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10:24:35 am on August 13, 2008 | # |
Medicine, Memory and Balanced Equations
Does Medicine encourage and demand memorizing of apparently useless information, or is memory good in itself as a creativity tool?
WSJ had a recent article by James Freeman on “Raising Bob Costas: Is Memorizing Sports Trivia Good for the Brain?. A couple of letters agree with Freeman. Samuel E. George, M.D., gives an account of the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling’s thoughts on the role of memory in creativity:
“…He believed strongly that memory of isolated facts lay at the core of intellect and creativity….In the mid-1930s, he was riding a train from London to Oxford. To pass the time, he came across an article in the journal, Nature, arguing that proteins were amorphous globs whose 3D structure could never be deduced. He instantly saw the fallacy in the argument — because of one isolated stray fact in his memory bank — the key chemical bond in the protein backbone did not freely rotate, as was argued. Linus knew from his college days that the peptide bond had to be rigid and coplanar. He began doodling, and by the time he reached Oxford, he had discovered the alpha helix.”
As medical students in India we were advised to just memorize organic and biochemistry equations in balanced format; so we wasted no time trying to balance them and I felt that helped us focus on the ideas rather than the mechanics of the equations. I tend to agree with Dr.George’s paraphrasing of Pauling:
“…It’s what you have in your memory bank — what you can recall instantly — that’s important. If you have to look it up, it’s worthless for creative thinking…”
In this age of change, with the advent of instant ‘knols’, is human memory irrelevant? or is it more important precisely because machines are getting smarter than us? Or is that a wrong question?
October 3, 2008 - Part 1 « Quiscus Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 3:58 pm on October 3, 2008 | # |
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