Study Reveals Surgeons Perform Better While Listening to Rock Music
This may or may not soothe your anxiety going into your next operation, but a study has found that surgeons actually perform better while listening to rock music in the operating room.
The type of procedure this study focused on in particular is laparoscopy, which according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, is a procedure used to check abdominal organs, or women's pelvic organs. New surgeons were observed as they performed their duties with no music, while listening to music at a medium volume (45–50 dB) and at a high volume (65–70 dB). The speed and accuracy at which they carried out the tasks were recorded to find the results.
The bands they used for the experiment? The Beatles, which were considered soft rock in their findings, and AC/DC, which were considered hard rock.
The results showed that playing The Beatles at a medium volume increased the speed at which the surgeons carried out a peg transfer — the process of lifting objects with one's non-dominant hand and transferring midair to their dominant hand — and increased their accuracy in giving stitches, as opposed to performing without any music at all. However, if The Beatles were turned up to a higher volume, these results were lost.
Playing AC/DC produced positive results at both medium volumes and high volumes. At medium volume, the surgeons were better at precision cutting and balloon preparation, and at high volume, the speed of these tasks was increased as well.
Ultimately, genre and volume have an overall effect on surgeons' performances on the table. Not that we necessarily want them to rush as they cut us open, though.
Check out a detailed report of the data here.
Spotify conducted a similar study of their own a couple of years ago to determine which genre surgeons tend to listen to while they're in the operating room, and they found that of the 90 percent of doctors that do prefer to listen to music while they're working, 49 percent of them choose rock [via Business Insider].
At least we dominate in something!