It kind of sucks.

We humans really aren't great at learning.

We forget easily.

I've probably said the words,

my brain feels like a sieve,

hundreds of times as I rack my brain for some tiny piece of information

that I just know is in there somewhere,

but I just can't seem to retrieve it.

And there's more challenges.

By the time you finish listening to this podcast, there'll probably be about five new blog posts, 24 tweets with links to recommended learning resources, two YouTube videos on emergency procedures, three New England papers related to EM, and maybe even a 2000-page emergency medicine textbook published.

Okay, maybe not all that, but every day the ratio between what you know and what you can know shrinks.

It's academic quicksand.

The more you struggle to stay afloat, the worse it gets.

Now, I know it's a cliche, but learning emergency medicine really is a journey, not a destination.

So in the spirit of reconciling ourselves to the fact that we can't know everything, unless your name is Walter Himmel,

today we borrow from some of the best educators in the EM world who answered a simple question I asked on Twitter.

What are your top tips for retaining knowledge in EM?

Keep your learning active. Teach. Quiz yourself. Write out what you know. Simulate in the lab and in your mind. Track your

misses and review those topics. Debrief difficult cases with your colleagues. Because if it's

passive and easy, it isn't working. You need to really chase down every case that you see, every

patient you admit, especially when you have diagnoses that you're not

quite sure about. Find out what happened on the inpatient's day. Find out what happened to those

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