How we learn and how we think

A number of years ago I was really struggling to understand some of the fundamental concepts in neurobiology.  I had studied the subject as an undergraduate,  but frankly I had learned it by rote long enough to write it down in an exam and promptly forgotten it.  A few years later I returned to university to study for a masters in neuroscience.  There was a bit of overlap between what I had covered as an undergraduate and what we were covering as a postgrad and so the same subject came up a again (for background it was how a membrane potential across a nerve is generated and maintained and how this is governed by the Nernst Equation). The problem I had was my maths had always been a bit ropey, and the physics of it had been bypassed in my science education.  So heads down once again I started out learning it all by rote.  However I still was lacking in a fundamental understanding of why it worked.  So unhappy with the level of understanding I had of the subject I went back to fundamentals and had to learn the basics of resistance and capacitance as well as brushing up on my maths.  In the end it clicked.

Now this got me to thinking about how I had studied in the past and how people study and learn a subject.  If we think about a subject linearly we start at the fundamentals and over the years build up to the more complex topics eventually we may even develop new insights and discoveries in that subject.

When using this model it is obvious that I had gaps in the basics,  which in its self did not stop me learning the topic but it made it difficult for me to understand the subject and so would never be able to develop any new insights into the subject. The more I thought about it and my other experiences in education made me think that instead of a linear model we should be thinking of a spiral-and probably a 3-dimensional spiral at that.  The spiral starts out in the center with the most basic skills that we learn like counting and way way out on the edge is string theory and the unified filed theory. If we still consider a "subject" to have a linear learning path and merge the two models then it can show the dependencies and associations between different subjects aid in the understanding and make it easier to learn.  When I look at my own education my spiral would have large black holes in areas of it where I skipped class did not do the homework limiting my ability to carry on extending my understanding in that subject area.

This made me think about what makes it easy to remember and recall information. If we don't have a solid framework to hang additional information on then our mind does not know how to file the information for and it just gets put in a random folder somewhere in your brain.  However if you have a structure in place it can be filled away, correctly tagged and linked to the other pieces of information relevant to it.  

Now some people are much better at this than others and can recall facts and figures, dates and events with incredible detail. Possibly their brain is better at filing and linking new facts next to the relevant fact building up a nice ordered index of information which is easy to recall. I am not one of those people.  I imagine my brain is probably more like an incredibly messy desk with everything lying at my fingertips.  I know the information is there it is just going to take me a few minutes to find it.  However what I am exceptional at is linking different concepts and finding links and associations between then and developing new ideas -also known as ideation. So is my ability in coming up with new ideas associated with my less than exceptional ability to recall detailed facts?  And is it linked to the way my brain stores and indexes the information I take in.   By having all the information littered across my desk it makes it easier to associate what would at first glance seem like two entirely unrelated pieces of information.  Does this mean that when we explore the way memory works that we will find different types of memory, and different mechanisms? with some people having a more efficient tagging and indexing mechanism and others having a better method of associating information.