Surgeons Who Play

Bang Bang! The Doctor Says: You're Not Dead!

Surgeons who play video games more skilled - U.S. study
19 Feb 2007 21:00:22 GMT19 Feb 2007 21:00:22 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Andrew Stern


CHICAGO, Feb 19 (Reuters Life!) - Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a study said on Monday.
There was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery

You will have heard of this study by now.


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From Scientific America:

Action-Packed Video Games a Sight for Sore Eyes
New study shows that an adult brain's visual cortex can be retrained, which could help people with "lazy" eye see crowded letters more clearly.
By Lisa Stein

EYE CANDY: New study finds that playing action video games may actually be sweet for vision.— REDLINK/CORBIS

Could it be? Could playing video games, long blamed by parents for turning their teens into fat, lazy bums, be good for something? Studies have linked nonstop video gaming to such ills as carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow, not to mention the current obesity epidemic plaguing this nation's young.On the positive side, some research has shown that playing video games can improve eye-hand coordination and visual attention—the ability to search for a target in a jungle of objects, to monitor several items at once, and to keep track of a steady stream of objects zipping swiftly by.And now comes more good news for video game aficionados. A new study, set to be published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that playing fast-paced, action-filled video games significantly sharpens vision, enabling gamers to see tiny, tightly packed letters more clearly.The reason? "Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says study author Daphne Bavelier, noting that after just 30 hours, video gamers showed "a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision." Translation: "They could see figures like those way down on an eye chart more clearly," she says, "even when other symbols crowded in."Bavelier, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says the findings are helping scientists design a way to aid people with amblyopic or "lazy" eye. Amblyopic patients often have trouble discerning normal-size font in a clutter of other letters (such as in newspapers) in much the same way that others might have difficulty reading the fine print in ads and on pill packaging (because the letters seem to collide or run into one another)."We think action video game playing trains the same part of the visual cortex (located in the back of the brain) as that which has a dysfunction in people with lazy eye," Bavelier says. "This is showing us a new path forward for rehabilitation. By combining more traditional methods for doing rehabilitation with these games, we should be in a better position to reopen the visual cortex to learning."

Which shows some of its suggested medical benefits.

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Also:

From an article from the Minnesota Daily:

Assistant professor of psychology and computer science Paul Schrater said he has been interested in perceptual motor skills, such as hand-eye coordination, for over a decade.

Tyler McKeanFirst-year students Andy Fischer, right, and David Reimann play “Halo 3” on Tuesday in Territorial Hall. “I’ve been playing video games for a long time, and I’m still awkward and clumsy,” Fischer said.

Schrater said a video game's virtual environment can help players improve these skills, and not just those needed to beat the game.

"This is one of the interesting things that seem to be true," he said. "The excitement and fun that we see in action video games engages learning in a way that other things don't."

Practicing certain skills will improve them, Schrater said. The excitement of playing an action game helps this more than many other activities.

In his studies, Schrater found that violent video games actually work better to improve motor skills than nonviolent games, like Tetris.

"There's something a little bit mysterious about that," he said.

Tyler McKean University professor of psychology and computer science Paul Schrater claims playing video games can increase perceptual motor skills.

Schrater said while people can learn in boring ways, it could take them thousands of times to show a significant improvement in whatever they are learning. When people do things they find fun, like video games, the process is sped up.

"If the only thing you do is shoot free throws over and over again, it stops being fun, and you stop learning," Schrater said. "There is a deep relationship between things that are challenging and things that are fun."

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Clearly we are at the forefront of important discoveries. In 2006 I seem to recall reading a conflicting study that suggested gaming did nothing to improve eye/hand coordination. When I was a kid video games were played mostly on an Atari. We had games like: Missile Command, Pong, and later on the lord of all games, Donkey Kong. I don't know if we were learning. I do know that my folks thought it a colossal waste of time.

My biggest worry as a librarian is that some of the more "violent" games would offend many parents. In a public library we may have issues of graphic violence that could be unsuitable to have in a public sphere.

In the classroom, again, there may be battles over tax dollars being used for games that would be offensive to some. Would the less engaging games supply the said development. Or would students lose interest and get bored? What kind of games can be used in a classroom setting? Would they need contain graphic and violent content to keep its player in a mode of learning skills needed later? Can they teach them better than more traditional methods?

I am not an educator. I am not out there in the field like many of teachers today. I would enjoy a dialog with teachers. Their futures are our futures.

Lots of interesting questions raised here.

Any thoughts?

Here are the links for the stories I borrowed from:


http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N2J303978.htm

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=action-packed-video-games