Trading altcoins on the brink of addiction – Cointelegraph Magazine

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Whether working in visual innovation or simply as a journalist, I have made a career of diving head first into ideas that I know nothing about.

The fresher and more complex the puzzle to be solved, the more I dig, going from the unknown to the known. And if I’m lucky, I offered a one-day adrenaline rush and unusual dreams in return for my services.

When I started I worked as a news reporter, a job that required me to write up to six stories a day. On top of that, the pressure to grasp every word at a presidential press briefing, for example, can be breathtakingly intense and require such inconceivable attention. The only comparison I could make would be cryptocurrency day trading.

And like crypto, my job often visited me late at night. Once in bed, I would feel a cursor blinking just beyond my peripheral vision, or I would see hazy titles written and rewritten so that they didn’t overstep their character limits.

The US president is seeking an agreement with Iran. Delete, delete, delete. President calls for trust with Iran on Was I Asleep? Was I whispering to myself? The questions were the same then as they are today.

Even picking up a box of cereal at the grocery store during this time could trigger the impression that the computer keys are being squashed between my fingers.

As I learned at the time, what I was going through had something to do with the so-called Tetris effect.

You see, when Tetris came out in the 1980s, people were so addicted to Russian-American engineer Alexey Pajitnov’s video game that they saw and heard it in everything they did.

A writer for Wired in the early 1990s even called the game a pharmatronic in reference to its addictive powers.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldsmith wrote of the game: For days I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. On rare trips out of the house, I visually assemble cars, trees and people.

Seems familiar? Do you see crypto candlesticks?

Pajitnov told Wired: You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started playing and never had time to finish the code. People continued to play, to play, to play. My best friend said, I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.

Tetris dreams have become a popular topic of conversation among gamers and psychologists. In fact, psychiatry professor Robert Stickgold and colleagues at Harvard Medical School found that among those they trained to play the game, over 60% said they dreamed of associated images.

Stickgold argued that these dreams of Tetris were just part of how humans process information from our waking hours.

Tetris has also been linked to the state of flux, the name given to the groove you get when you focus so strongly on a goal that the world around you vanishes.

Kerr agrees that the crypto visions I have had, mostly late at night, resemble the Tetris effect. But he is quick to point out that our brains will gravitate towards the puzzles, whatever they are.

We are natural problem solvers. And crypto is like a big puzzle in some ways. The dream has been linked to problem solving skills. And crypto is a problem we want to solve, solve, and make money, says Kerr.

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