Ears On

Sawbones who play video games regularly are 37 percent less likely to make a mistake when doing something in your gut with a pointed object, according to a survey of surgeons at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Of 33 surgeons who participated in the study, nine had played video games for at least three hours in the preceding week, and 15 had never played them at all. Those nine were golden: Not only did they make fewer errors, they also performed 27 percent faster, and scored 42 percent higher in a surgical-skills test. The technique in question is laparoscopic surgery, in which a video camera on a stick is inserted into the patient's body, allowing for smaller incisions for the other sharp objects and less invasive procedures overall. "It's like tying your shoelaces with three-foot-long chopsticks," says the author of the study, Dr. James "Butch" Rosser. Yup, he's a gamer: "I use the same hand-eye coordination to play video games as I use for surgery." Maybe we shouldn't worry so much about video-game violence. This guy's itchy trigger finger is saving lives.