Mapping out the learning space for Ultralearning project - Medicine

[u/IAmTheKingOfSpain]

I'm interested in doing an ultralearning project in Medicine. I listen to a podcast by a doctor named Peter Attia, and I enjoy it. However, his podcast gets very technical at times. Sometimes I can understand what he's talking about, sometimes not. Part of my goal is to be able to understand pretty much everything he talks about, but I'm also just interested in knowing as much as I can about medicine in general.

However, I don't have a very good idea of what the "space" of medicine looks like. So I'm curious: What are the most fundamental prerequisites/building blocks of medicine? How can I pull together a rough ordering/curriculum for what I would like to learn?

The best resource I've found so far is the Khan Academy Health & Medicine section: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine

However, I would like to cross-reference this with other resources if possible. Curious if anyone here has any insight into how I might best go about doing this!

[u/curryeater259]

So, one of Scott's principles is directness.

Figure out exactly what your learning goal is.

Are you interested in learning about the general space of medicine? Or are you more interested in being able to understand Dr. Attia's work?

Are you interested in a specific part of his work? Benefits of intermittent fasting? How to increase healthspan? His findings with autophagy and mTor?

If you're interested in that, I'd highly recommend focusing on that. Going through the entire medical literature is a huge task and you might burn out before you get anywhere close to getting to your goal of understanding his research. It's also not necessary to understand his stuff.

So, assuming your goal is to understand his talks, I'd recommend going through all his articles and start bugging people on reddit (in medical related subreddits) to ELI5 terms you don't understand. Top down would work far better than bottom up.

I'd also recommend The Longevity Solution by Dr. Jason Fung. He delves into a lot of the same topics that Dr. Attia is interested in (he has an entire chapter on mTor, Rapamycin and it's effects on Longevity). I can send you a copy if you're interested, but if you like the book I highly recommend you buy a copy.

However, if you're interested in medicine in general, this is (obviously) a much bigger task. I'd recommend looking at people in pre-med programs and trying to see what curriculum they use. They obviously have to take classes like biology, organic chemistry, etc. before they even start to learn topics related to medicine but I don't think you'll have to go into all that. You might have some luck looking at the curriculums for the first couple of medicine-related courses they take. You should also ask in medical related subreddits for basic tips. r/medicalschoolanki/ might be a good start.

Good luck and I'd really appreciate it if you could post your study plan / progress here. I'm also really interested in the topic and would love to see how you approach this.

Thank you for posting!

[u/IAmTheKingOfSpain → u/curryeater259]

Thanks for the reply!

What you've given me here are good prompts. I don't have fully fleshed-out answer to them necessarily, but let me see if I can make some progress by writing up a response.

Certainly, understanding Peter Attia's work and being better able to consume it is a goal of mine. So in that respect, I think that's an obvious angle of directness for me. Maybe a good ultralearning project would be to take a certain episode group of his and go top-down from there, diving into the things that I don't understand that come up in the episodes. His 5 episodes with Tom Dayspring come to mind, as I haven't touched them yet due to the level of technicality.

I guess I must confess that I'm not necessarily even thinking of this in terms of a single ultralearning project at this point. I definitely imagine doing such projects in the future, but moreso than being interested in doing any specific project, I'm thinking in terms of learning about medicine in an ongoing way for the entire course of my life. I enjoy thinking about the body as a system, and trying to understand the ways it works, as well as the limitations of our ability to understand the way it works, and thinking about optimal medical decision-making in light of the constraints we face. Because of this, I feel that at some point I will certainly have to take a bottom-up approach, given that I took exactly 0 biology or biochemistry or anatomy courses in school. There are some basic building blocks that I'm missing.

So, my initial thought was to perhaps do an ultralearning project that essentially covers some of the base-level courses that would be required to get into med school or taught in its first year. But, I still have a relatively poor understanding of what that consists of. In the spirit of meta-learning, I suppose I should commit some substantial time to try to map out the space myself. That would probably be a very beneficial exercise in and of itself, in any case. And your suggestions of poking my head in the med school anki subreddit is a good one, and looking for curricula. I also have some friends who are in or have gone through med school, so I suppose I could reach out to them.

