Top Highlights

• How doctors think Medical doctors may not be memory savants, but becoming a doctor requires an extra-ordinary amount of knowledge accumulation. During their education, medical students learn hundreds of patient presentations leading to over 10,000 diseases that have been described in the medical literature, which requires a tremendous amount of cog...
• These mechanisms are higher order functions of the brain, and demonstrate application of declarative knowledge, which is also known as procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge can be stored and then recalled from working and associative memory. Each episode of recalling knowledge facilitates building episodic memory, which in turn strengthens as...
• tendencies are largely subconscious and difficult to recognize prospectively. A more precise term “cognitive dispositions to respond” has recently been used in the literature to describe these tendencies. These cognitive dispositions respond to stimuli within a context. Cognitive dispositions are triggered subconsciously and follow “if and then rul...
• Anchoring bias: When a clinician anchors or focuses too much on an initial piece of information and tries to establish a diagnosis without fully paying attention to or exploring additional plausible diagnoses. Essentially, the clinician locks onto a few features in the patient’s initial presentation. This cognitive disposition is often compounded b...
• Illness scripts are organized mental summaries of clinicians’ knowledge of diseases. These scripts are specific to diseases. As a clinician’s experience grows, their illness scripts get progressively refined and tend to reflect distributions of symptoms and signs of particular diseases in the order of their frequency of occurrence. This refinement ...