“In short, someone who notices or remembers everything may end up understanding nothing.”
“Our lives are better served by being able to focus on the essential information than being able to remember every little detail.” – Drugs that Enhance Student Achievement

This chapter was very enlightening to me because it brought up a few drugs and their uses that I had never heard of before. It also shocked me that this type of focus-enhancing drug usage is becoming so very common place in our world. But the lines quoted above struck me most because when I think back to school, I think back to all of the exercises we had to do on the “main idea” of things. It made me wonder how these drugs affected our ability to put together all of these minute details into the “bigger picture.” Many tests, in fact, are like that – asking for more analysis and construction than memorization and spitting back details.

As humans, it is very important for us not just to recycle dates and random events throughout history. To survive, to solve problems that we have never encountered before, we need to use all of the data around us in conjunction. We need to see what is essential. If these drugs cause students to start focusing on the mundane details instead of the big picture, I believe it will hurt them. And personally, recently with the easy access to the Internet, many of my own professors and teachers have told me that it’s not so important to remember that date or that fact, as long as we can understand the main idea behind whatever subject we are learning. We can look up the exact birth date of George Washington on google if we really wanted to. But it’s more important to know who he was in general and even MORE important, to learn how to think critically about anything we learn. It will do us no good to remember all the details if we don’t know how to apply those thinking skills to the next problem we come across. As educators, I think we need to be wary of students who may be using these types of medications and discourage the usage from become normalized.