cross-posted from: https://linux.community/post/2267705
I’m a nurse thinking about expanding my job options and knowledge, maybe studying something. I don’t want to work bedside till I’m old enough to cash in my 401k because then I’ll have a broken back and I don’t want to become one of those old angry nurses constantly on edge because she’s angry at life.
To me, the way to achieve this is to learn a lot of things systematically: medicines (not the brand names, but the active components, because doctors where I work use components extensively), diagnoses that are often abbreviated, right anatomical names for bones, muscles and blood vessels…, right ranges for arterial and venous blood gas parameters and clinical chemistry…
It’s tedious and repetitive and I don’t want to take any drugs to study better, but I believe it fits me because I was always an introverted bookworm.
Is there any better way to learn this than the way I just described? It means 3 hours of reading and repeating concepts and ranges after my shift.
Memoization cards! Good for driving snippets of information through short-term memory, medium-term, and into long-term.
Cut up cardboard pieces roughly credit card sized.
On each write a cue on one side e.g. “Anatomical name of funny bone”, and answer on other side e.g. “ulnar nerve”.
Keep them in stacks of “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”.
Every hour, go through the hourly pile one by one and try to answer it, then flip and check. If correct, move to daily pile.
Every day, go through daily pile. Correct go to “weekly”, incorrect go back to “hourly”.
Etc for the other piles
So like… AnkiDroid
Ankidroid is the best memory cards app for sure!
Yup, flashcards and spaced repitition are pretty well evidenced for memorisation. I’m also a fan of mind maps, but that’s more for linking ideas and concepts together, not just learning acronyms, but mixing the two works well.
There are other memorisation techniques that you might find helpful depending on how keen you are (visualisation, methods of loci, etc) but for most people they feel like to much trouble to learn. Creating mnemonics and associating stupid images and stuff with otherwise arbitary acronyms can help. I can still remember all my physics equations from high-school QIT PIV etc because of stupid nonsense phrases I associated with them.
https://www.learningscientists.org/posters
They have some basic strategies to use there. My go to method is to create stories. I find studying to be intensely boring, and I will either zone out or just stop when it quickly gets boring. Stories, on the other hand, are exciting and fun. I definitely still have stories from twenty or thirty years ago bouncing around inside my head. Random snippets from reading books is where I get my large trove of trivia.
So for your medical terms, try creating stories that involve real world adjacent plots. Maybe the Kingdom of Aorta had a schism, and split into multiple factions vying for power. The Brachiocephalic lords went first, taking the right half of the kingdom with them, but the northern common carotids couldn’t find agreement with the subclavians on anything, so they went their separate ways. That sort of thing.
Mnemonics are amazing too. I don’t know a single person who didn’t find it easier to remember the cranial nerves after “Oh, oh, oh, to touch and feel a girl’s vagina, ah, heaven!” Or the adrenal glands’ “Salt, sugar, sex, the deeper you go, the sweeter it gets” for remembering your “go fuck rats” of the cortex’s layers. Obviously the ‘carnal’ things are easier to remember because they intrigue your mind in a more powerful association. That might just be me… but it does seem like the majority of us who are playing with other people’s bodies have good sex drives.
First learn Latin.