How to Study for Exams - An Evidence-Based Masterclass

0:00 so if there's one thing that can completely transform our experience of school or college or university it's knowing how to effectively and productively study for our exams no one really teaches us the stuff but there's actually hundreds of scientific studies from the last several decades that give us a clear road map and that teach us what are the evidence-based strategies that we can use to maximize the amount that we learn and minimize the time that we spend learning it hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali and I'm now an entrepreneur and author but a few years ago I worked full-time as a doctor here in the UK after spending six years studying medicine at Cambridge University now in my first year of medical school I really struggled when it came to exam preparation and I spent a lot of time doing really inefficient study techniques like rereading and highlighting and summarizing and all of that crap but then in my second year I came across this enormous wealth of scientific evidence around how to effectively learn understand memorize

0:46 stuff and I started applying all of this to my life and then all of a sudden my grades massively improved and while my grades were improving I actually ended up having loads of free time as well and I was able to use that time to hang out with friends and start my first business and start this YouTube channel But ultimately all of it was just down to being able to study effectively and productively now a few years ago I recorded this evidence-based masterclass and has been available on skillshare where over a hundred thousand people have taken out with absolutely rave reviews but this year I thought you know what as a thank you to all of the students who have been supporting my journey on this YouTube channel for the last six years we're going to basically take that class which previously you had to pay for and just put it for free on YouTube and in the hope that way more students will then find it useful in terms of learning how to study for exams efficiently and productively so obviously this was recorded a few years ago and so I look significantly younger than I do right now but all of the advice in this master class is fully

1:31 evidence-based and is probably hopefully Timeless in that it will hopefully still be applicable 100 years from now as it is today there will be timestamps down below so you can jump around whenever and however you like and if you're interested in a more holistic guide on how to be more productive with your work and your life you might like to check out my brand new book field of productivity how to do more of what matters to you that'll be linked down below oh and also you should download my completely free ultimate studying bundle this includes some worksheets and templates and stuff that I found super helpful when I was a student and those are all available for you completely for free with a link in the video description anyway now I hope you enjoy this evidence-based masterclass on how to study for your exams so this whole class is basically going to be split up into three parts and these are the sort of the three key steps of effective studying effective learning effective anything and that is step one understand step two remember and step three focus and they're all

2:18 kind of interlinked and obviously kind of focusing as part of the understanding and remembering but those are the three broad categories that we split up this class into and when it comes to effective studying of any kind understanding is by far the most important thing I think one of the mistakes that we can often make when we're studying for our exams or learning anything new is that we could be very quick to to rely on memorization and especially when you know we talk about some of the effective study techniques that we'll talk about later on like active recall and space repetition um especially when students find out about those for the first time and this certainly happened for me it's very easy to just go into kind of flashcard making mode and thinking okay cool I'm just going to be doing efficient things now and just kind of really focusing on memorizing the details but that's the wrong way around to do it we always want to be starting with understanding once we understand the stuff once we can

3:04 comfortably explain it to a friend comfortably explain it to a five-year-old and we can actually remember the fact that we've understood it at that point everything just becomes so much easier so step one is understanding and within understanding we'll talk about the Feynman method we'll talk about active recall and how it works we'll talk about some of the evidence behind it and we'll talk about how you can take notes during class and how you can take notes after class to Aid with our understanding of stuff and then we'll talk about scoping the subject which is another fundamental technique to help understand the content our second step is remembering and we've all had this issue where you know we think we've understood something we've been kind of working through it for hours and hours and then we come back to the topic a week later and we realize that oh crap I literally can't remember anything that I definitely understood like a week ago and that's because of the way memory works there's something

3:50 called the forgetting curve which we'll talk a lot more about later on but that's basically this phenomenon where anything we learn we are just gonna you know forget exponentially it'll exponentially Decay from our memory sort of like Half-Life if you're into like you know a-level chemistry and stuff um our memory for that thing will Decay over time and we have to interrupt the forgetting curve by repeating the subject at spaced intervals and that's where the idea of space repetition comes from and finally along with understanding and remembering the third part of effective studying effective learning effective doing anything is being able to focus so firstly this comes from getting the motivation or the discipline to actually sit down and study in the first place that's something we all struggle with then it comes from like when we're actually sitting down to study how do we not get distracted how do we make sure we can focus for you know an extended period of Time how do we take breaks appropriately

