Power-houses and small talk

I just finished running through my talk for the conference this weekend. Only two slides won't make the cut (due to time constraints), but I will tack them on to the end, after the acknowledgments in case someone asks a question specifically about the subject of those slides. Otherwise I think the timing is fine - though I feel a little rushed. I will probably put the time into actually semi-scripting the talk. I figure conferences, defences, and job talks are worth the added effort. When else do I have a captive audience for an extended period of time? I might as well do my best to make it worth their time too! I don't imagine I'd be able to put this much effort into daily lectures, but that is a different arena - facilitating the transfer and uptake of knowledge can be done in other ways. Next year I might even take some courses on teaching science - but I'm putting that off until I figure out what my next project will be.

I've been reading an awful lot of text books lately. I find that when I read about topics I have previously studied, but mostly forgotten, I gain a better, more firm understanding of the subject. Often times the terminology sticks, but the solid understanding fades quickly after the final exam. I worry that I will soon lose all but my mathematical vocabulary, and much of my other science knowledge as well! But it is difficult to find the time to reaquaint oneself with undergraduate subjects - and especially daunting when you have no professor to lecture for you, and instead only large texts books to sift through for the passages that will be most useful. What I find even more frustrating is that because I have no exam to study for, I don't know what information is worth retaining, and what can be glossed over. In an ideal world where I could retain everything I wouldn't gloss over anything - but I often feel that my brain is reaching critical capacity as is, and I really don't want to forget my phone number or where I live just so that I can remember all the components needed by mitochondria, for instance, to perform their various functions. It has been far too long since I've studied these things. I need a system.

I started writing down random thoughts, questions and ideas for research projects. It has been very helpful alleviating my worries of forgetting thoughts that might be terribly useful in the future. But those scattered scraps of paper need a home and some organization of their own. I think I need a "thoughts" book - I already have a "lab notebook" so that months from now I can figure out what the heck I was doing today. Hopefully the "thoughts" book can somehow help me write down things I've learned form my readings as well - despite the lack of a final exam, I'd still like to retain what I learn somewhere! I just can't believe it has taken me this long to get organized.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot of textbooks. I am trying to re-learn cell biology (actually, I am trying to learn it for the first time, since the course I took in undergrad was "problem based learning" and very little learning actually took place). How can I study anything in biology, even if it is only tangental to my work, without a thorough understanding of how the basic units work?