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_United_States_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.
