(no the pic has nothing to do with the story but hey who DOESNT wanna see Jessica Alba being a gamer?)

 

So I was trolling the intrawebs and found this story on wired.co.uk a summary of the article is what is here click the link at the end for the full story.

 

A new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has proven that the superior hand-eye coordination skills honed from hours of joystick-based gaming are the same talents required to master the world's most advanced robotic surgery tools.

more after the break

The study sought to identify the developmental effect video games have on training future surgeons. "A new era has started," explained Sami Kilic, lead author of the study and associate professor and director of minimally invasive gynaecology at UTMB. Kilic was inspired to conduct the study after seeing his son easily take control of a robotic surgery simulator at a medical convention. "Robotic surgery has been implemented in the medical field recently -- most of the physicians were not trained for it. We had to come up with an idea of how to train our trainers."

The surgical skills of the high school students (who played video games an average of two hours a day) and the college students (some of whom spent four hours a day gaming) were found to be equal to the UTMB physicians -- and in some cases, even exceeded the skills of the residents. The UTMB physicians were able to save face when the same test groups were asked to perform non-robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery, the physicians unsurprisingly coming out on top.

full story here as I just pulled some of the interesting tidbits from the article. 

(source: http://www.wired.co.uk)