Heard an interesting comment on the radio yesterday.
Apparently medical schools are having difficulty training the up coming generation of new surgeons.
It would seem that people in their late teens early 20's simply do not have the fine manual dexterity that former generations had and struggle to acquire the fine motor skills necessary to preform the fine cuts and stitching necessary to be a surgeon.
The suggestion was made that there have been a whole generation of young people who have simply never done the sort of things with their hands that previous generations did as children and who therefore have simply not acquired the hand eye fine coordination and dexterity that older people take for granted.
Children of the 60's and 70's grew up making things out of stuff like Bilofix. Lego and Meccano (Very fiddly) Not to mention all the other model making type activities that I recall as being pretty routine.
A lot of play nowadays with younger people seems to involve jabbing at screens, buttons or keyboards.
While some of these activities are intellectually quite stimulating, they do nothing for developing fine motor control.
After all, you cant learn to ride a bike simply by watching somebody doing so on a youtube clip!
Are we as a society building up a potentially really quite big problem here??
Apparently medical schools are having difficulty training the up coming generation of new surgeons.
It would seem that people in their late teens early 20's simply do not have the fine manual dexterity that former generations had and struggle to acquire the fine motor skills necessary to preform the fine cuts and stitching necessary to be a surgeon.
The suggestion was made that there have been a whole generation of young people who have simply never done the sort of things with their hands that previous generations did as children and who therefore have simply not acquired the hand eye fine coordination and dexterity that older people take for granted.
Children of the 60's and 70's grew up making things out of stuff like Bilofix. Lego and Meccano (Very fiddly) Not to mention all the other model making type activities that I recall as being pretty routine.
A lot of play nowadays with younger people seems to involve jabbing at screens, buttons or keyboards.
While some of these activities are intellectually quite stimulating, they do nothing for developing fine motor control.
After all, you cant learn to ride a bike simply by watching somebody doing so on a youtube clip!
Are we as a society building up a potentially really quite big problem here??
