[Due to a forum import error, this thread was manually copied here from the old forum into this top post.]
moca83 21 September, 2012 - 18:05
Yes, the memory techniques discussed on this forum clearly work for memorizing cards, number, simplified images, names, etc. However, it would appear that they fall short of being practical for certain areas of focus, namely medical studies. To be more specific, it simply takes too much time (at least for me), to transform the “raw data” of about 100 powerpoint slides per day of cellular biology information into a format that can actually be mentally digested. Here is an example of the typical medical school slide (below average in complexity) they require us to know…which for many people is by rote memorization:
Hereditary Cancer Syndromes
Hereditary Breast & Ovarian Cancer Syndrome
BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations
Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP)
APC mutations or MUTYH mutations
Hereditary Non-polyposis Colorectal Cancer Syndrome
(Lynch Syndrome)
MSH2 and MLH1
Li-Fraumeni Syndrome (multiple cancers)
TP53 (p53)mutations
Von Hippel Lindau Disease
VHL mutations
Cowden Syndrome
PTEN mutations
Retinoblastoma
I’m baffled by the fact that there are no algorithms for memorizing college lecture slides–no memory systems, that is. I’m baffled because of the inherent potential for huge $$$. Does Tony Buzan or anyone else realize what medical students (along with others) would pay to make their lives easier with an optimal system for memorizing complex information??? I would be willing to pay $1000 for a truly effective memory system for Cell Bio, Biochem, etc…and I wouldn’t think twice about it considering the pressure we are under for memorizing vast amounts of data in minimal time.
Sorry for the rant, I’ve just been racking my brain for ways to apply the memory techniques I know (e.g., loci, mnemonics, link, etc) to hundreds of slides of abstract information that I will soon be tested over.
It’s funny, here in the U.S., college kids are paying any amount for “smart pills” (i.e., adderall, ritalin, etc), just to gain an edge or in most cases, stay afloat. Imagine a memory system that would eliminate the need to take drugs to cognitively perform…now imagine an educational market that is nearly 1 trillion dollars in size???
Josh 21 September, 2012 - 21:29
I think that there is no magic pill. Either way, it will be hard work. I think that it would be much faster in the long run with memory techniques though.
How long have you been using memory techniques? If you have just started, it gets faster with practice.
Have you tried Anki? I might try to combine the method of loci and associations with Anki for something like the Hereditary Cancer Syndromes slide.
Maybe one of the other medical students here could offer better tips on that though. 
gavino 22 September, 2012 - 00:30
Hi Moca, you raise a very interesting issue and one that I think would be worthy of serious consideration by anybody here who needs or wants to go beyond the basic ‘tricks’. I could see this being a very useful thread if everyone gets their brains fully in gear on It. So, firstly can I try to scale the problem:
- Would it be something like 100 slides per day with 15 pieces of information times, say, 250 days per year times 4 (?) years? (This is 1.5 million…)
- How could this information be logically structured?
- How much time per day can you realistically allocate to pure memorisation, given the other elements of your studies?
- Any other critical information we should consider?
Gavino
sleightly 22 September, 2012 - 01:50
Hey moca83, if you try to learn the whole slide just as it is, you’ll be screwed. You need to categorise it into meaningful chunks.
How I might approach it is to first separate them:
Hereditary cancers
- Gynae
—BRCA1/2
—Breast & Ovarian cancer syndrome
-GI
—FAP
—APC/MUTYH mutations
—HNPCC/Lynch syndrome
-----MLH1/MSH2
p53 mutations
—Li-Fraumeni syndrome
—TP53 mutations
Multiple organ systems
—VHL disease/mutations
—Cowden syndrome
—PTEN mutations
Retina
—Retinoblastoma
Once you’re done this, I would convert each condition to an image (i.e. VHL reminds me of a hippo etc.)
Then have a main central image to represent hereditary cancer (some person you saw on the wards perhaps?)
Then have the images of a certain section interact with each other on top of the hereditary cancer picture.
So at the end have a person representing hereditary cancers, and you zoom into different organ systems to see conditions interacting with each other
Hope this helps fellow medic 
moca 22 September, 2012 - 10:36
Josh Cohen wrote:
I think that there is no magic pill. Either way, it will be hard work. I think that it would be much faster in the long run with memory techniques though.
How long have you been using memory techniques? If you have just started, it gets faster with practice.
Have you tried Anki? I might try to combine the method of loci and associations with Anki for something like the Hereditary Cancer Syndromes slide.
