Learning How We Learn: In an unlikely confluence, bioengineers are finding fertile ground in research and teaching about learning

You know too much; it's time to kill you." In Russian, the phrase rhymes. The captain raised his glass, steering an inebriated wink my way. I glanced down at the table, littered with bottles of every persuasion-vodka, whisky, tequila, champagne. I had learned Russian during a stint in the Army in the 1970s and subsequently happened upon a seasonal job as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers up on the Bering Sea and on the Pacific Northwest coast (Figure 1). I'd spend three to six months out at sea every year and the rest of the time studying to retrain myself to become an electrical engineer.