4:36 and so in this class we'll be talking through loads of techniques on how we can more efficiently Focus using some evidence-based examples and also some anecdotal examples from my own life and you know that of my friends uh we'll talk about kind of what music is best to help studying and focusing and we'll talk about the different environments that we can create for ourselves to help make the process of studying a little bit more pleasurable and therefore make us more likely to do it all right so the first step of understanding anything is being able to explain it to a friend or explain it to a five-year-old and this is the famous Feynman technique famously named after the famous physicist Richard feinman who was aptly known as The Great explainer and Feynman was a big deal back in the day before he died because he was able to you know distill really complicated things in theoretical physics in a way that made sense to the layperson and the

5:23 reason he was able to do that is because he understood the topic so well and once you've understood the topic well enough you can just explain it to anyone and that is the key principle behind the Feynman technique and that's our key litmus test for whether we really understand something and so the way we do that is that whenever we're learning a topic um what I would do is that after I've kind of learned the topic or sort of at every Junction within the topic I would ask myself does this make sense firstly and secondly could I explain this to a five-year-old so let's say in medicine I'm trying to learn about how atrial fibrillation works for example I might explain that oh well atrial atrial fibrillation is actually this uh this hot Rhythm where the h tree are quivering and you know fibrillation means quivering and therefore that means that we're going to get stasis of blood so blood is going to stay in the atrium because it's not being contracted and propelled into the ventricles and we

6:10 know that when blood is static in the atrium then it's going to clot and that clot can go into the ventricles and then can go into the lungs or can go into the brain and that would be bad and so that's me sort of explaining it to a five-year-old but this whole this little five-year-old thing is a little bit it's a bit of a metaphor really because obviously a five-year-old wouldn't know what the Atria of the heart are but you know that is reasonable assume knowledge when I'm trying to explain it to a friend and so like the way I think about it is could I feasibly explain this to a friend and if I can talk through atrial fibrillation in a way that makes sense in my head and makes sense in a way that I can explain it to someone else it means I truly understand the topic we need to understand stuff before we can do anything else with it and in order to understand stuff we need to be able to explain it to a five-year-old explain it to a friend explain it to our parents okay so at this point in the class we we are still in the understanding section

6:55 we haven't talked about remembering stuff yet we've talked about the vitamin technique um but before we move on I need to tell you about something called active Recall now what does active recall mean active recall is basically just a pretentious fancy way of saying test yourself and the authors of that book that I recommend called make it stick say that for the vast majority of students if you're not getting the marks that you want to be getting the reason is because you're just not testing yourself enough like testing ourselves is the most fundamental part of understanding anything and of learning anything it's like you know if you're trying to learn the piano like you can't really learn the piano just by reading about piano Theory you have to test yourself by actually putting it into practice it's the same when taking any kind of exam like we all like to think that rereading information and like sort of try like it's a case of putting information into

7:40 our brains but actually all of the evidence shows that actually it's a case of taking information out of our brains and the harder we try and work to retrieve information from our brains like active retrieval active recall the harder we try and work for that recall the more that neural Connection in our brain is going to be strengthened so to talk about the research a little bit uh there is a scientist called Professor donloski I imagine he's in America because they're all in America and in 2013 he did he wrote like this really long paper where he summarized like thousands of studies humanist colleagues summarized thousands of studies done on college students and school students all around the world that were all about how they studied for tests for exams for whatever and he found that active recall or testing was very high utility and he said that on the basis of the evidence we rate practice testing as having a high utility testing effects have been demonstrated across an impressive range

8:26 of practice test formats kinds of material learner ages outcome measures and retention intervals thus practice testing has broad applicability basically a fancy way of saying that we need to be testing ourselves more and for me and all of my friends when we first discovered the power of active recall in our second year of med school when we had the psychology lecture it completely changed our lives because we were like oh my God this is incredible all I have to do is like start testing myself a little bit more rather than just try and reread and highlight and all that you know useless stuff that we were doing in the past so we've talked about active recall and we've talked about how it's the single best way to make us remember anything but a question that students often ask is okay fine active recall like testing myself is all well and good and I'm going to test myself more but surely I need to learn the content first before I can test myself on it and that's a very

9:11 reasonable you know claim to make and what's been really helpful for me and most of my friends is that we start thinking of testing as just a part of the learning process itself for example like reading a textbook you know and preparing for human physiology these days at the end of every paragraph or every other paragraph I will stop I will like sort of metaphorically close the book and or look away and I'll ask myself okay what have I just read what are the key Concepts from what I've just read and can I phrase this in my own words and I'm doing that with the book closed I'm not wasting time by writing out a summary of stuff with the book open because that's completely passive and completely pointless what I'm doing is I'm closing the book and then I'm trying to actively recall what I've just read and the fact that I'm doing it there and then also helps with the forgetting curve that again we've talked about a bit and we'll talk about a bit later because as soon as I've read that paragraph off like reading that paragraph is a passive process and

