The Haversian Canal

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May 23, 2006

Frame of Mind for Studying

You need to learn what you don't know. Who's teaching you? You. As you study, you need to know what you know and what you don't know, so you can repeat the information you don't know to your future self. So you need to record what you don't know. You need to make a record. You need to produce a record. Making a product, in my case, notecards, is, in essence, you asking questions of your future self, and preparing answers in case your future self doesn't know the answer.

As you go through your notecards, if you know the answer, you can think it faster than you can read it or even say it, but it is still reinforced in your memory. The connection becomes stronger, more permanent. If you don't know, you need to hear the answer again to help the growing axonal processes weave their way through the jungle of connections to the other axonal process, dendritic process it needs to contact.

But that won't be learning for comprehension. Well, maybe, but I think it will, for two reasons. First, medicine is too complex to not be organized, and, secondly, the material is presented gradually, since well before you start medical school. The central piece of pedagogy that students need teachers for is the sequencing of information: general frames first, and proceeding to finer and finer details.

Notecards, in particular, are a conversation between you and your future self. Diagrams aren't particularly useful here, unless you need to see a picture to reinforce an idea for which you otherwise lack experience. The modern linguists seem to think that we simply have a very hard time talking about what we don't understand. That's why the leading edge folks are working in graphs and numbers and DNA sequences. They don't have all the information yet, so they're using the most basic tools to construct an accurate mental picture. Those more accurate mental pictures are what they pass on to the rest of us to learn. As science becomes more specialized, 'the rest of us' includes most of 'them', so don't worry to much about that. In any case, the idea is, you are having a conversation with your future self when you write notecards. Seeing a drawing made on a napkin can be revealing, as it happens, but the syntax, the order, of how that drawing came together is lost if it's completely written out. In fact, I think there may be a visuotemporographic syntax and grammar to drawing diagrams in conversation, but I'll have to look into that. One place a diagram is helpful, is in the question. Draw a diagram, of say, a sarcomere, label some proteins with letters, and then ask your future self to name those proteins. The answer, on the back, would have the letters with the associated protein names: A - Titin, B - Actin, C - tropomyosin, D - dystrophin, E - Z disk, etc.

Bottom line, write the clearest questions you can, leave no room for anything but the exact answer you're looking for, and then write that answer on the other side. Isn't that what you'd want a professor to do?

Posted by Niels Olson at May 23, 2006 1:03 PM

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