Page 174 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

11
frequently despaired his modest powers of understanding. Yet some of the most
exciting areas of neuroscientific research today are rooted in Cajal’s original
findings. 12
Cajal’s teachers, as Cajal later recollected, showed a sadly mistaken valuing
of abilities. Quickness was taken as cleverness, memory for ability, and
13
submissiveness for rightness. Cajal’s success despite his “flaws” shows us how
even today, teachers can easily underestimate their students—and students can

underestimate themselves.

Deep Chunking

Cajal worked his way fitfully through medical school. After adventures in Cuba
as an army doctor and several failed attempts at competitive examinations to
place as a professor, he finally obtained a position as a professor of histology,

studying the microscopic anatomy of biological cells.
Each morning in his work in studying the cells of the brain and the nervous
system, Cajal carefully prepared his microscope slides. Then he spent hours
carefully viewing the cells that his stains had highlighted. In the afternoon, Cajal
looked to the abstract picture of his mind’s eye—what he could remember from
his morning’s viewings—and began to draw the cells. Once finished, Cajal
compared his drawing with the image he saw in the microscope. Then Cajal

went back to the drawing board and started again, redrawing, checking, and
redrawing. Only after his drawing captured the synthesized essence, not of just a
single slide, but of the entire collection of slides devoted to a particular type of
cell, did Cajal rest. 14
Cajal was a master photographer—he was even the first to write a book in
Spanish on how to do color photography. But he never felt that photographs

could capture the true essence of what he was seeing. Cajal could only do that
through his art, which helped him abstract—chunk—reality in a way that was
most useful for helping others see the essence of the chunks.
A synthesis—an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea—is a neural pattern. Good
chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re
working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction
15
helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art,
poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it