Learning

In medicine, life long learning is essential. The fundamental knowledge of the physician is ever changing. Multitudes of research studies are published yearly, many with clinically important information that may change the way you practice daily. I've always enjoyed the learning process and I think this an important part of my career choice.

Learning is an interesting thing. How do we gain knowledge, and then retain it for use in everyday life? Perhaps the most memorable way to learn is through experience, by making mistakes and learning from them. In general, though, I think the learning process is one of constant challenge. By learning new information, we are constantly challenging our view of the world. If we come across a piece of information that we were previously unaware of, we must alter our world view so that it is consistent with what we now know to be true. By world view I mean the way we as humans make sense of the complex environment in which we live. If you think of learning in this way, its hard not to start integrating the information you take in daily. When confronted with something new, we think "does that make sense?" If not, we evolve, we grow.

This is most easily seen with day to day learning. In Juba, my world view is constantly changing due to the entirely new experiences I'm having. New foods, new accents, new people, new stories... I could go on forever. In the classroom, however, it might not be as easy to see. Sometimes information we learn in class seems too discreet, too singular, to fit into this model of learning. For example, I taught the students about muscle tissue last week. We talked about the different types of muscle, how to recognize them on a slide, and muscle contraction. This may seem to be outside the realm of our everyday world view, but I'm not so sure. Even the cellular intricacies of muscle contraction should make sense to us based on what we see in our daily lives. We see mothers embracing their children, similar to proteins engaging each other. We see the step by step process of mundane tasks, such as laundry or driving a car, and can relate them to the intricate step by step process of muscle contraction. Its just a matter of fitting it into the students already functioning world view. We have experience with our muscles everyday, and whether we pay attention or not, we've already made assumptions about how things work.

Even with biochemistry, which for students is often very hard to visualize, we can use this model to improve our learning. By explaining the big picture, and using familiar analogies, we try to insert the new information into the framework the student has intuitively built. We try to give the student the tools to think hard about what we are saying and decide if it fits into their world view, and if not, we try to figure out where the misconception may be. It is often a simple misunderstanding or incorrect assumption.

The process of learning is difficult and often frustrating, but if we keep in mind the bigger picture we can begin to see how everything connects, and this, to me, makes new information so much more exciting!