(not)studying

Tuan, Eds: I figured out where I got "bug out" from. That was some good times.

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I have a lot of friends that have excellent memorizing skill where they will sit in front of their notes or their textbook the night before the exam, read while highlighting or something, go write the exam on 4 hours of sleep and still get 97.85%. One of my friends reads statements aloud while making funny faces and somehow this is how he aces everything. From a neuroscience point of view, if size does equal function (I'm just assuming, it's hardly ever true), then you have massive hippocampuses.

I'm all about brute force memorization, which means I'm extremely inefficient, but I eventually get the job done. If my friends are Gary Kasparov, I have the computing power of Deep Junior at 3 million times less the computing speed. I read the notes with a highlighter, then I write out a set of notes to accompany these notes. I will read these notes again while I copy out important facts on a scrap piece of paper, then I will cover both these sheets and write out a new concept summary sheet with the facts I just memorized. Eventually this concept sheet will be discarded and unused; just a step in the process. I then open up my .pdf/.ppt documents and go through the slides rather quickly. My second time around, I'll open up my class notes and go through the .pdf/.ppt slides very carefully, being sure never to miss anything. My couple times around I'll just open the slides and copy down anything onto a scrap piece of paper, then I go into the exam.

I have difficulty memorizing anything long (Miller's suggested magic number 7 ± 2 does not apply to me, I have more likely magic number 2), so I tend to make these awful pneumonics or diagrams or anything to remind me of what the content actually is:



I actually woke up this morning thinking the one on the top: "FACCS", which are indicators for when a person diagnosed with a unipolar disorder actually has a bipolar one (features, antidepressant response, time course, comorbidities, symptoms). I also have ones like "HAPPIHARO" to remind me of the parts of the brain largely associated with emotion (hippocampus, amygdala, PFC, parietal, insula, hypothalamus, anterior cingulate cortex, retrosplenial cortex, orbitofrontal cortex).

I then have strange diagrams like the ones on the bottom left. The one with the cloud floating on the teeter-totter is thought disturbances in schizophrenia: The line represents tangentiality, the distance from the point represents loose associations, the cloud represent incoherence, the arrow pointing to the cloud is stereotypical thinking, the one pointing away is echolalia, and the box around all of it represents concreteness or autistic thought.

My diagrams can also be spatially oriented so I have previous anatomical knowledge to guide me. The brain with two eyes on the bottom right represents the Papez Circuit, the proposed areas involved in emotional cognition in the brain: fornix, thalamus, hippocampus/amygdala, mamillary bodies, cingulate cortex, (parahippocampal cortex)). I also have these actions that I do to remember things, like how I remember what pathologies can accompany GABA dysfunction: The only one I know for certain is that GABA is associated with epilepsy, so I start by touching my head, then I mentally trace the circuit my arms make with my head - in my hand I would hold a bottle of Beck's which would signify alcohol addiction, my arms would symbolize Parkinson's disorder and Huntington's chorea, then going back to my brain would be anxiety disorders.

I literally have two pages in really small writing of these stupid things, some with sexual connotations like "M PNS & CLT" for functions of acetylecholine (memory, pain, nicotine addiction, salivation, concentration, locomotion, thermoregulation). So while you people with perfect memories are pounding back pages of information like they're tequila shots on your birthday, I'm the guy pushing up his glasses in the corner cradling his academic appletini. I'm going to go study...