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. 

Brought to you by the letter P

Ahem.

It SEEMS TO ME

that having an exam within the next 3 days is the best way to get me to write a blog post. I am so not in love with Neuro night now. Pathways, pathways, pathways. Starts here, goes to there, inhibits there, which inhibits there, so inhibiting the inhibition leads to activation there, and then it travels here, crosses over there, then crosses back over, over there...stupid brain. Too smart for its own good. LITERALLY.  Anyway.

P is for procrastination.
This is seriously the worst bout of studying I've ever done in my life. I don't feel ANY stress to study. Worse than last time. But we have fewer lectures, so I'm less behind  starting out than I was before, so maybe that's why.

I'm seriously beginning to wonder if my brain somehow knows exactly how long it needs to study given the time I have and the information it needs to cram in...and then is exactly as productive as it needs to be to achieve that?

Because I ALWAYS hit a wall the night before a test. This is just earlier than usual. But it's sort of like the night before a test since tomorrow is mothers' day and I'll be spending the day NOT studying, with my mother and grandmothers. Who knows.


P is for Press handstand.
"What on earth is a press handstand?", you might ask. An excellent question. I will show you a video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEy5-dQVUk0

There you go.
It's REALLY DIFFICULT to do a press handstand. Like...REALLY. But I have AAAAAALWAYS wanted to be able to do one. Since...forever. And so I decided I am going to. I've been on this kick a few times before but it's never lasted for more than a couple of days. So I am going to set GOALS this time so maybe I'll actually stick to it. There's a bunch of different drills you can do to strengthen the various muscle groups needed at different points in the handstand so I'm gonna do those a million times a day until I can get myself up into that crazy handstand. So I know my goal is really unrealistic, but I don't really operate well unless I'm under some pressure, so I'm aiming for being able to do it by June 18 when my roommate goes back to California, so I can show her before she goes. As like, a going away present or something. :-P That's about a month, and as long as that sounds....the press handstand is really hard. especially when you start from sitting. So we shall see. ;-)

Oh yes and my HPSP (Air Force) application is IN and I should be hearing back within a couple of weeks. Can't WAIT!!

Still studying...

I decided to break a (non-Africa) record and post 2 days in a row.

Studying is going much better today...that's because my stress level has increased (how weird is it that that's exciting to me? What kind of warped reality am I living in??) and also because today's topics of study are much more interesting. I'm much more inclined to enjoy memorizing the anatomy of all the different minutia of the spinal cord than learn about sensory receptors. It's the anatomy thing.

Pathways are fun too. I'm going to memorize how information gets from your fingers to your brain. Not as simple as one would think it should be. But fun to know.

We had a lecture on the visual pathways yesterday and wednesday....this stuff is SO INCREDIBLY complicated they can't even teach us a fraction of what they know, which is only a fraction of what there is to know. How people think I'm stupid for believing that God designed this is beyond me. How can you think this incredible level of organization and complication and things crossing over and combining and separating and coming back together to give you all the different things we can see (the presence of an object, it's color, it's size, it's distance from your face, it's contrast, it's movement, it's direction of movement, it's orientation in space, whether a sound is coming from it or somewhere else...) happened by accident? If the most intelligent thing on earth - the human brain - cannot even comprehend how the visual pathways work, what makes you think that something that cannot reason (Chance) came up with it?

oh well. their loss.

anyway.

Here's an interesting tidbit: If you cut the spinal cord just a little bit, you will lose your sensation of pain and temperature on the opposite side of the body from where you cut. (for everything below the cut) But you will lose your sense of fine touch and awareness of where your limbs are in space, on the same side of the body as the cut.

IT IS SO GORGEOUS OUTSIDE i just want to go sit and nap in the sun like a cat, but I need to study and I can' t see my laptop if i sit outside plus there's no desk so it's really annoying because the SMELL of the breeze is coming in my window and making me crazy.

Ok back to the grind.

ACCEPTED!

Wahoo!! Got into medical school FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY THANK YOU JESUS!!

I was home for the weekend because, well I'm always home for the weekend, but my auntand cousins were in from Ohio and we had a surprise shower for one of them, and so I ha just gotten back from my long happy family weekend when I got an email. It was aaaaawesome! The only black mark on this whole thing is that I wish I could have told my Grandpa, in person, before he died. It was 2 months to the day after he died, and he wanted it so badly for me. I think he knows, but I wish I'd have been able to tell him myself and hear him laugh the way I know he would have when I told him.

So yeah.
I've accepted the acceptance and I am so excited and looking forward to FINALLY achieving one of my lifelong dreams - taking gross anatomy! (What a nerd!) And I'm excited about TA-ing histology, because I LOVED histo and I love the idea of teaching it...and a million other things. :)

I'm also moving forward with the Air Force, so I'm praying that there are still some scholarship spots left for this year, even though it's late, so I can get that going. It will be nice to have them paying me, I could use money. :-p

I'm supposed to be studying for my first Neuroscience exam of this block but find myself seriously lacking motivation. It's on Monday, and normally when there are so few days left I'm in super focused study mode but NOT SO this time. I don't think it has much to do with the med school acceptance because I felt this way at the beginning of the block...and it's not because I don't like it, because I didn't feel this way during biochem and I hated biochem. I don't really dislike it...but a lot of it i'm just like "meh"

We've done some development of the brain/spinal cord, brain/spinal cord anatomy and nuclei and tracts, olfaction, some visual pathways, the thalamus, ventricles and CSF, sensory perception, reflexes, propropception, and cerebral circulation.

That's a lot of stuff. I guess I have to just suck it up. but REGARDLESS I'm going to MED SCHOOL!