9:58 therefore my brain doesn't have to work very hard at reading the paragraph our brain is I it's not a Perfect Analogy but it's sort of like a muscle in that the harder it has to work to do something the more likely it is to be able to do that thing better in the future testing ourselves is really important and honestly if there's just one thing you take away from this entire class I don't know how long this class is going to be but if there's only one thing you take away from it please let it be that we should all be testing ourselves probably two to three times as much as we currently are but that doesn't involve just testing ourselves as a sort of judgment exercise once we've learned a topic it involves testing ourselves throughout because again the more a brain has to work to do something the more effortful the learning is the more the connections are likely to be strengthened taking notes is a little bit controversial because in general if you look at the evidence for it summarizing I.E kind of writing

10:43 summaries of stuff with the book open is generally considered a fairly low like low utility thing according to professor danloskey and his colleagues the guys who reviewed thousands of studies that looked at this sort of stuff they found that the people who sort of some memorized content and don't do very well compared to the people that just test themselves on the content because summarizing content is usually a passive process and going back to a fundamental idea the harder we have to the harder our brains have to work to do something the more likely we are to remember the thing that's partly why taking notes are controversial firstly I think kind of splitting it up into these two like thinking about it in these two different ways is how I think about it so during class and then after class so in this video we're talking about during class the first thing to say is that there's quite a lot of evidence about this sort of stuff but basically handwriting on notes is better for us than typing up our notes and there's lots of evidence

11:28 about this but again this might seem Blasphemous to those of us who take our laptops and see everyone with their MacBook airs out and like you know bashing stuff for an Evernote or notion or OneNote or whatever the you know note-taking app of the flavor of the month is but handwriting notes does have more evidence behind it so firstly uh handwriting notes is supposedly better because it helps us think a little bit more intensely for example there was a study done by Washington University in St Louis in America and they were comparing students who took notes by hand versus students who took notes with a laptop during a lecture and they found that if they were tested immediately after the lecture the ones with the laptop did a little bit better than the ones who were taking notes by hand but if they were tested 24 hours after the lecture then they found that the ones who did the handwriting performed better than the ones who typed up stuff with the laptop and when they repeated the test a week later they found that the handwriting students again you know had a better grasp of the concepts than the ones who took notes just using a laptop

12:13 but to be honest the whole taking notes in class for me thing like ever since I realized that taking notes is not very effective the only reason realistically that I actually take notes in class is because it helps keep me awake like it's so hard as you will know if you've been to University lectures it is literally so hard to stay awake during a lecture and so I found that for me that you know if I if I sit in the front row and I force myself to take notes it means I'm far more likely to stay awake and then the notes that I've got are usually are fairly minimalistic mostly based on the subheadings rather than the kind of nitty-gritty detail of the content which means I do get a broad brush stroke understanding of the content even if I don't get all the details there and then but most importantly it keeps me awake so that's just a little bit of advice about how to take notes during us Okay so we've talked about taking notes during class let's now talk about taking

13:00 notes after class and I said for me the main reason to take notes during class is to keep myself awake but for me the main reason to take notes after class is a to build my active recall questions and B to consolidate my understanding of the subject which is why this is in the understand section because we're still trying to make sure that we understand all of our content before we worry about trying to remember trying to memorize it so taking notes outside of class I think basically two main two main reasons for it number one is to be able to use multiple sources to help understand stuff so often if we're in a university lecture it can be kind of hard to keep track of what the lecturer is saying and take down absolutely every detail and it can be quite tricky to understand the stuff as it's going along which means we probably need to look over our notes again and we might need to add more little bits and going back to the

13:45 Feynman technique you know the ultimate objective is to be able to explain to a five-year-old or to be able to explain to a friend exactly how this concept works and so if we ever get to a point where we think okay if that makes sense then make sense that makes sense but and you know I don't I don't get how we got from there to there or you know that bit doesn't quite make sense at that point we're going to need to use different sources so Google Wikipedia textbook lecture notes whatever and then we can consolidate our notes so that when we're looking through it again we sort of get this more coherent narrative being built up these days I use the app notion for that so for example if there's something that I don't understand then I will create a separate page in notion and sort of add information usually from Google and Wikipedia and occasionally if I have to I'll go into a textbook and I'll screenshot something using the screenshot tool shove it into notion and

14:31 so I've got that information if if I need it loads of my friends including me when we were on our first year of med school we were like okay at the end of every lecture I need to make notes on the lecture and then I need to revise from my notes and the people who did this unless they were working like you know many many hours a day it became unsustainable because most of the stuff that we were tested on was coming directly from our lecture notes and the extra stuff that these people were adding and then you know I say I say these people like I was doing it myself the extra stuff that we were adding wasn't that useful it was helpful for our understanding but I think it was this fundamental misunderstanding that you know we have to take notes from the lecture and we absolutely do not have to take notes on the lecture for it to work and I remember in like the Easter holidays before our exams I would have

