haidut

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...at least when it comes to learning highly sophisticated, life-saving surgical skills, which in my opinion makes the thread title that much more valid. In fact, I would make the sweeping generalization that it applies to all science and that one of the reasons we are currently in a scientific drought is precisely the sterile, militaristic nature of education we have to endure at the hands of psychopaths...cough...I mean teachers. I posted another thread on a similar topic that makes the argument that true learning and wisdom require leisure, desire and ability to engage in an activity without a "plan", "agenda", or a "performance evaluation".
Leisure And Desire Required For Intelligence, Knowledge And Progress

That has also been discussed by Peat in many of his articles. More specifically, in the context of the high correlation between playfulness and intelligence, often observed in young children and almost never observed in adults over 40.
The study below is that much more important since it concerns the practice of medicine - something that arguably affects every person at some point in their life. Since most of modern medicine relies on little more than the "placebo" effect, being stress-free is a rather important requirement to develop into a kind doctor that can make the "placebo" effect work its magic.
The Placebo Effect Is Real And Depends On Human Kindness And Dopamine

Anyways, as the study below clearly showed, removing the stress and competitiveness of surgical residency allowed doctors to learn highly sophisticated surgical skills in as little as 5 hour-long sessions. For comparison, a full surgical training program can take a year to complete and many people drop out of it because of the insane amount of stress while in it. Perhaps most stunningly, the hobbyist surgeons achieved levels of dexterity comparable to experienced surgeons.
So much for the glory of Rome, as they say in one of my favorite movies :):

Absence of Stressful Conditions Accelerates Dexterous Skill Acquisition in Surgery
Stress-free training may enhance surgical skill
"...University of Houston and Methodist Hospital researchers are reporting in Scientific Reports that the best way to train surgeons is to remove the stress of residency programs and make surgery a hobby. Under relaxed conditions outside a formal educational setting, 15 first-year medical students, who aspired one day to become surgeons, mastered microsurgical suturing and cutting skills in as little as five hour-long sessions."

"It appears that by removing external stress factors associated with the notoriously competitive and harsh lifestyle of surgery residencies, stress levels during inanimate surgical training plummet," said Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor and director of the Computational Physiology Lab at UH. "In five short sessions these students, approaching surgery for fun or as a hobby, had remarkable progress achieving dexterity levels similar to seasoned surgeons, at least in these drills." His partners on the project, Anthony Echo and Dmitry Zavlin, surgeons at Houston Methodist Institute for Reconstructive Surgery, gave brief instructions to the students at the beginning of the program."

"...Once the students began cutting and suturing at their mobile microsurgical simulators, Pavlidis and team tracked their stress levels by measuring sweat responses near the nose via thermal imaging. The students' performance in the surgical drills was scored by two experts, based on video recordings. In previous work Pavlidis and Methodist Hospital researchers found that surgical residents exhibited high stress levels during their formal training in surgical simulators. These high stress levels precipitated "fight or flight" responses, resulting in fast, mindless actions leading to errors and creation of a vicious cycle during the surgical drills."
 
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haidut

haidut

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mind blowing...5 hour-long sessions to learn surgical skills...wow...

thanks @haidut

Yep, and not just learn but become as good as seasoned experts who spent years practicing this stuff.
 

Regina

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Fantastic. It is unfortunate that so much potential is lost.
Aikido is lost to the psychopaths still standing.
I suspect that for the hobbyist who learns something well without distress that Musashi's "from one thing, know ten thousand things" applies.
So, the endeavour itself is well worth the effort.
I've been amazed by several home schooled kids entering the adult world; they master the new environment effortlessly.
 

yerrag

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It makes sense for me. With a hobby, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm mindful of the moment, and I observe the little things and I connect the dots. I'm not trying to be efficient. I'm not trying to beat anybody. I'm not even trying to beat myself. I think I gain a lot of insight, and I find myself questioning popular opinion about the how's and why's. If I waste money on my hobby and I don't find myself making it into a business, the better for me. I think of a hobby as being in a university with nice surroundings that encourage one to wander off in thoughts. There's the drive in the student to learn than no amount of test taking and grading can surpass.
 
