Sejal Patel

Psychology Seminar

Professor Lappin

November 30, 2000

M.D.- A Learning Expert

Walking into his office, I was quite nervous for I did not know what was wrong with me or how I would be treated. For most people, myself included, going to a doctor can be a scary experience due to the lack of knowledge about how one’s body works and the vast amount of health problems out there. Nevertheless, everyday thousands of people place their faith and trust with medical professionals hoping to lead longer, healthier lives. What is it that allows so many people to walk into physicians' offices day in and day out expecting proper treatment and a healthy recovery? That title of M.D. stands for a lifetime of dedication to the active process of learning, transferring, and applying the knowledge accumulated for the benefit of others.

From medical school to private practice, the powerful mind is actively working towards storing medical facts, as well as recalling procedures for future applications. With regards to recalling facts and events, doctors utilize and expand their declarative memory involving the hippocampus. The procedural memory bank recalls skills and other cognitive operations by using the neostriatum, which joins with the hippocampus to allow doctors to properly diagnose their patients. Every patient provides a different challenge, calling for different applications of the comprehended information, which can be gained by coupling experience with learning. The brain is a dynamic organ that is constantly influenced by experiences, which offer a way to alter the structure of the brain. The amount of experience in the complex medical world is proportional to the amount of structural change in the brain. All of the learning stems from active transferring built on past experiences and knowledge that improve the physical realms of the brain along the way.

Treading the path to becoming a doctor is never over or easy, which is why a strong sense of motivation is a must. As stated by White (1959), it is their "competence motivation" that drives doctors to develop a high level of proficiency along with the ability to diagnose different medical cases. Just as in scaffolding with children, it is important for doctors to maintain pursuit of their goal, avoid frustration with problem solving, and above all stay motivated. By replacing frustration with patience, every challenge provokes the desire to learn more and help more people in ways never conceived of before. The importance of motivation to overcome obstacles is best seen with children who are able to learn quickly because success and understanding are motivated on their own. Similarly, the best doctors are those motivated by the rewards of satisfaction from helping others in a way that is not possible without their hard work and dedication to learning.

It is through their high level of intelligence and acute ability to solve medical problems, that doctors have become adaptive experts able to treat patients, who are mere novices when it comes to the field of medicine. As a patient, I am able to relay my many symptoms upon acquiring an illness, but that is where my knowledge stops and the doctor’s expertise steps in. A doctor is able to perceive groups of meaningful information and view them in various ways, allowing him to assess symptoms and come to the proper diagnosis. Doctors organize their information about the body around the core concept of how it functions, which allows them to key in to specific problems with a patient’s health. Doctors are able to thoroughly analyze the body and draw a connection between the symptoms, the problem, and an appropriate treatment.

Doctors know more than a patient because they have "more conceptual groups of memory, more features defining each group, more interrelations among the groups, and efficient methods for retrieving related groups and procedures for applying these information units in problem-solving contexts" (38). It is true that doctors have a greater database of knowledge, but the key in their successful practice is the ability to see correlations among the information and match each disease with the right treatment. Every patient that walks into the door has a different body and a different set of symptoms meaning they need a specialized treatment that takes into account their allergies, preferences, age, gender, and lifestyles. The doctors have to become good at retrieving the right type of information from their vast amount of medical knowledge and expertise. The knowledge acquired over the years can only be effective when used at the right time and for the right problem. Therefore, knowing a lot means not only having a great amount of information but also forming the tools to process it, access it, and apply it in various ways.

Not only do doctors retrieve knowledge for diagnosing a health problem, but they also have to translate that information into understandable terms for the patient. The doctor can successfully figure out the disease, offer a proper treatment, but without the patients part in the process nothing will be effective. The patients have to know what is going on without the hindrance of confusing medical terms or frightening descriptions. It is a difficult task for such intelligent experts to teach their precise detailed knowledge of the disease to a patient, for they think in medical jargon. Therefore, it is critical that the doctor translates the confusing medical terms, complicated chemical processes, and hard biological malfunctions into simple, easy to understand explanations and guidelines for the patient. The knowledge has to be brought down to simple terms, meaning the doctor has to understand and transfer the information in various forms for various patients. By putting the patients mind at ease, the two can come together as a team working towards better health of the patient and yet another learning experience for the doctor.

Gaining more experience and expanding their knowledge is exactly what doctors do every day that they practice medicine. The medical problem of every patient is viewed as "a point for departure and exploration to expand their current levels of expertise" (46). They can fluently take their time in examining each patient and going through all the possible treatments to find the best one. They are able to do all this at the same time, for they have achieved a certain level of ease while analyzing the body and its functions. However, many times, new cases will come their way involving extra examination and research. For those cases, it is important for medical professionals to practice metacognition, and monitor what they can do and what help they need. It is far more important to know what you know and what you do not know than to simply know information. Therefore, it is crucial to provide proper care by recognizing one’s limits and knowing when to call in other specialists and doctors. With every new challenge, a doctor’s knowledge is tested and often the most important part is knowing how to approach that challenge and go beyond one’s limits as a healing professional.

Doctors "not only use what they have learned, they are metacognitive and continually question their current levels of expertise and attempt to move beyond them" (48). New challenges to current treatments and knowledge can have great implications for the medical well being of humans. When faced with a disease that has never been encountered before, doctors are able to find new connections between the body and its problems. By continuously learning, doctors can stumble upon new cures and forms of treatment. Great amounts of research are conducted to reveal the human genome, to make it possible to alter the appropriate genes for treatment. With all the new learning possibilities, finding cures for cancer and AIDS seems within human reach. Aside from diseases of the body, doctors can learn more and more about the human brain as well. Their lifetime dedication to learning can lead to more discoveries about how people learn based on those that have deficiencies of the brain. By studying problems of the brain, doctors can gain more knowledge about how to improve the brains functions. With medical experts continuously learning and experiencing new cases, there is no end to the possibilities for better health and even better methods of learning. Their ongoing contribution to medicine and their dedication to its improvement, makes doctors an ideal example of adaptive experts that "are able to approach any situation flexibly and to learn throughout their lifetimes" (48).

Doctors continuously learning in the fast-paced medical environment are analogous to the vast changes that the brain undergoes as humans learn more about its structure and endless capabilities. Research on stroke patients has shown that the human brain can be functionally reorganized by learning and experiences. Different learning tasks and skills alter specific regions of the brain that are involved in that task. The brain can even be modified by specific tasks that enable a person to use alternative sensory input to accomplish various activities, as with blind people using their visual cortex for reading Braille. Though it is not clear to what extent, physical activity as well as mental activity are capable of reorganizing the brain to improve its functioning. By studying these changes and the ways children learn, researchers can form new ways to improve the processes by which people retain knowledge. With this new research, the brains of children can be altered so their potential to learn and comprehend will increase. These children, will in turn grow up to be the future doctors, researchers, and engineers that will come up with even more brilliant theories on how the brain works and can be expanded. This ongoing cycle will never end for the brain will always remain a dynamic organ that is actively involved in learning, transferring, and applying knowledge and experience.