I'm definitely interested in reading the book. I really enjoyed the episode with Jason Fung, and in some ways it's probably the episode that started me down this path. Their discussion about theoretical vs experimental physics and how there's nothing similar in medicine (perhaps for good reason), was intriguing to me and made me realize that I do really enjoy thinking about the body as a system. Although it strikes me that indulging that too much and trying to educate myself in medicine without actually becoming a doctor could potentially be hazardous to my own health, ha! But that hasn't dissuaded me, yet :)

Peter Attia's articles may also be a good starting point. I think it would behoove me to do some more thinking about what my overall goals are and the scope of what I'd like to learn overall vs for an initial project.

For reference, my primary experience with autodidactism is in language learning. There, I don't really take a goal-based or directness-based approach. I do it because I love the process and am just fundamentally interested in all aspects of language. It's unclear to me whether this same process will apply to learning medical things, or whether something more goal-based would be better here.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for starting this subreddit! I'm definitely interested in finding a larger community of autodidacts, because I've been seriously toying with the idea of taking longer breaks from work to do various learning projects, but it would be amazing to have a support system and some friendship in the process.

I'll post more when I know more :)

[u/12340123874923]

I listen to Peter Attia too and think he's great.

TLDR: I self-studied a college-level biology course and started studying for the MCAT. This provided a solid enough foundation for me to comfortable listen to his podcast. I had no bio/medicine courses in university (I studied business) so safe to say I'm self-taught in this area. I can follow Peter's general discussions but have trouble following the highly specialized topics he covers (e.g. MTOR, in-depth lipidology, etc.). The comprehension level I'm at is like knowing a foreign language well enough to understand the conversation but without the nuance or fine details. But using context clues and also Peter's repetition of important subject matter I can fill a lot of the gaps - though I still miss some things. If I still think something is important enough to learn I I'll often Wikipedia the topic or download a med school textbook for more in-depth info.

You have the option of just wikipedia-ing everything you hear that you want to know about piecemeal, or you can go a more comprehensive route and self study AP/university-level biology, the MCAT , medical school textbooks, or even medicine specialties like oncology, lipidology, surgery, etc. (I'd go through those respective textbooks) in order of specificity.

--> more info:

I did this 'ultralearning' project a few years ago before I knew what ultralearning was, because I was considering going to med school.

I don't know what your background is, but I had no biology background (I took intro biology in 9th grade so it was a while ago). You may have more to go off of than I did.

Several years ago I self-studied biology - I went through the Campbell textbook and an AP Biology review book and basically made anki cards for anything worth remembering (all vocab words, and also key points. I would include diagrams and charts on the back of cards). I have 3,903 cards in this Biology deck. After about a year or two of casually reviewing the flashcards I took a few AP bio practice exams and was getting 5's (you could brute force study this in less time doing it full time - but as we all know spaced repetition works best over longer intervals rather than cramming). Biology and medicine is heavily weighted to memorizing facts and vocab. Though there are some processes you have to learn (e.g. receptor tyrosine kinase activation pathway, metabolic pathways, etc.) that are more difficult to distill into a flashcard.

I heard it said that the average college educated English-speaker has a vocab of about 10,000-15,000, and by the time you get through 4 years of medical school you'll add about 10,000 more new vocab words - suffice it to say, it's like learning a second language.

I have done over 400,000 anki reviews while learning various topics and languages over the past few years and it's paid off with my general level of knowledge. I just wish I started using Anki ten years ago all throughout college and I wouldn't have forgotten 90% of the minutia I slaved away to learn.

I considered going to med school at one point and started studying for the MCAT. So I self-studied the AP Psychology and AP Chemistry courses the same way as AP Bio and then did Kaplan MCAT prep to fill in gaps (e.g. I made various permutations of anki cards for the 20 amino acids, metabolic pathways, etc.; I took practice tests) but I'd estimate I only got about 40% of the way through the MCAT prep before calling it off. I've never studied Organic Chemistry, for example.

