DON’T GIVE UP hope if your child spends hours glued to the PlayStation controller, tuned out of the real world. There may be more in the kid’s future than asking the children of former classmates if they want fries with their burgers.
According to a study published last month in the Archives of Surgery, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association, you may have a budding surgeon on your hands — and a good one, at that.
The researchers, a group of doctors from top-flight hospitals and universities, wanted to find out if video games could be helpful in training surgeons to do laparoscopic surgery — operations in which tiny surgical tools and cameras are inserted into the body through small incisions, then manipulated remotely by the surgeon.
The researchers had a ready-made laboratory for their experiment — the Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills Shoot-Out. Top Gun is a program designed to help surgeons improve their skills in competition with one another. The surgeons perform simulated surgeries and are rated on the quality and speed of their work.
In comparing the Top Gun scores from 2002, the researchers found that surgeons who played video games more than three hours a week had a distinct advantage over their colleagues. Past gamers committed 37 percent fewer errors than non-gamers, and were 27 percent faster. The more time they spent playing games, the better they were in the surgery competition.
So, are those kids just zoned-out slackers or potential surgical stars? Who knows? But its something to think about the next time they beg for the latest, bleeding-edge game machine.
Think of it as an investment in your comfortable retirement.