Playing video games can improve your skills, says White Sox Catcher
Chicago White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski could easily have been on the fast track to being sent back to the minors thanks to a lackluster batting average and poor hand eye coordination. Until his Nintendo DS saved him.
Now, Pierzynski is batting .529 with 2 homers and a team-high seven RBI through four games. And he says that several hours of playing video games on his Nintendo DS is the reason. No, he wasn’t playing MLB 2008, but Nintendo’s FLASH FOCUS, which promises to improve a player’s vision and hand eye coorination. The result for Pierzynski is that it has been improving his ability to pick up the baseball.
”With his hand-eye coordination and ability to hit the ball the other way, he should be a big RBI guy,” teammate Paul Konerko said.
This isn’t the only video game that works to improve a person’s eye skills. The Giz reported a few months back that surgeons at Banner Good Samaritan Hospital have been using the Wii to improve their surgical skills. The study consisted of a group of eight trainee surgeons, who spent one hour on the Wii, and the same amount of normal trainees in a surgery virtual reality simulator. The Wii Surgeons played games that required delicate, small and precise movements such as Marble Mania, which gets the player to control a ball over a 3D maze. The results (surgeons playing the Wii improved over 50% against those in the Virtual surgery simulator) were promising enough to conclude that a cheap Wii could be an excellent substitute to enhance surgery skills in third world countries.
Hat tip: The Giz
Tags: DS