15:16 friends being like Oh my god I've still got 84 lectures to take notes on and only then can I start my revision and that always seemed to sit like not very well with me because even then I sort of thought that this whole taking notes from lectures thing is possibly a little bit pointless but anyway going back to the main point I said the point number one was that taking notes after class is semi-useful in in that it helps build up the picture to consolidate our understanding of it and the second reason why taking notes after class is helpful is because similar to in the previous video we can use the Cornell note-taking system to write questions for ourselves and so for example if we've taken notes in class then we can look at those notes after class and think okay what are the different questions that I can I can make from this so let's say we've taken notes on I don't know how aquaporins work in cell membranes or the structure of cell membrane biosynthesis or the discovery

16:03 of cell membranes or whatever I'm thinking about cell membranes because I recently did a notion video about that and that was kind of top of my mind the recency effect in Psychology it's called anyway let's say we've got notes and all that stuff like the notes themselves are pointless because we don't want to just be rereading the notes what we want to do is we want to create questions for ourselves based on the notes so again what I do is I use notion and I use the toggle feature of Notions to write a question for myself so one of the questions might be what is the function of the cell membrane and within that I would write my notes on the cell membrane but I would hide them so the only way I can see the notes on the cell membrane is if I've already looked at the question first and then I make it a point that whenever I see a question in my notes I actually think about how will I answer this question which is active recall in action sort of the Feynman technique in action if it's a concept

16:49 that I can explain to someone else but it ensures that I'm not just passively rereading the notes I'm actually actively dredging information up from my brain which coming back to our main point the thread that runs through this entire class is that the more effort for learning is the more likely we are to make the information stick and so yeah going back uh to the topic of this video taking notes after class I think is a matter of expanding uh using multiple sources to improve our understanding and secondly making sure that we've written active recall questions for ourselves in one way or another to help actually consolidate the information to help use active recall to retrieve it from our brains and to help that information stick and at that point when we're going through our notes we could even if we wanted to we could turn it into flashcards if we're using a flashcard app we'll talk a lot more about flashcards in the remember section because there's a few pitfalls people

17:35 can run into with flashcards but yeah that was taking notes after class I hope you found that very helpful Point number one expand the sources to include multiple sources and understand the topic better Point number two please let's write questions for ourselves so that we can actually use active recall rather than passive rereading so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video okay so let's now talk about this thing called scoping the subject and I think this is one of the most important mantras I first learned this from a friend of mine in med school who used to do really well in exams I'm sure he still does if he takes exams to this day um but he coined the phrase scoping the subject and basically the idea is that in in order to understand something we need to understand where I understand we need to understand where it fits in Into The Wider picture and there's a phrase that I really like that I use a lot in this course which is we don't want to miss the forest from the trees like it's

18:20 it can be so easy when we're sort of in the day-to-day studying of school University whatever it can be so easy to focus on the detail to focus on okay I've got to get through lecture seven of pathology and lecture nine of physiology now that we if we like if we don't take the time to do it it can be so easy to just forget what the bigger picture is and I really used to have this problem so when I first started out in my fourth year of med school we started out in clinical medicine and I had this idea that I was going to memorize the Oxford Handbook of clinical medicine which is one of the you know core texts that we had to use and I for some reason I had this terrible idea that I was gonna afflict of random pages and if I did that enough then over time I'd memorize the whole thing like clearly this is completely like terrible because there was no understanding there it was pure memorization and you know there was no way for me to hang details on the skeleton and that's sort of how I think

19:07 about it today like either hanging details on a skeleton of the outline or thinking about it as like a tree understanding a tree and then understanding the branches and then understanding the leaves so we don't want to be focusing on the leaves or the branches we want to be looking at the tree and thinking about where the branches are going off of the tree and so that's part of what scoping the subject is it's about kind of taking a few hours to literally go through every single topic within our subject and try and sub categorize the different topics the reason I'm going on about this so much is because this is something that I used to not do when I was in secondary school and early on in University but then since I started doing it I found that now when I'm learning details I can appreciate the bigger picture I can appreciate the bird's eye view and there's an analogy I like I like in in medicine which I'm sure applies to other subjects as well which is that you've got the bird's eye view and then you you've got the Frog's eye view and the

