I’ve been doing a number of coding and database side projects lately (including the Stanford Community Health Resource Center , basically a hacked and cracked WordPress weblog), and it’s really affected the way I think about information.

I think it’d be fascinating if we could see the way a neonate first-year med student’s brain works and stores information compared to how a second or third-year does. Medical school memorization is a challenge, I think, because you’re going from storing arrays to storing tables and databases, really.

Throughout your education, you memorize facts as arrays. That is, one piece of information corresponds to the other. It’s all linear. Capital of Kansas => Topeka. P53 => tumor suppressor. Word => Definition. But medical school changes that. It’s no longer so simple. It’s not just that _this_ equals _that_, it’s that _this_ is related to _that_ as well as _this other thing_. Or you’re required to memorize categories of information on a certain topic. Just like a database.

An example may help. For each bacteria, we have to know:

* How to diagnose it
* What syndromes causes
* How the lab identifies it
* Its antibiotic resistances
* How it causes disease
* What toxins it produces
* Where it infects
* How it is transmitted

So it’s not just the process of trying to memorize all the information that makes it so difficult; it’s the fact that you have to train your brain to start storing information differently. Boratella pertussis, the bacteria that causes Whooping Cough , isn’t just a bacteria. Now it’s a bacteria that:

* is a gram negative rod, fastidious
* causes Whooping Cough
* can be prevented with the DPT vaccine preferably; erythromycin will treat it
* produces pertussis toxin, an AB exotoxin which decreases immune function
* produces tracheal cytotoxin, which inhibits cilia
* produces adenylate cyclase toxin
* inhabits the ciliated upper respiratory epithelium
* is transmitted by aerosol particles

See what I mean? It’s a whole other ballgame.

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