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jzeno

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This is very interesting. This research supports what others have concluded with respect to learning, such as Jim Kwik and Georgi Lazanov, the "father of accelerated learning", which is that the state of the pupil (relaxed, anxious, curious, pressured, etc.) has a huge impact on retention, etc.

Jim Kwik: (skip to 2:18)


Lazanov:
Georgi Lozanov - Wikipedia


Great stuff. I would love to see advancements in education in my lifetime. I think we have the ability to achieve that.
 

Francesca123

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I'm a medical student and find it interesting how I can love learning about physiology and science in my own time but as soon as I need to learn it for a test my interest has diminished. Thanks for posting.
 

Lee Simeon

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I'm a medical student and find it interesting how I can love learning about physiology and science in my own time but as soon as I need to learn it for a test my interest has diminished. Thanks for posting.
Totally agree, school has a way to make anything uninteresting, even if is something one care about. I find that everything almost depends on the teacher. I think the best teacher can make a something you despise entertaining, at least in my experience.
 

Francesca123

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Totally agree, school has a way to make anything uninteresting, even if is something one care about. I find that everything almost depends on the teacher. I think the best teacher can make a something you despise entertaining, at least in my experience.

Very true. Before medicine I did a degree in Psychology and the subject I did my dissertation on was very dry and technical and I would never have chosen to learn about it willingly; however, my tutor was amazing and so passionate about it that I ended up loving it.
 

Terma

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This is very interesting. This research supports what others have concluded with respect to learning, such as Jim Kwik and Georgi Lazanov, the "father of accelerated learning", which is that the state of the pupil (relaxed, anxious, curious, pressured, etc.) has a huge impact on retention, etc.

Jim Kwik: (skip to 2:18)

Phenibut does wonders for my pupils
 

Regina

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Totally agree, school has a way to make anything uninteresting, even if is something one care about. I find that everything almost depends on the teacher. I think the best teacher can make a something you despise entertaining, at least in my experience.
Totally agree.
But there are always those people who can make virtually anything competitive in virtually any environment.
 
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haidut

haidut

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I'm a medical student and find it interesting how I can love learning about physiology and science in my own time but as soon as I need to learn it for a test my interest has diminished. Thanks for posting.

Very little of school is about learning these days. It is mostly about compliance and getting a "permit" to practice for profit. Medical school is just about proving to the medical industry that you are not an enemy and will follow orders from higher powers. But once you graduate and become a doctor you will probably have more freedom to choose what you want to do and how you want to interact with your patients. So, the goal is to get out (graduate) of the school as quickly as possible :):
 

Broken man

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This is very interesting. This research supports what others have concluded with respect to learning, such as Jim Kwik and Georgi Lazanov, the "father of accelerated learning", which is that the state of the pupil (relaxed, anxious, curious, pressured, etc.) has a huge impact on retention, etc.

Jim Kwik: (skip to 2:18)


Lazanov:
Georgi Lozanov - Wikipedia


Great stuff. I would love to see advancements in education in my lifetime. I think we have the ability to achieve that.

The context is same like what is written with book called "How to think like a Einstein". I found it very useful. The title of the book is only marketing trick I think, didnt find something about it in books about Einstein.
 

Francesca123

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Very little of school is about learning these days. It is mostly about compliance and getting a "permit" to practice for profit. Medical school is just about proving to the medical industry that you are not an enemy and will follow orders from higher powers. But once you graduate and become a doctor you will probably have more freedom to choose what you want to do and how you want to interact with your patients. So, the goal is to get out (graduate) of the school as quickly as possible :):

Very true, we are never told opposing views just the same old dogma. I'm in the UK so I'm not sure how easy it will be to go against the NHS especially now when money is so tight. I'm just glad I found Ray Peat and others who offer counter arguments for the medical rhetoric we are bombarded with.
 
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haidut

haidut

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Very true, we are never told opposing views just the same old dogma. I'm in the UK so I'm not sure how easy it will be to go against the NHS especially now when money is so tight. I'm just glad I found Ray Peat and others who offer counter arguments for the medical rhetoric we are bombarded with.

