When you initially learn an abstract fact, it is hard to remember. As you conceptualize and understand that fact, if there’s a story to go with it, it’s easier and easier to remember. The more times you touch on that fact the easier the fact is to remember.
Now for the cool part: the more you learn, the more you can remember. The more knowledge you have, the more places you have to attach new information. It gets easier. Allow me to explain with a brief example.
You meet someone named Kristin (a new person just moved into my neighborhood) I think to myself, “Oh that’s like Kristin I work with and another Kristin I used to be friends with in high school.” I have the image of the three of them standing in a group. Now I’ve got it.
Even better, this new neighbor’s husband is Christian. I can easily link Christian and Kristin. So all I have to do is remember her name, and I’ve got them both. Linking.
Now take a name I’ve never heard and have trouble pronouncing, like Tushar. I don’t know any other Tushar’s, and I struggle to remember how to pronounce it. That name fades just a little quicker.
The more people you know and the more names you know, the easier, NOT the harder, it gets to remember the names. It’s a direct relationship where you would naturally think it’s an inverse relationship.
The same goes for medical knowledge. The more you know the more you can learn. You have to lay the groundwork and the vocabulary first, and then build from there. If I had two people follow me around for the day, I could teach a PA student 100x more than I could teach a high school student about surgery.
If all of this is true, (and it is), then one of your goals should be to gain as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible, so that you have the groundwork to continue to learn and remember even more.
If learning and memorizing things to build a better foundation of medical knowledge is your goal, then there is no better tool for doing that than The Final Step – the book I wrote of 1,200 quick review questions designed to pound home of key ideas. You’ll like it. Take a look:
Brian Wallace