How much does med school help with general memory?

SDN Members don't see this ad. (About Ads)

I've heard that after a while in medical school, students become adept at learning vast amounts of information because their brains just get used to having so much thrown at them all the time.

Is this only med school (or biology) specific or does it apply to other areas as well? For example, how long would it take for you to memorize cold the first and last names and states of all 535 US Congressmen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_U...tates_Congress

Originally Posted by flatearth22

I've heard that after a while in medical school, students become adept at learning vast amounts of information because their brains just get used to having so much thrown at them all the time.

Is this only med school (or biology) specific or does it apply to other areas as well? For example, how long would it take for you to memorize cold the first and last names and states of all 535 US Congressmen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_U...tates_Congress

I think you should try it and report back to us with your results.

Originally Posted by flatearth22

I've heard that after a while in medical school, students become adept at learning vast amounts of information because their brains just get used to having so much thrown at them all the time.

Is this only med school (or biology) specific or does it apply to other areas as well? For example, how long would it take for you to memorize cold the first and last names and states of all 535 US Congressmen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_U...tates_Congress

Your title says medical student, shouldn't you know the answer to this?

Originally Posted by flatearth22

I've heard that after a while in medical school, students become adept at learning vast amounts of information because their brains just get used to having so much thrown at them all the time.

Is this only med school (or biology) specific or does it apply to other areas as well? For example, how long would it take for you to memorize cold the first and last names and states of all 535 US Congressmen? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112th_U...tates_Congress

I don't think there's much of a knock on effect.

If you look at people who do well in memory competitions, most of them use some sort of technique that involves taking random, disjointed pieces of information, and putting them into some sort of a context. This helps because the human brain is terrible at remembering isolated facts or pieces of information devoid of any context. The classic way of doing this is to imagine the things you need to remember (or something else that relates to it) in different specific positions in a place that you are very familiar with. You might imagine a green-skinned, martian version of Heinrich Himmler sitting on the living room couch of the house you grew up in. He's reading a book on Los Alamos, because he's plotting to nuke all the jews. Now, instead of remembering an isolated, context-free fact (a man named Martin Heinrich is a congressman from New Mexico), you have coherent picture in your mind that helps you remembers this (A Martian Heinrich Himmler is reading about research done in New Mexico to help him nuke the jews). And you have him in a place that lets you put him into a list of other congressmen. By the time you've assembled your list, you can imagine walking in your front door, through the living room, the dining room, etc, seeing each congressman's mnemonic along the way.

This is not a good way for medical students to memorize information in med school, though, because there's another, much better context to use. That context is the rest of medicine! You could make up mnemonics to remember the names of which nerves go to which muscles, so that you aren't just memorizing a list of context-free facts (the dorsal scapular nerve innervates the rhomboids, etc, etc). But you're better of having the context be the actual image of the body in your mind. The dorsal scapular nerve is closer to the spine (which is sort of like being more dorsal) than the scapula. It travels right through the area where the rhomboids go. As you build the understanding of, and an image of, the human body in your mind, you have a ready-made context for all of this anatomical information. Likewise, as you learn different pathways, diseases, etc, you build coherent pictures of these things. _This_ is the context you should be using to remember the information in medicine, not some hackneyed picture of weird people sitting in your grandmother's arm chair.

TL;DR - The techniques that will best help you remember things in medicine are medicine-specific, not generalized memory enhancing skills.

Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Brain Structure Changes during Extensive Learning, Draganski et al.

The current view regarding human long-term memory as an active process of encoding and retrieval includes a highly specific learning-induced functional plasticity in a network of multiple memory systems. Voxel-based morphometry was used to detect possible structural brain changes associated with learning. Magnetic resonance images were obtained at three different time points while medical students learned for their medical examination. During the learning period, the gray matter increased significantly in the posterior and lateral parietal cortex bilaterally. These structural changes did not change significantly toward the third scan during the semester break 3 months after the exam. The posterior hippocampus showed a different pattern over time: the initial increase in gray matter during the learning period was even more pronounced toward the third time point. These results indicate that the acquisition of a great amount of highly abstract information may be related to a particular pattern of structural gray matter changes in particular brain areas.

Originally Posted by sibitrum

Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Brain Structure Changes during Extensive Learning, Draganski et al.

I have the same memory now I've always had, and that's not a great one. What I learned in medical school was how to properly study.

I think it might have more to do with your will to learn and less with your ability.

Originally Posted by VisionaryTics

Hilarious

This NY Times best seller is all about memory training and the writer is a journalist who turned himself into a competitive memorization champ in a year of training:

http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Ei.../dp/159420229X

It makes general memory worse

Medical memory seems awesome but improvement in this area is really just an artifact of increased exposure and familiarity with patterns in medicine/clinical presentation.

Originally Posted by tiedyeddog

Your title says medical student, shouldn't you know the answer to this?

That's because the OP is not (yet) a medical student, according to his/her sig. Not sure why people can't wait until they actually start med school before changing their status...

Originally Posted by krafty934

That's because the OP is not (yet) a medical student, according to his/her sig. Not sure why people can't wait until they actually start med school before changing their status...

The minute I match as an M4 I become a resident, right?

Critical thinking is the real fountain of youth.