19:53 annoying thing is that most of the exams test us on the Frog's eye view like you know that nitty-gritty minutiae detail but actually the bird's eye view is the thing that's important for a helping us understand the subject and be at least in medicine for helping us actually apply it in real life because really in real life as a doctor we don't like we never really think about the intricacies of how the receptors work whereas that was what we were tested on in medical school we just think about the broad picture so starting off with the broad picture and then narrowing down is I think a much better way than you know that mistake that we all make of starting with the details and then forgetting the forest from the trees so that's what I'll say about scoping the subject hey guys this is a bonus segment within the class and it's all about the importance of understanding this isn't really like cool material so feel free to skip ahead to the next video if you're really rushed for time but this is a conversation that I had with my

20:39 friend assade he is currently a final year medical student at Cambridge University he consistently ranked like in the top three in the year group um for the last several years so he's really really good at taking exams and obviously because he's a Cambridge he absolutely smashed his gccs and his a-levels and he's been using this knowledge of effective studying to really absolutely smash these exams ever since he found out about these techniques so in this video we're talking about the importance of understanding and I start by asking him what it actually means to understand something when you understand something it's a lot easier to retain and I I think more generally and I think it's part of how I study I really struggle to bring myself to Simply memorized details without having any kind of understanding not because I can't do it and in fact to a certain degree in second year I did do that to

21:25 some extent but it just doesn't feel right to me and I I have this kind of nagging feeling inside of me to really understand what's going on and how do you define understand like how do you know you've understood something I suppose for me it's about coherence within my mind um if there aren't any kind of unexplained questions that I have left on the topic then I'll consider it understood if I can kind of derive the topic through some basic first principles within within my mind I I feel as if I understood it um and I guess that's different to other people who feel like they've understood it when they can say explain it that that wasn't necessarily um what I used it was more about

22:11 internal coherence okay but what's the difference between internal coherence and being able to to explain it and I also because often my proxy for do I understand something is would I feasibly be able to explain this to a five-year-old and I feel like for me when I have internal coherence it means I can be like okay well you know if you if you lose 20 of your blood volume then that happens and therefore that happens and that happens and it's a chain of events in my mind so absolutely I mean I think sort of the gold standard is being able to explain it to a five-year-old that that really indicates like quite in-depth conceptual Clarity um however you can't always necessarily have that um I think especially in physiology and neurophysiology there are some quite complex

22:57 um Concepts that you need to understand and for quite a few of them there'll be times where I'll understand them for seconds at a time and then lose understanding and and I know the method I need to re-understand them I know the diagram that will make me understand them again but usually because the comp because the concepts are quite complex sometimes I'll only be understanding them whilst contemplating the diagram either on paper or in my mind okay and then at that and then but once you've understood that you're you're then happy to just remember it for for the exam because you know that at one point you had that Moment of clarity where where it all made sense so I mean even then I wouldn't necessarily just call it remembering a random fact or anything

23:43 like that without meaning I'll remember how I came to understand it and I'll usually if I need to be able to work out how to understand it again and I guess that's this is probably a bit more relevant in neurophysiology than say physiology because it has perhaps the most kind of advanced concepts within medicine some of the most abstract Concepts which really seem very divorced from things you'll find in everyday life [Music] such that unless you're unless you've got a mental image built up where you're Imagining the circuits all at once it's it's quite difficult to really remember what's going on but what you what you can remember is a basic outline which

24:31 you can reconstruct in your mind and somewhat run as a model understanding a subject is it is like having a mental model of that subject in your mind absolutely yeah and to some extent you can explain bit to those to a five-year-old but to some extent as as you're saying it's just there and it would you probably could if you had to put all the time and effort to figure out how to simplify it down to explain to a five-year-old but it's unsustainable to do that for everything I mean I guess the one example I could give um so I'm currently doing supervisions in neurophysiology for um the second year students and the next supervision that I'm planning to give is on memory uh specifically on the role of the hippocampus and as far as it's taught in the course everyone knows that the hippocampus is

25:17 involved in memory if you have damage to the hippocampus it interferes with your ability to perform new memories and sometimes you lose old memories as well but the reason for that isn't quite clear and I remember learning and understanding back in second year that the way the hippocampus works is that it works as an index it doesn't store memories but it's just like an index in a book documents where in the cortex the memories are stored so if you ever want to re-summon a memory it can recruit all the parts of the cortex that are needed at the same time now there's a very specific circuit structure which allows that to take place within the hippocampus I don't remember that at the moment and it would take a while for me probably half an hour to really work through the diagram and re-understand it but because

