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The Milk of Amnesia?

12/3/2021

Let’s run a little thought experiment.
Your anaesthetist comes and talks to you before your surgery. Following his thorough yet efficient pre-operative assessment he tells you that it may be possible that his anaesthetic is simply a perfect amnesic agent. You could potentially experience the entire operation in the moment (unable to move or do anything about it) but at the end you would have absolutely no recollection of these events. You would ‘wake up’ from the anaesthetic with a perfect gap in your episodic memory; to all intents and purposes a period of ‘unconsciousness’. No one would know if you experienced anything (particularly you), and it would be exactly as if you hadn’t. But maybe you had.
Would this bother you? And if it did, why?

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Medical Education: Spaced Repetition Revisited

15/1/2021

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A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post looking at the technique of spaced repetition. With my (hopefully final) exams now completed I wanted to revisit the topic and add a few additional points that I think complement this approach to learning. These are ideas that I have come across over the intervening years of using spaced repetition, as well as from ongoing study around learning techniques. One of the most useful of these resources has been the free online course “Learning How to Learn” by Dr Barbara Oakley and colleagues on Coursera ( I believe I have read that this is the most popular course on Coursera). This course highlights some of the key evidence-based approaches to effective learning and I would strongly recommend the modest time investment involved in completing it. In addition, although I was still digesting it at the time of writing my initial blog post, I feel I have been able to absorb more of the concepts from the brilliant book ‘Make it Stick’. Although this is a more detailed dive into the evidence, this blog post from Eva Keiffenheim provides an excellent summary of some of the key themes which is well worth a look at. But now I’ll give a quick summary of some of my own learning points. These are all related to the optimal use of my flashcard deck using the Anki app, so some points may be more or less applicable to you depending on your own approach.

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How do we know? 3 - Gettier Cases

28/12/2020

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There is a saying that I like: "even a stopped clock is right twice a day". Now this is usually used as a bit of a mean joke when someone gets something right when you might not expect them to. However, we can use this as an example of a 'Gettier Case' (I think it is probably my favourite one). As I alluded to at the end of the last post, Edmund Gettier was a philosopher who demolished the classical definition of knowledge (Justified true belief) with a concise paper consisting of a few examples where there is a belief that is true and justified but is quite clearly not knowledge. Why is this important? Well his observation, demonstrated through his examples, made it quite clear that we don’t really have a great way of describing why one thing would count as knowledge, and another thing would just count as fluke, or a lucky chain of events. This is an issue that can impact significantly on how confident we can be in some of the things that we ‘know’. Let’s delve a bit deeper.

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How do we know? - 2. What is knowledge?

28/11/2020

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Welcome to the second post in this series looking at epistemology. As I alluded to in the introductory post, I wanted to start by looking at the very definition of knowledge itself. Now this may seem like a bit of an odd starting point to some of you. Indeed, you may feel that you have a pretty clear idea of what we mean when we say the word knowledge. And it is probably this fact - this innate feeling of the term - that provides some of the fascinating thinking points. This is because, as we shall find out when we start to unpick the definitions that we have been using, we start to find problems with what we ‘feel’ is knowledge, and how we actually articulate that. Let’s explore!

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How do we know? - 1. Introduction

12/11/2020

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Welcome to the start of a new blog series: How do we know? This is a series that I have been aiming to get started for some time now. The primary goal is to look deeper into the topic of epistemology; the domain of philosophy that explores what knowledge actually is, how we can best approach it, and some of the many challenges that this path imposes. It aims to describe my exploration of this field as I look into the different lines of enquiry that many great thinkers have taken to try and answer some of these hardest of questions:

What actually is knowledge?
How can we be sure what we know?
How can we trust our perceptions?
What are the common challenges that we face?

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COVID-19: Part 1

20/3/2020

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“I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
A day may come, when the strength of men fails,
When we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship.
But it is not this day!”
Aragorn, King of Gondor

As we enter the first days of the tempest that is the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like a suitable time to put pen to paper again to document the landscape. It seems likely that we are living through a moment in history (a ‘once in a century event’ our health secretary has called it), and it is already starting to feel a little surreal from here. I can imagine that this might be what it was like in the early days of the great wars, or the worst days of the cold war: a sense of colossal forces moving throughout the world, whose potential impact is unclear, but almost certainly massive. A slight variation on this feeling is that we, as healthcare workers, are the footsoldiers in this upcoming battle, and with the knowledge that first contact with the enemy is imminent (I appreciate that, at the time of publishing this, the first contact has probably arrived for many of you). But enough over-dramatic build up for now, and time to do some more useful writing. Here, I hope to put down a few thoughts to entertain (or maybe just occupy) those who are stuck in self-isolation at this time, and also provide a reference point for posterity; to allow myself (and anyone else that is interested) to look back at the time before the wave hit, and recall what we were thinking.

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The Milk of Amnesia?

Medical Education: Spaced Repetition Revisited

How do we know? 3 - Gettier Cases

How do we know? - 2. What is knowledge?

How do we know? - 1. Introduction

COVID-19: Part 1

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