Visual media for learning biology/medicine

[Sasha]

The animations in the video from Forestglip are very nice and give a rough idea of what is going on. The only problem is that the VoiceOver includes a lot of popular ideas about how the immune system works that are wrong or misleading. T [...] These are things that immunology textbooks often get subtly but importantly wrong. T cells are not 'in charge' of B cell responses for instance. Antibodies do not stop you dying from new infections, unless you are a newborn baby, and so on.

This is all very depressing, for someone at the start of the learning journey.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

This is all very depressing, for someone at the start of the learning journey.

No it isn't, Sasha. It is just a reminder that science is all about making sure ideas really make sense when you fit them together. Improving the way we fit ideas together is just as important a task, if not more so, than getting data from experiments. Data are only ever of value as ways to test the integrity of our models.

 

[hotblack]

For the basics of T cells, B cells etc I’ve found the Khan Academy stuff in the other resource threads pretty good overviews. I’m not so sure about the visual aspects as I tend to just listen.They don’t seem to do the fluff to make things ‘engaging’ you get in some places.

My feeling is if stuff works for you and is mostly accurate that’s good enough, especially for a lot of our purposes. We don’t learn things immediately but pick things up over time from different sources, which hopefully, all fit together into a picture that makes sense and ends up accurate. And of course ideas change so what we are taught often gets out of date. But accurate from our current understanding. Learning is a process not a one off.

Common and repeated misconceptions and tropes are a different matter. As those get ingrained. And can be hard to unlearn or change, influence other ideas, etc.

I suppose what I’m saying @Sasha is don’t worry too much, find a few good sources that work for you, be open to being wrong or updating how you think about things and carry on learning