00:05
So Barb, it's interesting to me people often come up and say
well "You're a heart
surgeon, that must be really challenging" and I always pause
for a minute and I
think that you know in fact what was so challenging was when
I started as a
medical student and then in the early days of my residency.
But I found that the
more I work at it and the more I became involved, actually I
felt things got easier,
it became easier to learn new things. So, can you give us
some insights as to what's
happening in the brain and so an explanation for that.
Peter, there is a really
fascinating explanation for why that happens and why
learning can get easier as
you go further along. So let's get started. So, it's
important to understand a little bit
of Neural shorthand. This will make our understanding of
later concepts a little
easier. So the Neural shorthand I'm going to teach you
relates to how neurons
connect together. We know we've seen how that happens, the
little button
connects with the dendritic spine and that's how we have
memories. But, it would
be pretty complicated if we showed lots and lots of neurons
all connecting together
like this. So, an easier way of looking at things is to
instead of each neuron have a
dot and the connections between neurons are actually just
lines. The more you
practice and the stronger that connection, you make that
line a little thicker.
01:58
So, this can represent very briefly some of the ideas of
connected neurons that
occur when you're remembering something. But this will allow
us to understand
a very important concept called consolidation. And
consolidation is when your
brain kind of takes all those connections and simplifies
them and makes them more
elegant. So, I'll give you an example with a concept known
as plate tectonics.
02:35
This is that idea that originally the globe had one big
land mass on it and gradually
through the millennia those land mass has broke apart and
seas formed and
eventually we have the continents that we have today. So,
the idea of plate tectonics
is actually rather complex in that it's combining lots of
different ideas. So, we know
continent broke apart formed today's continents but this
involves the idea of a plate
which we know is also affiliated with food and water and
also continents forming.
03:26
We've got rifts forming between the continents, volcanoes,
mountains, lots of
different concepts come together within this one idea of
plate tectonics. Now,
each of those concepts that I mentioned have little dot
neuron representations.
03:48
When you combine them altogether, they are really quite a
complicated mass.
03:56
So, what the brain does is when you're thinking about plate
tectonics, at first
you're kind of thinking "Okay well we've got a plate, it
moves apart. So that means
I don't need to worry about the idea of plates with food on
them. I don't need
to think about mountains and how cold they are or the kinds
of grasses and trees
that grow on mountains." In other words, each of those
concepts that I mentioned
has lots of affiliated ideas that aren't important when you
come to the greater
conception of plate tectonics. So, as you begin to
understand the idea of plate
tectonics better, your mind starts to simplify, get rid of
extraneous connections.
04:50
And in the end, you're left only with the essence of the
idea of plate tectonics.
04:57
So, this is consolidation. It's crystallizing into the
ultimate essence of the idea.
05:05
Now it isn't just that you're taking away connections.
Sometimes you might,
for example, add connections and build out so that idea is
related to other ideas.
05:20
So, ultimately in the brain what is happening is your
working memory of course as
you're thinking about a topic is sending information weakly
to neocortex and
strongly to Hip, the hippocampus. And only when the working
memory relaxes can
the hippocampus work with Neo, the neocortex, but when Hip
is working with Neo
is when that consolidation is taking place. Once something
is very very well
consolidated, you actually don't even need the hippocampus
anymore. So, that's
the great thing about a well-consolidated piece of
information is you can access it
directly with working memory without going through Hip. So,
when is consolidation
best? When can a brain do it most easily? Well, you're not
using your working memory
really much at all when you're sleeping. So, consolidation
occurs most often during
the time when you're sleeping. That's a time when certain
connections are snipped
away and others are added in. In fact, we can almost have
this certain neuro bath
of chemicals that seals certain dendritic spines into place
so that we start to build a
nice strong connection where we need it. So, during sleep
taking some connections
away, adding other ones, strengthening certain ones, this is
all taking place and
that of course is consolidation. Now, consolidation I've
shown here through the
declarative system, but of course it also takes place
through the procedural
system. Ultimately, when you are learning something new,
when you first start
it can seem really difficult and you might get, let's say
you're learning a language.
07:39
As you're learning Spanish, for example, you might be first
starting with present
tense and so you kind of learn some of the present tense
aspects then you learn
some past tense then you learn some future tense. Those are
all beginning to come
together and form the beginning of a schema for your
understanding or expertise
in the Spanish language. So, let's say you've got those 3
main tenses in mind,
you might then add the idea of the conditional tense and
also other tenses,
for example imperative. And along with those, you're also
adding in vocabulary
and interesting phrases and all of these are adding together
to create this wonderful
network in your brain of the Spanish language. But as you're
learning, you notice
you already created parts of what you need to know. So, once
you've learned
several tenses you kind of get the idea of tenses and it can
be easier to add in
yet another tense. So, in this way you're forming this
wonderful complex network,
the schema of information, and what's terrific about a
schema, a well-established
schema no matter what you're learning whether it's language
or math or something
to do with skateboarding, you'll find that the higher you go
or the more you learn,
the easier it becomes to learn more because you're already
hanging it on neuro
information that you have put in mind previously. So,
consolidation and build a
schema of expertise and that's the way to go. So Barb, what
a great analogy once
again. It makes it so understandable to me. People often say
that as a physician
you know you talk doctor speak and in a way really what we
are doing is learning a
language but we build our language with biochemistry and
anatomy and physiology
and pharmacology and then hone those parts of knowledge to
build new skills and
as you go through you become more comfortable speaking that
language.
10:26
It is important when you communicate with patients not to
use doctor speak
but in terms of learning your skill and your craft and your
profession, it really does
get easier and now we know why and the strength of
consolidating and then
building on prior knowledge are really important concepts
and I think can help
students as they may feel daunted at the start but
ultimately it does get easier to
build on these concepts and go forward. So, thank you. Thank
you Peter and all
I know is when I get heart surgery I want you to be my
surgeon. Very nice,
thank you Barb.