In my many talks, presentations and speeches on the future of health care, one of the things that I really try to impress upon my audiences is the importance of unlearning—that is letting go of old knowledge or old ways of doing business. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, but if one wants to prosper in the Exponential Economy it is a skill that all of us will need to practice with increasing frequency.
To this end, I’d like to share two recent articles. The first is from NewScientistTech and it discusses how studies have found that surgical residents performed better during simulated surgery after playing on a Wii console. Now, the notion that a video game might help improve a surgeon’s performance might seem a little counter-intuitive, but as ever more surgeries become laproscopic and microscopic in nature, the dexerity of the surgeon is going to become even important than it already is. The challenge that this prsents is that old surgeons (as well as parents who want their children to become surgeon) might have to unlearn their bias against video games. In this case, video-gaming skills might actually make residents better surgeons in the near future.
On a slightly different level, this second report suggests that doctors might be able to detect cancer by the “feel” of the cancer cell. According to a recent study, cancer cells, in some situations, are softer than healthy cells. If true, this might require doctors to unlearn their current and preferred methods for detecting and testing for cancer.
Interested in other posts on the topic of unlearning? Check out these articles:
Learning to Unlearn: Case Study #1
Examples of Unexponential Thinking
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
