Ahmed: Make academic connections

Think back to middle and high school. What do you remember? I remember classes being separately… Think back to middle and high school. What do you remember? I remember classes being separately scheduled chunks of time, each preordained to cover a single subject. When the bell rang, that meant to stop thinking about biology and to start thinking about English. You never imported your knowledge of the cell to a class session dedicated to Shakespeare’s sonnets.

It’s a regrettable reality that with that physical time separation followed a mental tendency to not associate and integrate subject matter from different classes. The practice can only be described as a hindrance to learning.

College seems to hold much of the same. We still have scheduled, separate classes that simply breed that same mentality. However, now is an appropriate time to reassess our learning methodology. Consider ways that you can relate seemingly different topics to gain a more substantive understanding of all of them. Sometimes it’s hard, and at first it will seem silly. But hopefully, with practice, you will find it beneficial and it will set your mind free.

There are many quick examples of this in practice. If you’ve taken organic chemistry, you’ve learned something about aromaticity. You’ve learned that there is a special stability in the benzene ring — electrons switch back and forth about a six-membered carbon ring. Well, if you recall from physics, applying an external magnetic field can induce these electrons to spin along the ring — think solenoid. This affects the chemical shifts in both carbon and proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Something you learned isolated in a physics class was actually the core science behind an application — spectroscopy — you practiced so fervently in organic chemistry.

Physics and organic chemistry are both natural sciences though. Can this sort of cross-classroom association be applied along the age-old barrier of the arts and the sciences? Fear not, it can.

Let’s take a simple example. You might have read Dante’s “Inferno” and learned that at the beginning of the circles of hell, the long passage toward the center of the Earth is the Vestibule. Here reside the folk that were not against God but did not accept him either. In neuroscience you will likely learn of a  system that also lies at the beginning of a long canal, the ear canal that is. This system integrates information from the body’s periphery to maintain balance and a sense of spatial orientation. It’s called the vestibular system.

Now there isn’t a complex relationship here between literature and neuroscience. But if you’ve learned of both, there is no reason to not associate them. It’s easier to remember each, the Vestibule and the vestibular system, if you do.

Now a deeper example. In introductory biology, you learn of homeostasis. Put rather crudely, homeostasis is the maintenance of a stable, steady environment in the body by the use of feedback systems. So if a parameter is too great, the body senses it and causes a cascade of events to work against, reverse or nullify that parameter. This also happens to be a keen way to describe dynamic public opinion.

Christopher Wlezien, a professor of political science at Temple University, argues that the sway of public opinion is homeostatic. When policymakers enact legislation that is too liberal, the general public becomes, on average, a little more conservative. When policies are too conservative, the general public becomes a little more liberal. In the same fashion as the human body, a body of people maintains a fairly consistent general opinion about politics.

Although your mind might not jump to the idea of bodily homeostasis when you read about public opinion, such habits are not prohibited. If you do associate the ideas, you can extrapolate on each of them and realize that the same general mechanism underlies two different disciplines. Approach knowledge with the belief that there is much common ground, and you will understand it all more thoroughly. Approach knowledge for what it is, not what we label it as.

So as you are juggling the different classes you take, your major requirements, general education requirements and fancies, find commonality between disciplines. You will better learn and appreciate the information. Do not let the physical determine the mental. Yes, Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory might have ended, but there’s no harm in bringing an economic mentality to a chemistry class. You might just find keeping track of moles of gases and their pressures a little easier.

Write Abdul at aba24@pitt.edu.