Chapter 13 Flashcards
(9 cards)
In his career, Santiago Ramón y Cajal found a way to combine his passion for art with a passion for science.
Do you know other people, either famous public figures or family friends, or acquaintances, who have done something similar?
Is such aconfluence possible in your own life?
How can you avoid falling into the trap of thinking that quicker people are automatically clever?
Doing what you are told to do can have benefits and drawbacks.
Compare Cajal’s life with your own.
When has doing what you were told been beneficial?
When has it inadvertently created problems?
Compared to Cajal’s handicaps, how do your own limitations stackup?
Can you find ways to turn your disadvantages into advantages?
Can every concept have a metaphor or analogy? How and why is it useful for learning?
One important key to learning swiftly in math and science is to realize that virtually every concept you learn has an analogy—a comparison—withsomething you already know.
Sometimes the analogy or metaphor is rough—such as the idea that blood vessels are like highways, or that a nuclear reactionis like falling dominoes. But these simple analogies and metaphors can be powerful tools to help you use an existing neural structure as a scaffold to helpyou more rapidly build a new, more complex neural structure.
As you begin touse this new structure, you will discover that it has features that make it farmore useful than your first simplistic structure.
These new structures can inturn become sources of metaphor and analogy for still newer ideas in very different strategies.
When you learn a concept in one subject, how can it be easier for to learn a concept in another?
Here, you can see that the chunk—the rippling neural ribbon—on the left is very similar to the chunkon the right.
This symbolizes the idea that once you grasp a chunk in one subject, it is much easier for you to grasp or create a similar chunk in another subject.
The same underlying mathematics, for example, echo throughout physics, chemistry, and engineering—and can sometimes also beseen in economics, business, and models of human behavior.
This is why it can be easier for aphysics or engineering major to earn a master’s in business administration than someone with abackground in English or history.
Metaphors and physical analogies also form chunks that can allow ideas even from very different areas to influence one another.
This is why people who love math, science, and technology often also find surprising help from their activities or knowledge of sports, music,language, art, or literature. My own knowledge of how to learn a language helped me learninghow to learn math and science.
What is a synthesis or abstraction? How can art, poetry or music be useful for compiling?
A synthesis—an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea—is a neural pattern.
Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in but with other subjects and areas of our lives.
The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another.
That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling.
When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds—we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patterns we already possess, allowing us to morereadily see and develop other related patterns.
Once we have created a chunk as a neural patern, we can more easily passthat chunked patern to others, as Cajal and other great artists, poets, scientists,and writers have done for millennia.
Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives—an important part of the creative process.
What was Caja’s study routine? How did what he do help him learn? What is this process called?
Each morning in his work in studying the cells of the brain and the nervous system, Cajal carefully prepared his microscope slides. Then he spenthours carefully viewing the cells that his stains had highlighted.
In the afternoon, Cajal looked to the abstract picture of his mind’s eye—what he could remember from his morning’s viewings—and began to draw the cells.
Once finished, Cajal compared his drawing with the image he saw in themicroscope.
Then Cajal went back to the drawing board and started again,redrawing, checking, and redrawing.
Only after his drawing captured thesynthesized essence, not of just a single slide, but of the entire collection ofslides devoted to a particular type of cell, did Cajal rest
Is it possible to make significant changes in the brain? How or why? Do you have an example of someone who has?
we can make significant changes in our brain by changing how we think.
What’s particularly interesting about Cajal is that he achieved his greatness even though he wasn’t a genius—at least, not in the conventional sense of the term.
Cajal deeply regreted that he never had a “quickness, certainty, and clearness in the use of words.” What’s worse is that when Cajal got emotional, he lost his way with words almost entirely.
He couldn’t remember things by rote, which made school, where parroting back information wasprized, agony for him.