There is a famous news story about the Dean of the Harvard Medical School telling every new class of students this gem.
Past Deans of the Faculty of Medicine | Harvard Medical School
"...Dr. Burwell was a cardiologist who specialized in circulation changes associated with heart disease. He is credited with bringing attention to obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. In 1944, while Dr. Burwell was Dean, women entered Harvard Medical School for the first time on an equal basis with men. In an address to students at the Medical School, he said, "Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong, and half of it is right. Our problem is that we don't know which half is which.""

Too bad it is not repeated at every medical school. We would have had much more humble, open-minded and non-psychopathic doctors.
 

Terma

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Don't you think "scientific drought" is a bit strong? I don't agree with that bit in the least. Practically-speaking 70% of all my best insight into health matters comes from articles dated 2015 or newer, and it seems to get better every year (not to mention sheer volume of experimental data is important). There are some good quality old research but it's aging and slowly deprecating. Rant against the establishment and all that but there are still brilliant scientific minds writing those articles and science happening beyond the institutions. I have every reason to be pissed off at everything but objectively speaking there is no doubt in my mind things are getting significantly better from a pure research/knowledge perspective. (It's just highly specialized and) You can't count on the medical system to make use of the information.
 

yerrag

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Don't you think "scientific drought" is a bit strong? I don't agree with that bit in the least. Practically-speaking 70% of all my best insight into health matters comes from articles dated 2015 or newer, and it seems to get better every year (not to mention sheer volume of experimental data is important). There are some good quality old research but it's aging and slowly deprecating. Rant against the establishment and all that but there are still brilliant scientific minds writing those articles and science happening beyond the institutions. I have every reason to be pissed off at everything but objectively speaking there is no doubt in my mind things are getting significantly better from a pure research/knowledge perspective. (It's just highly specialized and) You can't count on the medical system to make use of the information.
Really?

We build using cement that don't last much longer than a hundred years, and yet castles have been around for much, much longer. The Pantheon is still around, despite not having steel reinforcement.

We can't even keep California wildfires from engulfing communities, and then have to have native American Indians teach us how to manage the forests?

The mainstream medical community cannot cure cancer, and everything they cannot explain is attributed to genes and randomness. Sounds like the Renaissance in reverse.

I still have yet to see real-world applications of quantum theory. Should I be in abject abeisance to something I truly don't understand, and simply admire works that aren't comprehensible, just because it far exceeds my mind's ability to fathom?

What about this big racket called Climate Change? Is the hoax of 97% of climate scientists stating that climate change is man-made nothing but a demonstration of man's ability to hoodwink society into becoming lemmings?

The truly great achievement in this century is man's ability to use technology to bury truth, and the truly disappointing part of it is man's gullibility to accept what is force-fed them, and to regurgitate it as gospel truth.
 

Terma

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All that is red herrings/off-topic in gauging this and meaningless to me in this context. Cancer is a failure mainly in respect to the amount of funding it receives. But its research produces far more pure knowledge than just noise and chemo fodder. I can personally use that research to advance my knowledge in a tangible way - in completely unrelated conditions - and if I can do that it's far from "scientific drought", which is an extreme statement to make and not backed up by those singular examples. Don't confuse inefficiency (or problems in peer review/reproducibility, for that matter) for "drought". I've been hurt as bad as anyone by the medical system, but this doom and gloom - and iconoclasm for its own sake - become frustratingly counterproductive.
 

yerrag

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All that is red herrings/off-topic in gauging this and meaningless to me in this context. Cancer is a failure mainly in respect to the amount of funding it receives. But its research produces far more pure knowledge than just noise and chemo fodder. I can personally use that research to advance my knowledge in a tangible way - in completely unrelated conditions - and if I can do that it's far from "scientific drought", which is an extreme statement to make and not backed up by those singular examples. Don't confuse inefficiency (or problems in peer review/reproducibility, for that matter) for "drought". I've been hurt as bad as anyone by the medical system, but this doom and gloom - and iconoclasm for its own sake - become frustratingly counterproductive.
This isn't about something than you can reduce to inefficiency. This is about how efficient the system is at squelching advancements in science. Painting the sad situation in a bright palette of colors won't do any good at all. All it does is conceal the dark underbelly of modern science.

Those who speak truth are marginalized. Those who perpetuate falsehood are rewarded. Yet you can't see the effects of such a situation on the advancement of society?
 
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