One of my favorite chemistry professors gave me this stellar piece of advice: Never memorize something you can look up.
The reason I think it is wonderful advice is that human brains do not have a limitless capacity: there is only so much one can stuff in at once and be expected to regurgitate on demand. For example, although I memorized hundreds of phyla of biological life forms, after I finished my last plant biology course I promptly removed those useless facts from my memory (yes, this is why we have encyclopedias) and instead filled my mind with more useful things. For example, Planck's constant, h; 6.626068x10(-34) or the three elements on the periodic table that are all named after the same place (yttrium, ytterbium and terbium), or how to derive about 6 million physical chemistry gas laws.
Oh man. Such useful knowledge.
Monday, December 4, 2006
Useless facts about life and chemistry
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1 comment:
Some people don't consider the brain to be a data storage unit, though. Rather, some of us conceive of the brain as a tool of transmittance... analagous to a pipe. For exmaple, you never look at your kitchen faucet and wonder how much water it can hold; likewise with the brain, it merely provides a faculty for transition from mental to physical. Perhaps the storage is endless, and variations in brains are indicative of different types of thinkers.
Here's a good analogy. Everyone likes column chromatography; well, if you take a very polar column, apolar molecules are going to come out faster than polar ones, which stick, and vice versa if an apolar column is used. So perhaps if someone is good at language, their brain has a certain polarity that allows language to flow freely, whereas us poor sods with polarization complimentary to mathematics are hideous at language skills.
Just my 15.2% of a picture. (A word is .001 pictures, right?)
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