26:05 I know that basic concept that the hippocampus is working like an index and that there are these basic neurological principles like neurons that fire together why together I can I can basically use those guiding principles to re-understand what I understood in in second year hello so this is another bonus segment and in this video uh me and assade are discussing the idea of developing a syllabus for your subject and this is particularly important in subjects where you're kind of more rely on understanding than you are in memorization because if you have a list of things to memorize then fair enough you memorize a list of things but if you need to understand Concepts or if the kind of outline of what you need to know for your exam or for your studies isn't quite clear it's very important that we kind of create our own syllabus and in this video as said and I are discussing this concept a little bit further well I

26:52 think in every case where you have such uncertainty I think you need to find a syllabus for yourself I think it's really counterproductive to not have a limit on what you're learning and there's always a tendency to try and expand the resources that you're that you're using because other people use different resources and they will yeah know things that you don't know the odds of handbook but there might there might be some Rogue fact and sort of the big pathology textbooks absolutely so I mean for me for instance I made the step one textbook my curriculum that I mean that definitely didn't have everything I had to supplement it with other things including including past medicine but that combination was incredibly comprehensive

27:38 and yes there were things that I didn't know even like despite learning though learning sort of much of those but I think you have to accept the fact that sort of you can't know everything and it's better to know a lot well then then sort of stress yourself into trying to achieve something which you can't really do yeah and I think that's a really important Insight that actually it's it's it's impossible to know everything and therefore what's the big chunk of information that you all know and what's the the sliver of information that you don't need to worry about yeah and in a way like simplifying like the more we simplify it the well in a way the easier it becomes I was I was having

28:23 a chat with a student from UCL a couple of days ago um he was um in his fourth year and he was saying that yeah it just seems there's so much information I don't know what to use I don't know if I should use Kumar and Clark Oxford handbook I don't know if I should use uh you know Alistair Scots UCL notes that have been propagated throughout the internet I don't know what to do and his it's it seemed like the advice that resonated with him when I gave it was that that he was thinking of clinical medicine as he was making it harder than it had to be like realistically all you basically have to know is what's in the Oxford handbook and then a few extra bits maybe to get a few years yeah and if you confine yourself to that you actually realize that oh well within Cardiology there's only 15 topics okay within respiratory there's only eight topics oh this is it becomes much more manageable yeah yeah I mean I will say the Oxford handbook is really kind of sort of

29:09 poor in terms of explaining things yeah it tells you the stuff rather than helps you understand the stuff and for that reason I almost I pretty much didn't use the Oxford handbook at all during my clinical years um you the US Emily material was relatively a lot better explained okay I don't like the first aid step one for example yeah yeah um I think again the key is to take one or to take a few sets of a set of resources it might just be one thing or a couple of things and and make it your Canaan and really kind of master that and would you make notes on these things to sort of compile into a master note yeah again it's pointless yeah because you've you've got the information there

29:54 you need as in just as with the lecture notes in first and second yeah yeah why would you do this there was no point so yeah I'm just making redundant notes I I think once in third year um when I was doing essays in Theology and philosophy yeah each week whenever I was doing essays I'd have a big reading list and usually I mean these these topics again were highly abstract and what and it would usually take quite a while before I really understood what was going on and in each of those cases I found that if I could just take one kind of book what one of those books and make it kind of the key to my understanding really understand that

30:40 book in detail I had to read it maybe three times in order to really understand what was going on when I got to that stage I could skim read the rest of the books and sort of basically top up the kind of foundational Concepts that I had and that would be really easy whereas I think if I'd read every book in turn I would have had a much more superficial understanding yeah so make one book your Bible and the rest are supplementary texts absolutely and and if you learn the Bible yeah the supplementary test you can get through sort of very quickly so that was a bit of discussion on how you can find a syllabus for yourself all right so welcome to the second segment of the course which is about remembering so segment number one or step one was understand step two is

31:26 remember and as a reminder step three is focus so we'll talk a lot more about kind of distractions and motivations and procrastination all that kind of stuff in the focus segment but now we're going to be diving into all of the evidence-based tips for remembering slash memorizing things but again just to retreat understanding is the most important part and without understanding there's literally no point in memorizing or remembering stuff what's the problem here that we're trying to solve and as I mentioned in the previous section um what we're trying to do is we're trying to combat the forgetting curve so in the 1800s there was a chap called ebbinghaus who did a study on himself where he made himself memorize all these random random words that he just kind of made up and he tested how quickly and how often he forgot what these words were and he realized that you know as soon as he learned a word his memory for that word decayed exponentially over time

