Simplicity

In University, one of my Biomedical Engineering professors made a huge impression on me. It was in a class about modelling biomedical problems with electric circuits.

If the title of the course doesn’t make sense to you, here’s a quick explanation. Electric circuits are a good model for the study of systems in general, and Biomedical engineering is one example. You can use measurements from a biomedical system (for example, someone’s brain) and decide that this brain actually reminds you a lot of an electric circuit that you know. There are good electrical engineering techniques for solving electric circuits, so if you can create a model for a brain using a solvable electric circuit, you can understand the behavior of the brain (assuming your model is somewhat useful).

Obviously real life brains are damn complex. So they don’t tend to remind you of any electric circuit that you know. Not as a 4th year engineering student anyway. And this is where my teacher was getting to the interesting part.

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