Meta-learning

Disclaimer: rambling philosophical never-getting-to-the-point lies ahead. Not my fault if you're confused at the end...this is how it goes in my head and it's not my responsibility on my blog to reorganize my thoughts so they make sense to you. Who do you think you are?? I'm the only one who reads this anyway. 

Ahem hem.

Learning about learning. Metalearning. We had a lecture about learning and memory last week...so I'm sitting there trying to cram information into my brain. Information about how the brain crams information into itself. 

Pretty awesome to think about. 

What happens is that information is stored as connections. Each neuron is receiving something like 30,000 inputs form other neurons, and putting out similar amounts. (or maybe more...or less...depending on the location it really could range from 1 up to anything. Not the point.) If you see something, information goes to the visual part of your brain. When you're remembering what you saw, you're activating the same connections that were used to see it the first time. The more often you think about seeing it, the stronger those connections get. The connections for the things you saw once and never thought about again slowly get weaker and go away. Use it or lose it. 

So the more you think about stuff, the easier it gets to think about that stuff. 

The less you think about something, the harder it gets to think about it in the future. 

Problem is you tend to strengthen connections at the expense of other connections.  The information is stored in the RELATIVE strengths of connections. 

So that saying "one thing drives out another" really is true....which kind of is not a good thing for medical school, whose goal is to put a MASSIVE amount of information into your brain and get you to be able to recall ALL of it with high accuracy and speed. But they taught us, in medical school ironically, that it's really hard to do that. 

DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE THE PROBLEM HERE??? 

I've kind of known this for a while, because everyone knows the more you keep reviewing something the less likely you are to forget it. A million times I've learned stuff that I knew I'd need in the future, but after a while forgotten it, and then thought "I should have kept reviewing it!" but there is SO MUCH information that by the time I review everything I have to remember once, it's been too long and I've lost the memories from the beginning of the review. 

Buuuut, you can add more connections so you can have more connections that are strong (and more that are weak...but the point is more that are strong)

I feel like my life is the same way. The more time I spend doing anything the more I want to do it. The more I sleep the more I want to sleep, the more I'm on facebook, the more I want to facebook. The more I'm home the more I want to be home. The more I study, the more I - wait, nope. The more I study the less I want to study. ;-)

Buuuuuuuuuut you can't add more time to the day the way you can make more neuron connections. We're constantly reshuffling our time within the day, within the week, within the month, or year. Everything you do is at the expense of something else. I don't like that! 

I've realized that this is basically a rant against time. I just became sick of thinking about this so I will conclude. 

Conclusion: I can't wait until I get to Heaven and there is no time constraint and probably no forgetting and never having to choose where to invest your time, because you can do everything.