During undergrad and now in medical school, I often clear my head with video games. One favorite is GeoGuessr, a game that drops me onto a random stretch of Google Street View and asks me to figure out where I am. At first, it felt like harmless virtual travel, but over time I realized it was teaching me skills I now use every day at the microscope – especially the habit of spotting patterns.
Before medical school, I worked on the hematology bench as a medical laboratory scientist. Night after night, I scanned smears for blasts, teardrop cells, left shifts, and subtle hints of toxic granulation. The constant time pressure trained my eyes to sort shapes and colors almost without thinking. That routine turned out to be ideal preparation for pathology.
GeoGuessr taps into the same mental loop. One round I land on a foggy highway with no signposts, and the questions start: Are those birch or poplar trees? Is the sign in miles or kilometers? Which side of the road carries traffic? When I open a fresh slide, the same script runs: What organ am I looking at? How is the tissue arranged? Do I see granulomas or germinal centers? Do I need to dig deeper?
The game rewards small clues. A Cyrillic sign points to Eastern Europe, while red clay beside eucalyptus trees hints at Australia. Over time, I collected shortcuts – the look of stop signs, the tint of soil, the style of roadside bollards – that let me narrow the map in seconds. The same instincts guide me on digital slides. A smear dotted with teardrop red cells makes me think of myelofibrosis. A neat sheet of plasma cells on a core biopsy suggests multiple myeloma. The moment I see those patterns, a diagnosis jumps forward.
Shortcuts help, yet context rules. When I spot the Street View car with thick roof bars, my first thought is Guatemala, but it could just as easily be the Dominican Republic – the scenery and language are almost identical. On a slide, keratin pearls steer me toward squamous cell carcinoma, but the same pearls can appear in a benign keratoacanthoma. A quick clue gets me close, but when uncertainty creeps in I slow down, look for a road sign or a deeper layer of tissue, and let the finer details decide.
Both worlds demand attention to the broad scene and the fine print. In GeoGuessr, I zoom out to catch mountain ridges, then zoom in on a license plate, before stepping back again. At the microscope, I move from low-power architecture to high-power nuclei and back – a rhythm that keeps me from locking in too soon.
The best players, like the best pathologists, always circle back. I once dropped a pin in Spain, noticed a Portuguese road sign, and nudged it into Portugal just before the timer hit zero. I’ve previewed hematology slides on my own, only to spot extra findings later when a colleague took another look. Fresh eyes often save the day.
At a school where early pathology exposure is limited, lessons from GeoGuessr and the hematology bench fill a real gap. The game never taught me medicine, but it sharpened pattern recognition, strengthened probabilistic thinking, and made me comfortable with uncertainty. Time spent outside textbooks often trains diagnostic muscles in ways the classroom never will – proof that insight can come from places far beyond medicine.
Now, whether I’m following a dusty road in Senegal or studying a colonic biopsy full of distorted crypts, I scan, compare, reason, and decide. And when the picture finally settles – whether it’s a street or a slide – there’s a quiet click of certainty. In that moment, I know exactly where I am, and I remember that the skill was forged as much in late-night game sessions as at the microscope.
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