Another excellent recent read has been the book ”Peak”, by the late K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. The book is essentially a reader-friendly summary of the work that Ericsson had done throughout his extensive career looking at what makes experts as good as they are. As such, it provides some fascinating insights into many aspects of human learning and development - some of which are quite surprising. It was just by luck that I had also recently read a review on this topic by Duncan Chambliss entitled “The Mundanity of Excellence”. There are some overlapping themes here and both of these ..read more

My ongoing interest in learning techniques has led me to the book “Micromastery” by Robert Twigger. This is a fascinating read which promotes a slightly different approach to learning than I have ever previously explored. He describes how the “mastery” of small and well defined skills can actually provide notable educational benefits that go beyond the sum of these component parts. As such, it is really more a book about an approach to life than it is about educational theory, but this definitely adds to the relevance rather than detracts from. Indeed, its pages contained some great ideas tha ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 probl ..read more

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 ..read more

“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 thi ..read more

Once again, some time has passed since my last post and it felt as if that needed changing. As such, this outing is a mild departure from some of the more clinically-directed recent posts and looks at a slightly more parallel topic: that of habits. More specifically, this is a reflection on one of my recent reads which I have found to be particularly worth eulogising. ​ The book in question is “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, and it follows in the footsteps of another fascinating (though slightly less recent) read of mine: “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. You’ll not win any prizes for ..read more

It’s just turned 8pm on Tuesday, and the room is about half full of the usual crowd. The smell of freshly brewed, specially sourced Peruvian coffee wafts over the circle of plastic chairs and their occupants, as gentle conversation about anaerobic thresholds is exchanged. The door shuts gently behind a lycra-clad latecomer - the breeze of its closing causing the ‘Anaesthetists Anonymous” banner on the adjacent wall to flutter gently. As the chair signals the start of the meeting, a young man (though not as young as he would like to still think) stands up to speak first. “My name is Tom, and ..read more