Mind Control Techniques Improve Surgeon's Skills

A new study has found that trainee ophthalmic surgeons can significantly improve their surgical skills by regulating their own brainwave activity, using a process called neurofeedback.

Researchers from Goldsmith's College, University of London (UK) randomly assigned 20 trainee ophthalmic microsurgeons to either Sensory Motor Rhythm-Theta (SMR) or Alpha-Theta (AT) neurofeedback groups that received eight 30-minute sessions of electroencephalogram (EEG) training; a further eight trainees served as a randomized subset of a "no-treatment” control group. Pre- and postassessment of the trainees included a skills laboratory surgical procedure with timed measures and expert ratings from video-recordings by consultant surgeons, together with state and trait anxiety self-reports.

The results showed that SMR training demonstrated advantages absent in the control group, with improvements in surgical skill according to the expert ratings (which included overall technique and suture task), overall time on task, and decreased everyday anxiety. Importantly the decrease in surgical task time was strongly associated with SMR EEG training changes, especially with continued reduction of theta (4-7 Hz) power. In all, SMR-Theta neurofeedback training provided significant improvement in surgical technique while reducing time on task by 26%. AT training produced marginal improvements in technique and overall performance time, which were accompanied by a standard error indicative of large individual differences. Notwithstanding these results, successful within-session elevation of the AT ratio correlated positively with improvements in overall technique. The study was published in the August 2009 issue of BMC Neuroscience, a publication of BioMed Central.

"Overall, the data set provides encouraging evidence of optimized learning of a complex medical specialty via neurofeedback training,” concluded study authors Prof. John Gruzelier, Ph.D., and graduate student Tomas Ros, M.Sc.

Neurofeedback is a therapy technique that presents the user with real-time feedback on brainwave activity, as measured by sensors on the scalp, typically in the form of an EEG display, video display, sound, or vibration. The aim is to provide real-time information to the central nervous system (CNS) as to its current activity, thus helping to regulate it.

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