Having a Heart Increases Your Chance of Heart Disease

via Reuters

Headline: "Surgeons who play video games more skilled: study."

"Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count..."

Really, that's all you need to know. The article goes on to talk about what hospital and what surgery technique but we don't really care. Point is, video games make your surgeon better at poking around inside you.

But wait a sec...

"Out of 33 surgeons from Beth Israel Medical Center in New York that participated in the study, the nine doctors who had at some point played video games at least three hours per week made 37 percent fewer errors, performed 27 percent faster, and scored 42 percent better in the test of surgical skills than the 15 surgeons who had never played video games before."

So the ones that played games regularly did better? But did the video games really "cause" the surgeons to be better or is it merely coincidence and we're trying to imply more. This is one of my favorite logical fallacies, correlation does not imply causation. What if these surgeons just happen to already be good at manipulating on-screen objects? If that were the case, then they may naturally gravitate towards games as an entertainment device, since they're good at it.

(By the way, you gotta love this math: "Out of 33 surgeons... the nine doctors who had at some point played games... than the 15 surgeons who had never played games." ::counts on his fingers:: ::squints face, looks up:: ::counts his fingers some more:: ::shrugs::)