Hiralious

"In the end, no one remembers Krebs cycle"

 We spend so much time studying the metabolism of fats, but in the end, we dont remember its details. That's true. I don't think anyone does.

A formal education, by the end of which you get a degree, serves mostly to familiarise you with the core concepts. You don't remember most of it.

  I was always ready to be intimated by the idea that people can google their medical condition and seem to know more about the problem than the doctor they go to, simply because the doctor doesn't essentially remember all the nitty gritty details of this one specific disease. But here a distinction becomes relevant.

  A doctor during the course of his training studies the medical sciences from the very basics of physiology, biochemistry and anatomy. They start from how the chemical reactions work inside the body and how electrical impulses make the heart beat to how a disease manifests grossly in a person. And although all they  have currently might be some lingering vestiges of that knowledge, they are familiar with, or are at least aware of the existence of the explanations behind what's going on in the body. Studying a course in its entirety , like Medicine, gives you an aerial or a bird eye view of a city. On the other hand, if you are a layperson and you don't have the underlying knowledge of basics or any familiarity with it, you can still google a certain disease and you can be really literate in it. It is as if you have gone to one house in the city and explored it thoroughly , you can give any doctor a tough time with your questions about it. As you should!  But you don't have the concept  in your mind of where this particular house lies on the grand map of the city, you don't have a web of connections about how this one disease or symptom relates with the others, that knowledge or intuition is only possible with training in the basics and related disciplines.

  I give the example of a doctor only because Medicine is my subject. Otherwise I find it relevant for all other fields. Many times when I feel that I have a good understanding of a concept from another field , I end up learning a thing or two about it from the experts, and I am humbled by the magnitude of the things I had overlooked. 

  There are people capable of cross-overs into other fields, and there are self taught specialists in a field, like Elon Musk who built a rocket that way. But such people are exceptions, not the rule.