Find a rock. Look at it deeply. Now compare it to your finger. If you could look inside both at a microscopic level, the rock would be complex but your finger is unbelievably more so. If you think about the rest of your body, you start to understand how much there is to learn about this thing that you live your whole life in.
Here are a few reasons why it threatens to melt your brain into wanting to give up – don’t, there are solutions:
The Number of Smarty-pants labels
You can do all sorts of tricks here: memorizing by mnemonics, using simpler labels, or even sheer repetition. Even though we would like it simpler, the truth is – there are enough different parts that need specific names to identify them that it is actually better to have complicated labels than to use easy-to-understand-but-easily-duplicated labels. In short, you’ll have to deal with volume.
Just remember you learned about 10,000 words by the time you reached 8 years old; you can learn some more. Ancestors of ours would have killed for a 1.5 second google search to an answer which makes this much easier & there are also some good places to start: [ All Essential Medical Terms in One Place | AIMS Education ](https://aimseducation.edu/blog/all-essential-medical-terms).
We can’t see lots of it
Most of it is hidden inside us
Imagine having transparent skin. Every morning you’d see your spleen and your thymus in the mirror & you’d notice really quick if there was a new giant bump there in the same way you would if it was on your nose. But because it is “under the hood” we just aren’t that familiar with our own circuitry. Youtube, Khan Academy, this article series will give you a good primer.
It is so small that it is hard to visualize
This is much less emphasized than it should be, start here where I’ve put together some novel ways to leverage your intuition that can pay off in a big way.
Everything in it has so many moving parts
Before Google maps, I remember hot shot adults giving me instructions on how to get somewhere, “OK turn left on vine, go for a block and a half and then on your left is an old statue, go around it and then turn left, go for three more blocks then go right and then take an immediate left, then a right left right right…..wrrroonnngggg, grrrrr. Your brain only holds on to a few chunks at a time. We hope that things are easy but just as a route requires all the steps to get to your destination, so also do some of the parts and processes in your body require specificity. Like driving a familiar route a few times, what was once hard will become easy.
Problems, solutions, check
Note that in all of this we are aiming for a working-level of understanding. People spend lifetimes learning deeply about specific areas, but because the coming decade is going to blow this whole thing wide open (more to come there), and because when it comes down to it you have to be the CEO for decision making on your body, the timing is great to start to get the fundamentals down. Onward.
