Go To Medical School--Or Just Play Video Games

Discover Magazine has published an article entitled "Your Brain on Video Games: Could they actually be good for you?" The article is only available to Discover subscribers, but The Technology Suits has posted a summary of the important segments. For example: researchers are beginning to believe that gamers make the best surgeons when it comes to laparoscopic techniques, which makes use of joystick-like controls to perform incredibly miniscule incisions.

Surgeon Butch Rosser [was called] a "Nintendo surgeon". This started his thinking that perhaps his apparent gift among many of his peers was because he was a gamer. Rosser set out to see if there was a correlation. ... "The results were really astounding," he says. "First of all, if you played video games [at any time] in the past, it was found that you were significantly faster and, more importantly, you created fewer errors than people who had no previous video game experience. Then when we looked at whether you were a current video gamer, we found that if you played video games currently, you were over 30 percent better--faster, and created fewer errors--than someone who did not play video games at all."

Another study found gamers had better immediate pattern recognition, which "could really help you avoid accidents" according to psychology professor Alan Castel. He suggests games would be a good training tool for such diverse purposes as surgery, military flight training, and brain surgery rehabilitation. However, the "Nintendo surgeon" also notes that just playing games all day long probably won't get you very far either.