Maybe one of the other medical students here could offer better tips on that though.
I figured it would be hard work…but it’s hard work just to figure out where to start, let alone structuring everything for memorizing.
I’ve been using memory techniques for about a year now (maybe about twice a month) for memorizing things related to school. I’ll admit, I definitely could use more practice but time is very scarce as a medical student.
I have tried Anki and am definitely a fan, however, Anki is geared to long-term mastery via spaced repetition. Unfortunately the intervals used for review with Anki tend to be too spread out for huge exams about every other week. I will definitely use Anki for the USMLE, giving myself about a year of preparation.
Thanks for the suggestions. I really appreciate your contributions to this forum. 
moca83 22 September, 2012 - 11:22
gavino wrote:
Hi Moca, you raise a very interesting issue and one that I think would be worthy of serious consideration by anybody here who needs or wants to go beyond the basic ‘tricks’. I could see this being a very useful thread if everyone gets their brains fully in gear on It. So, firstly can I try to scale the problem:
- Would it be something like 100 slides per day with 15 pieces of information times, say, 250 days per year times 4 (?) years? (This is 1.5 million…)
- How could this information be logically structured?
- How much time per day can you realistically allocate to pure memorisation, given the other elements of your studies?
- Any other critical information we should consider?
Gavino
Hi Gavino,
I’m glad there are others who see the potential here. As mentioned in my post, I just can’t believe that there aren’t more Tony Buzans out there trying to target grad students, etc with a product that is tailored to the style of information typically found in upper-level coursework. The funny thing is, it would be easy for me to personally get a group of about 50 students each paying $500 - $1000 for a system that actually works for what we are studying…now multiply that by tens of thousands of students around the country/world to get a glimpse of the potential market here. I digress… So to answer your questions:
- My typical week consists of four one-hour lectures, five days a week, along with an afternoon lab four days per week. So as you can see, time is scarce. A typical lecture will have about 35 slides, each containing roughly the amount of information listed below:
Huntington’s Disease – Autosomal Dominant:
Neuropathology is degeneration of striatum and cortex
Patients present midlife with motor abnormalities, personality changes, a gradual loss of cognition
Penetrance and Expressivity depend on the number of repeats
100% Penetrance for individuals with >40 repeats. Borderline penetrance for 36-39 repeats.
Anticipation: disease presents at an earlier age when passed to offspring (via pedigree) through father.
Since our exams are about every 3 weeks for one set of three classes (Molecular Fundamentals of Medicine, Medical Gross Anatomy, and Neuroanatomy), staggered with another three classes that are less science-intensive. Therefore, we would have to have a system for memorizing somewhere around 800 slides for one set of exams (every three weeks) and about the same for another set of exams staggered.
-
The information could be logically structured (at least in my mind) by fitting it into an overall schema or tree (i.e., Huntington’s Disease displays autosomal dominant inheritance–>List characteristics–>Genetic disorder). Or perhaps this information can be clumped into a palace or something…you see, the tricky part is coming up with an overall construct which holds the ideas. It’s easy to use a house with 10 separate rooms to memorize X-number of images per room, but try coming up with a palace/path/loci to hold 800 slides with 4-10 ideas per slide…that’s the difficult part. The more I think about it, the more it seems as though this stuff shouldn’t need to be structured, considering the fact that memory champions are memorizing abstract poetry line-by-line.
-
This questions is the million dollar question (literally)… So many grad student, college student, professionals, etc, are strapped for time and given enough time could memorize by rote memorization…but that isn’t practical considering our tight schedules. So, I would realistically only be able to devote a solid hour per night to memorizing 140-ish slides per night (and reviewing material in a cumulative manner).
-
The key is to be able to take about 140 slides per day, rearrange them in a couple hrs max, then apply some algorithmic system (i.e., peg system for memorizing order of slides, association for concepts in slides, visual-emotional-action for evoking memories that stick, linking for connecting concepts, etc). I’m convinced that there is a way to somehow manipulate what we know about the current memory techniques and use them in a pure-academic manner. So in summary: 1. In college, instructors pile “raw data” on you at a very rapid rate; 2. Student’s job is to get ALL information into brain (including minute details) as fast as possible.