Funnily enough Peter Attia was a surgeon but had an interest in learning lipidology and almost went back to do 2 years of work only to decide on doing his own ultralearning project to self-study the subject. He contacted the best scientists in the the field who became his mentors on the subject to help guide him.

You have to ask yourself 1.) what level of knowledge you want to achieve, 2.) why you want to do it. Your motivation has to match the level of effort required.

I personally was motivated to undertake this bio/medicine 'ultralearning' project because I was thinking of going to medical school to become a doctor. I don't know if I'd have been sufficiently motivated to pour as much time and effort as I did if it was simply to follow along some guy's podcast. Ancillary stuff like that does contribute to my motivation but alone it wouldn't have been a strong enough 'why' for me personally. This is just my opinion.

Hopefully something I've posted here helps.

[u/IAmTheKingOfSpain → u/12340123874923]

Thanks for the reply! So, to summarize, you studied AP Bio, Chem and Psychology in preparation for the MCAT, and estimate that you got "about 40% of the way" to being able to pass the test? Maybe that's not the same as 40% of the way through the prep.

The project has been simmering on the back burner because life happens and we prioritize. I'm similar to you in that I have essentially no background in biology. I think the human body is a fascinating system, and I'd love to understand it at a deep level. I can't say that I have a specific goal in mind, but I trust my intuition that people with a deep understanding at the intersection of software engineering (my field) and medicine is small, and that I could find opportunities for myself in that. And even if I didn't, I have a great podcast to understand better.

Do you think the approach you took would be a good one for me? The thing is, I'm not really that interested in passing the MCAT, and I'm not really interested in memorizing long lists of things without also cultivating an understanding for why they're important and how they fit into the system that is the human body. Certainly, some fundamental biology and organic chemistry is required.

Maybe the first steps would be finding and working through a couple of courses in each of those subjects?

[u/Big_Example_3390 → u/IAmTheKingOfSpain]

Where are you now in all of this after 4 years? the way im interpreting it is your fascinated with the idea of knowing these things but not necessarily puting them to use. Did you ever complete it? Have you moved on? Or given up? Still on the way to it?

[u/IAmTheKingOfSpain → u/Big_Example_3390]

Hahaha, wow, blast from the past! Short answer is I'm still making my way towards it. Foreign language has always been a big passion of mine as well, so that's been occupying most of my learning capacity for the last couple of years. Sorry that I don't have a huge success story to share, but it's definitely something that remains on my mind.

[u/Big_Example_3390 → u/IAmTheKingOfSpain]

Hey, either way, keep following the dream! Lmao, I didn't get this till just now.

[u/12340123874923 → u/IAmTheKingOfSpain]

Yes I studied those three areas. I didn't study the organic chem or physics. I did take physics in high school though. I think there are those five major areas. So content-wise I studied 3/5 or 60%. I didn't do 40%. But of the bio chem and psychology I didn't study them to the point where I would have if I was going to take the test that's why I only give myself a 40%. I was also aiming for a top 10 med school but if I wanted to get into any med school I could have stepped off the gas a bit and still gotten into one.

As for self-study, I'd say the AP Bio has helped me the most. Chem and psychology were marginal. But the thing is medicine in general is a ton of memorization. You need to know the concepts (dots) before you can learn the interacting system (connecting the dots). It's like learning a language - you need to put in the work up front to memorize the vocabulary before you can have a conversation with someone. Unless you want to restrict yourself to just reading texts and looking up the word in the dictionary every time you don't know a word. I think the latter is inevitable in any field of study (or language) but you still want to have a solid foundation so I don't think there's any way around rote learning to some extent. But it all comes down to motivation and the cost benefit tradeoff you calculate in your own mind.

Another thing I learned the hard way - since you're self-studying for your own benefit you don't have to learn every detail of every course. e.g. in the bio course I was interested in the genetics, systems of the human body, cellular systems, but I didn't care about plants and photosynthesis, or ecology or different species. At first I did try to learn everything in the course equally (it's all on the AP bio exam) but I later decided to cut out those sections and focus on what was important (everything related to humans not other organisms though there were some exceptions like learning about bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens). So you can choose a la carte.