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The Memory Trick Every Med Student Should Know

Discussion in 'Medical Students Cafe' started by Hadeel Abdelkariem, Jun 28, 2018.

  1. Hadeel Abdelkariem

    Hadeel Abdelkariem Golden Member

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    Anyone studying medicine knows that there is a ton of information that you need to just buckle down and memorize. Sure, you’ve tried the obvious strategies for remembering tricky facts — like mnemonics or repetition — but sometimes you need more than this basic toolkit to get through the next examination.

    One solution to this problem comes courtesy of Shiv Gaglani, an MD/MBA candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Harvard Business School, who recently wrote for Fast Company about his personal memory trick that has helped him throughout his academic career. Utilizing the principles of association, Gaglani recommends mentally attaching new facts to stories, as they hold more psychological significance than a mere mnemonic.

    To illustrate the trick, Gaglani explains that he will always remember that one side effect of bleomycin is pulmonary fibrosis because he recalls how then-upstart cyclist Lance Armstrong declined the cancer treatment in 1996 in fear of scarring his lungs. Whenever possible, Gaglani writes, he attempts to marry facts with associations stronger than the average nonsense phrase used by decades of students.

    And so the idea for Osmosis was born. This side project of Galani’s is a “web-based platform that, among other things, automatically recommends associations” for any topic that a medical student would need to memorize. The online tool is still in the beta phase, but Gaglani writes that he expects it to continue growing.

    “We’re focusing on medicine because it’s our area of domain expertise and nowhere are the stakes higher in terms of being able to learn and retain information,” he wrote. “And if it works for medical students who are drinking from the proverbial fire hose, it will likely work for others who also want to break out of the inefficient learn-forget cycles that we’ve become unnecessarily accustomed to.”

    As many students begin to shake off the summer cobwebs and prepare themselves to once again enter the confines of a nightly study ritual, breaking out of these “learn-forget cycles” is more important than ever.

    And when you master the art of intensive association studying — a term just now invented — you too could have a glowing neon brain. (Editor’s note: this claim is not supported by medical evidence and should not be taken as a guarantee)

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