EMERGENCY MIND EVIDENCE

What surgeons (and the rest of us) can learn from how musicians train.

A study exploring the links between expert performance in music and surgery.

Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash

The Quick Look

The Evidence

“ Enhancing surgical performance by adopting expert musicians’ practice and performance strategies.” Rui M, Lee JE, Vauthey JN, Conrad C. Surgery. 2018. PMID: 29336812. Find it here.

Question

Surgery and music are both performance arts requiring the ability to successfully and consistently execute sophisticated techniques with precision and grace despite stress, fatigue, and other forms of pressure. In this study from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the investigators dug into the scientific literature about what effects expert level musicians perform at their peak — and what prevents them from doing so — with the goal of exploring what surgeons might learn from their musical counterparts.

Punchline

The authors identify five areas of potential similarity between surgical and musical performance that surgeons might exploit: (1) the role of deliberate practice in training, (2) the importance of ambidexterity, (3)…