From gamer to brain surgeon- yes, its possible!

According to a recent Canadian University study, those that regularly play games like Call Of Duty, Halo or World of Warcraft have developed such high-end eye-hand coordination that their brains have been effectively ‘rewired’.

In fact, some hardcore gamers have reached such an advanced skill level they could become keyhole or laparoscopic surgeons, where the use of images displayed on a TV screen was routine.

By using brain scans, the researchers were able to demonstrate that gamers changed the way their brains worked during so-called ‘visuomotor’ challenges – those that link vision with physical actions.

In an interview with UK magazine www.metro.co.uk, Lauren Sergio, associate professor in the Faculty of Health at York University in Ontario, said, ‘We tested how the skills learned from video game experience can transfer over to new tasks, rather than just looking at brain activity while the subject plays a video game.’

This was done by monitoring 13 hardcore male gamers in their 20s and 13 who never played computer games, asking them to complete difficult visuomotor tasks, such as using a joystick or looking one way and reaching in the opposite direction.

The scans revealed those who rarely played games used the parietal cortex – the brain area typically involved in hand-eye co-ordination – while the experienced gamers used the prefrontal cortex.

This may well come as good news for those that have teenagers that are seemingly glued to their PC’s playing games- in reality they could be thought of as brain surgeons just waiting to be discovered.