I’d like to point you toward a really interesting place to hash out the ins and outs of continuing medical education (not the politics or funding issues, but the science of art of CME): #CMEChat, a weekly Twitter discussion that takes place on Wednesday mornings at 11 am ET. I don’t always get to participate—for some reason that time seems to get clogged with meetings and conference calls—but when I have joined in, I’ve been really impressed with the level of conversation that happens in 140-character snippets. And now there are videos extolling the virtues of #CMEChat by Brian McGowan and Lawrence Sherman, but this one had me literally laughing out loud.

This article on how Internet use has affected our ability to remember things is pretty interesting, if not exactly surprising. Researchers have found that we tend to remember things we can’t look up on the Internet, and forget things we know we’ll be able to retrieve electronically. We’re also better at remembering where we store information—in this case, which folder we stashed a bit of info in on a hard drive—than we are the bit of info itself.

While it’s not a new idea, it does confirm what CME providers have been saying for a long time, that since healthcare providers can’t possibly remember everything they need to know, what they need to learn is where and how to find what they need to know when they need to know it. The biggest revelation seems to be that we’re using the Internet as “our primary external storage system,” but we all knew that already, didn’t we?