Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, and Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, 149-37 Powells Cove Blvd., Whitestone, NY 11357, USA.
Diabetes Metab Res Rev. 2010 Nov;26(8):598. doi: 10.1002/dmrr.1142.
Why do we continue to gather to meet to exchange medical knowledge more than 500 years after the invention of the printing press, 100 years after the telephone, and 20 years after the widespread use of email? We, the human race, have been transmitting information by multimedia--voice, face, and body language--into each other's ears and eyes (and noses) in caves around fires, at work, and on the trail, since well over 100 000 years ago. That communication is built on a foundation shared with many other primates and non-primate mammals. The origins of this communication are hundreds of millions of years old. Each newly input bit of this type of communication often needs to be processed immediately and responded to appropriately (food, hug, love, hit, bite, fight, and flight). The brain has had all this evolutionary time to build a complex, rich network of neurons to take it all in immediately, deal with it speedily, and save it for guidance in the future. (Also, 're-play' is not usually a choice.) Writing is only 5000 years old and comes in through only the eyes. (The ears and nose are excluded from these communications.) The earliest surviving paintings, the predecessors of writing, are less than 30 000 years old and are an exclusive product of human evolution. The brain has had less time to build a rich response centre. Re-reading is common. Only in a minority of instances (e.g. STOP sign, High Voltage) is an immediate response demanded. In essence, the two distinct modes of communication complement one another. Vive la difference. Vive la compagnie.
We witnessed this complementarity at the recent Laniado Hospital/Bildirici Diabetes Center meeting in Israel. The public presentations from the speaker's platform stirred the minds and souls of the audience. We remember the presenter, we recall the overall message (but not the details), and we were emotionally moved by what we heard. Now we are publishing these papers in a medical journal to use the other mode of communication-the written word (cool, slow, reader's convenience, skip, and re-play). Each alone is good--the two together produce an unexplained but exhilarating synergy and a long-term meld of the warm emotion and cool reason.
为什么在发明印刷术 500 多年后、电话出现 100 年后、电子邮件广泛使用 20 年后，我们人类还要继续聚集、开会、交流医学知识？早在 10 多万年前，我们人类就在洞穴里的篝火旁、工作中、在小径上，通过多媒体——声音、面部表情和肢体语言——将信息传递到彼此的耳朵和眼睛（还有鼻子里）。这种交流建立在与许多其他灵长类动物和非灵长类哺乳动物共享的基础上。这种交流的起源可以追溯到数亿年前。这种交流类型的每一个新输入信息通常都需要立即处理并做出适当回应（食物、拥抱、爱、打、咬、打架和逃跑）。大脑已经有了所有这些进化时间来构建一个复杂而丰富的神经元网络，以便立即接收、快速处理，并在未来为其提供指导。（此外，“重播”通常不是一种选择。）书写只有 5000 年的历史，只能通过眼睛进行。（耳朵和鼻子在这些交流中被排除在外。）现存最早的绘画，即书写的前身，距今不到 3 万年，是人类进化的独家产物。大脑还没有足够的时间来构建一个丰富的反应中心。重读是常见的。只有在少数情况下（例如，停止标志、高压电）才需要立即做出反应。从本质上讲，这两种截然不同的交流模式是相辅相成的。存在即合理。公司万岁。
我们在最近于以色列举行的拉尼亚多医院/比尔迪奇糖尿病中心会议上见证了这种互补性。从演讲台上的公开演讲激发了观众的思维和灵魂。我们记得演讲者，我们回忆起总体信息（但不是细节），我们被听到的内容所感动。现在我们将这些论文发表在医学杂志上，以利用另一种交流模式——书面文字（冷静、缓慢、方便读者、跳过和重播）。两者单独使用都很好——两者结合在一起产生了一种无法解释但令人振奋的协同作用，以及一种温暖情感和冷静理性的长期融合。
