A la recherche du bears perdu

Here are the four interesting facts that I have learned in the past two weeks as part of my study of the cardiovascular system:

1. Excess liquorice consumption can cause high blood pressure.
2. Kangaroos have both left and right vena cavae (the large veins returning to the heart). Human embryos also have them but we lose the ones on the left very early in our development.
3. Hibernating mammals such as bears (anyone know any other hibernating mammals) have parasympathetic nerves plugged into their ventricles. Humans don't.
4. Duck egg whites are deficient in globulin, the protein which foams up when you whisk them, so don't try making meringues out of duck eggs.

(Actually the last fact is from Stephanie Alexander's big rainbow coloured cookbook, but it's just as scientific sounding as the stuff I learn at med school!)

Have you noticed the common theme? The stuff I remember easily and without effort concerns either food or animals, preferably both. Perhaps it's a holdover from prehistoric life when the most important things you could learn concerned finding food and avoiding being someone else's. I'm starting to wonder if I should have chosen veterinary science or butchery as a career rather than medicine. But it's too late to switch now, I'm already on career path C as it is.

I just need to figure out how to take advantage of this peculiarity of my memory. Perhaps I need to carry around with me a big deck of cards with pictures of dangerous animals and delicious foods on them. Every time I come across a new fact I want to remember I will quickly glance at the next dangerous animal or delicious food and the new fact will be branded forever on my mind. The advantage of having both dangerous animals and delicious foods is that I will never know what to expect next so it will keep me in a heightened state of awareness.

I think studying medicine would have been much easier for my caveman ancestors because they wouldn't have to carry around a deck of cards with scary and delicious pictures on them, because behind every tree was a 9-foot tall carnivorous tree rat waiting to rend them limb from limb. On the other hand, they didn't have Wikipedia. With my patented Threat/Food Learning System (TFLS) I have the best of both worlds!