Class content >Introduction to the class
This course is all about learning to think scientifically -- to use a large body of knowledge to recognize situations that seem new and to solve problems that you might never have seen before. (In medicine, this is both diagnosis and designing appropriate interventions.) To develop these skills you have to both learn lots of facts and procedures, but you also have to learn to bring them to mind in appropriate situations when you need them. Surprisingly, most of the errors students make in this class -- and that doctors make in practice -- are not because of things they don't know, but because of things they know but don't use. In order to learn how not to make these errors, it helps to understand a bit about how your mind works -- your memory, where you store what you know, and how you use and access it.
In the past few decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot about how the brain works. The whole story isn't in, and won't be for a few decades (at least). But enough is known to help us figure out that there are some dangers to standard rote learning. Here are some brief discussions (with some fun and surprising exercises) to show you some things you might not have known about your brain and how you think.
Joe Redish 7/3/11