Don’t despair over kids who sit in their basements and play video games for hours on end — they could one day save your life. The Huffington Post reports that “scientists at University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston pitted high school sophomore gamers, college gamers, and medical residents against each other to see which group would perform better using virtual surgery tools.” The results were clear: the high school gamers performed better virtual surgery than the medical residents.
Of course, performing well in “virtual” surgery is much different from performing well in actual surgery, so you probably shouldn’t try to save money by asking your neighbor’s couch potato kid to remove your appendix anytime soon.
All the same, the Huffington Post says that the study “measured skills in 32 categories, including hand-eye coordination, pressure on the controls, and time,” so it seems that playing games does give people practice in useful skills that could help them one day if they choose to become medical professionals.
A video outlining UTMB’s experiment is posted below.
