Does medical school change the way you...

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Allosteopath

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Think?

I apologize for the clickbait, and surely an obvious answer in that it will change the way you think by the end of medical school; however, I am actually slightly curious, but I am starting to wonder if medical school trains your brain to learn or think faster?

I’m not really sure if this phenomenon is real, but I feel as if I am really able to pick information up and put it in my brain a lot faster than I was able to at the beginning of the year. My only n=1 personal anecdote, for which I don’t know if it is supported in science.

Anyone else have this same feeling, thoughts, or knowledge of whether this is based in science or not?

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Medical school requires a lot more active learning to succeed than undergrad did. This is primarily due to the vast amount of info we have to assimilate in such a short period of time, and as we continue practicing that skill at such high volumes and short time periods we become much more efficient study machines where we can study a near book’s worth of knowledge in a few days, understand the most important stuff, and recall it for exams.

I think a good term to use here though is really *efficiency.* I have become a more efficient thinker because I can cut through a bunch of crap to reveal the gold more easily than before medical school. As an MS3 myself, this challenge has only gotten more difficult since real patients aren’t clean like SP’s are. They have a million problems and take a million drugs and they come in with a CC which may or may not be related to those things. Gets overwhelming. Chart review can be daunting sometimes given you must find the right info to provide context for your patient interviews In a timely fashion. But hey, that will just get easier with time too. So ultimately, I am not sure it’s as much a brute increase in thinking speed as it is not getting bogged down in irrelevant information so you can arrive at the right answer sooner.
 
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An individual cannot accurately assess his/her own ability to "learn or think faster." Self assessments almost always make yourself seem better.

Realistically, most people who went to medical school will say it made them smarter because it is a mere (extremely unreliable) self assessment.
 
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Compression and retrieval of information certainly changed for me in med school, especially around boards study time. My brain was constantly connecting pieces of info. I don't feel like that's as much the case now, or maybe I've just gotten used to it. I've forgotten a lot since med school honestly.
 
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wonder if medical school trains your brain to learn or think faster?

I was talking to a buddy of mine about this over the weekend.

I feel like alot of us got better at taking tests over time. It wasn't because we got smarter or could think faster. We got better at understanding what works specifically for us to get the information we needed in an efficient manner.

It wasn't because I was smarter it was because I know where I need to look.
 
It depends upon what age you are in medical school. Most students in medical school have not reached their peak in mental function which happens in the early 30s.
By analyzing data of the best 96 all-time chess grandmasters, the scientists found that on average, the age of performance peak is 31.4 years old for chess.
The physiological parameters characterizing human capacities (the ability to move, reproduce or perform tasks) evolve with ageing: performance is limited at birth, increases to a maximum and then decreases back to zero at the day of death. Physical and intellectual skills follow such a pattern. Here, we investigate the development of sport and chess performances during the lifetime at two different scales: the individual athletes’ careers and the world record by age class in 25 Olympic sports events and in grandmaster chess players. For all data sets, a biphasic development of growth and decline is described by a simple model that accounts for 91.7% of the variance at the individual level and 98.5% of the variance at the species one. The age of performance peak is computed at 26.1 years old for the events studied (26.0 years old for track and field, 21.0 years old for swimming and 31.4 years old for chess). The two processes (growth and decline) are exponential and start at age zero. Both were previously demonstrated to happen in other human and non-human biological functions that evolve with age. They occur at the individual and species levels with a similar pattern, suggesting a scale invariance property.

So this is an interesting conversation, actually. When does a physician's ability peak? For the purposes of this debate, let's assume we're discussing physicians who are trying to remain on top of their craft, continuing to read journals, and staying on top of new treatments and techniques. I think that physician model will provide the closest simulacrum of a chess grandmaster's constant study. Even in this situation, though, I doubt that the age is the same as chess, for 2 reasons.

The first difference is length of training: most of those chess grandmasters have been playing since they were 4-6 years old, so their peak occurs ~25 years after they began specifically training for their discipline. Whereas with physicians, you could argue that you don't begin specifically training until medical school (or maybe even residency or attending-hood, for some specialties - I know a number of surgeons who feel that their real learning only began when they were attendings). Based off that and assuming a similar number of hours of study required, physicians would not be peaking until their mid/late 40s, which seems a lot more realistic.

The second difference is the type of problem being solved. Chess is a perfect information situation. A better example of the type of problem solving used in medicine is poker, an imperfect information game with varying stakes. In these cases, it's not totally clear what relative benefits cognitive flexibility vs. experience confer.
 
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Great thread. As a nontrad, medical school has actually made me realize the opposite about myself. I don't know that it would have been so obvious to me that I'm getting older and slowing down if I hadn't done this.

I used to be able to stay up without sleep for 48+ hours with no problem if I wanted to, I'd skim something and I'd remember all of it, I would wake up without needing to take time out to stretch because my neck/back were not hurting (might miss that part the most tbh). Not only is med school more knowledge, but I'm noticing I'm having to make more effort to remember things and my performance is greatly decreased when I don't sleep. I might have been a little tired if I completely missed a night of sleep before, but now I'm exhausted if I slept but didn't sleep enough. For the record, I'll graduate in my mid-30s so I'm not that old, but there is 100% a performance difference between my intrinsic abilities in my early 20s and now.

You under-25ers whose brains are still maturing and not yet on the downslope don't know how good you have it. That being said, I wouldn't say I'm at a disadvantage. I have a life/medical experience benefit my younger classmates don't have (my attendings and residents are commenting on it), but it comes at the cost of losing that early 20s physical and mental performance.

And there's that slight bit of regretful "man, I really could have made better life choices" thinking that happens when your attending with three years of attending experience post-residency is less than a year older than you are. Or, more hurtfully, younger than you. :laugh:
 
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