32:13 but if he interrupted that forgetting by testing himself on the word again and then looking it up he interrupted that cover then he went back up to 100 but then he found that crucially it took him longer to forget it the second time around but then when he forgot a little bit and he studied it again it took him even longer still so while the Decay is very precipitous to begin with the more times you repeat a topic the longer it then takes for you to forget that information and this is the key Insight that the whole of kind of the industry and the algorithms around space repetition are based around it's this idea that the more we repeat stuff the longer it takes to forget it but the longer it takes to forget it means that we should space our repetitions of that topic over time so let's say we're starting a topic on day one let's say we've studied I don't know thyroid function tests or the thyroid you know

32:59 let's go for the thyroid let's keep it simple let's say we've studied the thyroid on like today by tomorrow we'll probably have forgotten about 50 of it and by three days we'd have forgotten like all of it because it decays exponentially in the early stages so let's say we revise it again tomorrow now our learning for it goes back to back up to 100 but now it takes let's say a week to forget 50 of it so then in a week we come back to it and we study it and then let's say it takes a month to forget 50 of it so we've we've repeated it like a day a week and a month later but at spaced intervals and that's the idea behind space repetition so when I first discovered space repetition it was again in in the second year Medical School lecture on psychology which was all about the psychology of effective learning and this was one of the concepts that like when we first heard about it in that lecture everyone was like looking around

33:45 in Wonder at one another because we were like oh my God this is absolutely game changing because in the past I'd always tried to make like these revision timetables but I just never really appreciated the fact that just by by virtue of the way memory Works my memory for everything was just going to Decay exponentially over time and so once I discovered the power space repetition I realized that I could scientifically choose when to revise certain things to maximize the chances that I'm going to retain them and what's also at play here is this idea that you know that theme that runs through this entire class which is that the more effort for learning feels the harder we have to work to learn something or to retrieve something the more likely that information is to stick so let's say I were to read about the thyroid today and then an hour later and then an hour later uh the the you know reading it like three times in one day would be a little bit pointless because I haven't

34:30 forgotten any of it I haven't like allowed myself to forget any of it therefore my brain is not working to retain that information or to retrieve that information instead it's just a passive process and again like we've said many times before whenever learning anything or studying or revision becomes passive like you know we're playing the guitar and we're just kind of bashing out passively to songs we already know we are not learning anything at all it's when learning is hard like when we're playing those new chords of that new fingering or whatever that sounds weird um in the guitar on the piano it's when it's difficult that we actually learn and we can consolidate that information it's the same with learning anything for exams or whatever you're learning the more difficult it is the more strongly that information is going to stick and I will keep on repeating that every single video pretty much but now let's move on to talk about some of the ways in which we can practically apply the concept of space repetition to our own studying to

35:16 supercharge our productivity and to make sure we remember the stuff that we need to remember Okay so we've talked about why space repetition is an absolutely amazing thing and let's now talk about some of the methods for applying space repetition to our studying and my personal favorite way of doing this is by using the retrospective revision timetable now this is a term that I've coined it's basically it's basically a revision timetable but instead of deciding in advance what topics we're going to do in any given day we decide on the day based on what topics we've done in the past and how effective our recall of that topic was I will just show you how I actually use that in notion these days so here we go this is hom hummus stands for homeostasis which is human physiology in the Cambridge course and this is what I've done retrospective revision timetable wise so

36:03 you can see we've got the topic of nerves and then on the first of January I did that for the first time and then on the second and then on the 7th of January and then on the 20th of Feb and there's different ways that we can rate our understanding of it so when I was using Google Sheets I would just color in the cell using I don't know the coloring feature unfortunately on notion you can't color in the cells of a table so instead usually um if I'm not feeling fancy I'll just rate it out of five so this one was a three out of five four out of five and five out of five but sometimes if I'm feeling fancy I'll traffic light it with Emojis so you can use red yellow green whatever or you can use stars like two star four star five star but essentially it's exactly the same thing it just lets me see on a given day what topic I want to study so for example today is the 28th of February I think 27th of February and so I'd have done renaline respiratory recently

36:49 um I did nerves last on the 20th of Feb and so I'll probably do that one again actually um no I'll probably do renal again so then that takes it up to three repetitions of renal so we'll do 27 Feb there and hopefully then that might be like a three out of five or I think you know I've done it three times recently probably four out of five and then next time I come around to studying physiology I can decide based on the retrospective revision timetable exactly what I want to be doing so that's one way of going about how to incorporate space repetition all right so in the last video we talked about my retrospective revision timetable method for incorporating spaced repetition into my life but a few weeks ago I was chatting to my friend Simon clock we were doing a collab video on YouTube and he mentioned his his method of doing this which is called the spaced repetition journal or space repetition diary and we included this in