You know you’ve discovered the diamond when you (or Tony Buzan) can pick up the medical student’s 35 slides, study them for about 30 minutes, then recite back to the student the information on each slide in order. I along with tens of thousands of other graduate students would happily pay $1000 to learn how to do that.
moca83 22 September, 2012 - 11:50
Sleighty,
Thanks for helping a fellow med student out, I appreciate it. I will definitely try what you have suggested and I’ll let you know how it works out. I’m about to start studying genetics and cancer pathways for a few hours, hopefully I can make some progress in applying these memory techniques.
I really do think our fellow mnemonists are onto something (and have been for a while). We are so close to revolutionizing the way people think, we just need more people interested in the practical applications of these techniques. There is so much potential to what the people in this forum are doing and I believe that when it catches on, people will leap exponentially ahead of their current cognitive abilities.
Kinma 23 September, 2012 - 00:28
Hi Moca,
So you know that the techniques on this forum work.
That is a good start. I remember in April that you where very exited that you learned (if I remember correctly) 100 numbers.
These techniques are the same with learning new knowlegde. The difference is, because of the nature of the stuff you need to learn, that you need to come up with your own way of associating the knowlegde you need to learn to the stuff you already know.
A lot of universities btw have too many med students. One way of weeding out the lesser students is to give each and every one of them too much work to see which ones can handle the workload.
This could be true in your situation.
Also talk with other students how they cope with the workload.
Let’s dive into how one can learn thisspecific slide.
With no knowlegde the data sounds impressive and difficult to learn.
However, once you know that the letters in BRCA1 and BCRA2 stand for BReast CAncer, this becomes a lot easier.
The term BCRA is a mnemonic in itself!
The first time I read your post on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 I thought Bric à Brac, where in my mind I would see BR1C à BRAC2.
I would then use that as a sort of auxilary link.
FAP is an mnemonic that is easy to learn once you know what it means in urban slang! At least it makes it easier to create visualisations
I could go on and on about this, but like Josh says, once you have a bit of experience, you will become faster in doing this.
Good luck!
Hype 23 September, 2012 - 05:07
As a new medical student myself, I’ve been overwhelmed by the workload of it all. I was told so many times that it’s A LOT of information to memorise, and that there’s so much to do, but you don’t quite grasp the quantity of information you have to learn until you’re actually told to learn it!
I’m only about to start my 3rd week at med school, but there’s already been so much: from the basic medical sciences, to psychology/sociology, to medical ethics and law, to human anatomy. It strikes me that I would benefit by categorising information by process/situation as opposed to by field.
I’ve been practising mnemonics for a while and even I find it quite a daunting task to apply them to the type of information we need to memorise. I’ll be sure to write extensively about my experience in experimenting with mnemonics throughout my years at medical school; the reason I haven’t tried to apply them yet is simply because I want to see how efficient and effective rote memorisation is before I move onto mnemonics, such that I can accurately compare the two methods of learning. Perhaps rote will work great for anatomy, but mnemotechnics will be the best for pharmacology.
I’ll be keeping an eye on these sorts of topics; I’ve downloaded Anki for the first time and am excited to play around with that - if any current medical students can recommend me any pre-made decks, that’d be great.
This is also the reason for my inactivity on the forum - it’s because of me struggling to acclimatise to the workload of university. 
gavino 23 September, 2012 - 06:30
Ah, Hype, I was wondering what you were up to!
I am still contemplating all of this, but the one thing I would be finding most scary is not even the time for initial structuring or memorisation, but the sheer buildup of information for spaced repetition purposes…
Gavino
Hype 23 September, 2012 - 08:07
gavino wrote:
Ah, Hype, I was wondering what you were up to!
I am still contemplating all of this, but the one thing I would be finding most scary is not even the time for initial structuring or memorisation, but the sheer buildup of information for spaced repetition purposes…
Gavino
Although there will be a huge build up of information in spaced repetition; not all of it is necessary to be remembered. Some stuff we have to learn for our exams simply won’t be clinically relevant in the future, or relevant for the rest of medical school. There are facts that will come up in exams, then we will never use in the rest of our lives. Sifting through things like that will help with the spaced repetition workload. Information like that can be crammed during the pre-exam period.
Thanks for giving me something else to worry about, though!
But, throughout this semester I’ve definitely run into the same exact issue that you brought up: is it worth applying these memory techniques to ALL of this medical information? Well, this is what I have found (so far). There really is not one magical technique to memorizing this stuff. However, if you combine MANY techniques together- everything about effective learning that you’ve encountered- then you can definitely become efficient in studying for med school.