Verbose Snow

So, after nearly three years of being shown radiographs, I'm finally in a course that (supposedly) is going to de-mystify interpreting all that anatomic snow. Not exactly going according to plan as of yet. We spent an hour today staring at lung lesions, which are (again, supposedly) easily classified into four main "patterns." So far, I seem to be improving on the system, easily classifying them into just one "pattern" - anatomic snow. Unfortunately, none of the expert radiologists on staff here are impressed with my greatly streamlined approach.

My personal inadequacies aside, it turns me back to a question I've pondered several times since starting vet school. How do we learn to see meaning in unfamiliar patterns? Or, less prosaically - how do we learn to see what we are seeing?

Way back then I was encountering a more colorful anatomic snow - histology - for the first time. Histology is the study of tissues and their cellular composition - essentially microanatomy - and involves looking at specially stained tissues under high magnification. At first, just separating one (red, blurry) cell from another (red, blurry) cell seems a monumental task. Eventually, though, you start to see the meaning of faint lines and variations in shading, organized patterns become apparent, and suddenly you are translating all this into larger structures and seeing meaningful relationships between different cell types and groups. Two groups of cells layered next to each other, which originally seemed indiscernible from each other, are now quite conspicuously unique, and moreover their differences and relationship to each other have become filled with meaning. Before you know it, you are learning histopathology - the study of diseased tissue - and suddenly slight variations from what you've come to see as "normal" colorful anatomic snow are even more meaningful, and they clue you in to specific disease.

I was acutely aware that this process was happening to me, but I couldn't for the life of me pin down exactly what I was doing (or having done to me) that precipitated such new understanding. I think it's a very commonplace learning experience, but it was the first time I experienced it as a relatively self-aware adult. Children discover new 'theaters of meaning' and learn their secrets all the time - imagine deciphering the meaning of faces for the first time, or decoding 2D photos to 3D realism, or moreover, learning to interpret drawn representations of reality with varying levels of abstraction (DaVinci to Monet to Picasso, say). I think that abstraction is the center of the mystery, too - how do we develop the rules for making loose, imperfect equations?