Using games for rehabilitation

One of the few things I recall from my Psych 101 class back in college was the tale of Pavlov and his dogs. As it turns out you can teach yourself to associate sounds with actions. A new virtual reality therapy is doing just that, helping those with addictions connect things they hear in game with the will to resist temptation.

The game, created at Duke University by Professor Zach Rosenthal, works with rehabilitation patients to try to control their cravings when they are not in therapy. Because the patient is immersed in an environment similar to that they would find in the outside world, the temptations are fairly convincing. Rosenthal explains that cravings are a learned mental behavior, and if you can associate something, say a particular tone (like Pavlov's bell) with resisting that craving, you create a new learned behavior, this time a positive one. I love it when I see positive uses for video games. It proves that we as a society can learn so much from the games we play.