Learning theory

In college I learned the value of keeping a journal, even if it mostly contains other peoples ideas. I made friends with a returning vet, Nelson ..who went on to become a successful Neuroscientist. He had stopped reading textbooks a long time ago ..but he kept a journal of ideas he heard both inside and outside the classroom. He wrote his own version of them ..paraphrasing what he thought they meant ..annotating where they were coming from .. and how they related to other ideas he had heard. He then drew his own conclusions ..which usually sounded far-fetched to me. He let me look at his journal. I saw fragmented sentences that crumbled into dashes and scribbles. There were diagrams with arrows pointing to other diagrams and more fragmented sentences that crumbled into dashes and scribbles. His own views were heavily circled and punctuated with bold exclamation marks. When he explained them to me ..it didn’t sound like we were talking about the same class. Those journals were all he used to study for the comprehensive exams we took each term. It worked. He wasn’t simply repeating what he had been taught ..he went deeper than that. He could describe the underlying connections that weren’t readily apparent in the lecture material. He could even go beyond the information presented and talk about the possibilities they suggested. Turns out that this was exactly what people in the profession were looking for. Even though the answers he gave were mostly interpretations he made, mildly tempered with feedback from others ..he aced every exam and went on to practice at Stanford.