nature of digital game technology, it might be possible to advance cognitive and physical rehabilitation following a brain injury. It would also be possible to systematically adjust the challenge level of the rehab activity in order to pace engagement with tasks presented at a level that was neither, too easy or too difficult for the patient and thus, keep them in what game developers call the “flow channel”. If one could design rehab games that were that motivating, yet still specifically targeted the cognitive or physical process that needed rehabilitation within a functionally relevant virtual reality context, we might be able to not only increase the amount of training required to effect positive change, but we might also be able to draw in digital generation patients into treatment who might not otherwise seek treatment. We later saw this happen with young digital generation service members (SMs) with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),
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