37:35 a YouTube video but I will include the uncut conversation between me and Simon in this in this course now uh so you can see us discussing this concept of the space repetition diary and you'll hear Simon explaining how this method Works uh I get that some people like the idea of the kind of pre-deciding what they're going to study because I mean it kind of makes sense then on a given day you don't really have to think about it you can just execute on the plan that you've already made and I think Simon's method is a good way of building a revision timetable but based on kind of the principle of space repetition rather than kind of doing it randomly like I used to do when I was in school so here is now me and Simon talking about his spaced repetition diary if I could travel back in time and slap two words into 10 year old Simon's head it they would be spaced repetition like cannot stress enough how important this technique is to give you an example when

38:21 I was doing my third year exams at Oxford and it was the best like academic performance of my academic career did really well I think the reason for it was I used this technique where I would on a given day if I studied a particular subject write in a paper diary I did on say the first of May uh Atomic physics looking at a particular subtopic I then go forward a day and write down that topic again go forward a week write that topic go forward a month and write that topic and then as you went through your revision you gradually populated this diary with the revision that you needed to go back and look at on a given day so you get to say I don't know May 14th and you would say right well I now need to revise this part of atomic physics this part of general relativity this part of subatomic physics and you would have a

39:06 ready-made checklist of stuff to go over again as well as the stuff that you had to look forward to in your revision plan and it meant that I covered everything several times at these increasing intervals and it just stayed in my head so much better but it was the ease at which I could Rock up to the library open up my diary and say right what's today it's the 14th of May okay I've got these five topics to do first let's go and it just made life so much easier and I did so much better because of it alright so that was Simon Clark's uh prospective uh spaced repetition diary size Journal thing I think it's pretty good I might try and actually start experimenting with that myself because at least for me like when I learned stuff on the wards at work these days in the hospital it's it's often very kind of serendipitous it's not like you know I'm

39:52 deciding on a given day that I'm going to learn something it's more that a patient happens to come in who's had I don't know an ectopic pregnancy or a heterotropic pregnancy or you know anything anything interesting I'm an Ops and Garnier at the moment and so what I've been thinking is that Simon's method will be really good like let's say on the 25th of February I read up about ectopic pregnancy management then if there were a way that I could add it to my calendar so that I would read up on it a week later and it would remind me to look at ectopic pregnancy and then a month later it would remind me to look up ectopic pregnancy I think that would be a very effective way for me personally to sort of ad hoc use the power of space repetition and active recall to kind of retain memory of stuff that I've learned on the wards because I'll be honest like when I'm not in exam preparation mode I don't really use a lot of these efficient like study and learning techniques even though I really should and so I've been thinking for a while that oh if only there was a way to

40:39 remind myself to study stuff in a space repetition fashion and I think I'm going to start using Simon Clark's method for that so I'll see if I can build some kind of macro or shortcut on an iOS or something that I just enter the subject once and then it automatically creates a calendar event to remind me in a week's time and in a month's time and in a year's time maybe to review that particular topic so we'll see about that but anyway that was Simon Clark's space repetition Journal slash diary I hope you found that useful let's now move on to the next video all right so we've spent a bit of time talking about space repetition which is the idea that you leave time in between study sessions let's now talk about interleaving which is which involves how you split up your time within one study session itself and interleaving is the idea that we should mix up our practice as we go along within the same study session because the idea is that again

41:24 returning to the thread that's running through this whole course that whenever stuff becomes too easy whenever we're not working very hard whenever our brain is lifting very lightweights then at that point we stop learning as effectively and so the idea behind interleaving is that we do a little bit of one topic and a little bit of another topic and then a little bit of a third topic and then back to the first rather than do three hours on one topic three hours on topic two and three hours on topic three or whatever your timing ends up being and there's a fair bit of evidence that interleaving improves retention when it comes to studying for exams but also when it comes to learning anything so again in the book make it stick which I don't have a physical copy of because I read it on Kindle but you should definitely read that they talk about this famous hockey coach who like he gets his players to do certain exercises and then just as they're getting the hang of those exercises he switches them onto something else and just as they get the hang of that he

42:10 switches them onto something else and the players don't really like this because they have to work a bit harder and you know just as they're approaching the Mastery and they're like oh yeah I can do this this kind of makes sense he moves them onto something else but he gets results and the teams end up winning like loads of stuff and the players are happy for it in hindsight because they recognize that actually it's only when stuff is difficult that's when we're actually learning it and the theory behind this as they say in the study is that when we are blocking stuff like for example if we're doing math problems and we're doing lots of the same problem at once just changing the numbers our brain starts to take shortcuts it starts to realize okay that's the method and then it just starts applying that method but if we're doing different sorts of problems that are all mixed up our brain has to take that initial step of thinking okay what method do I have to use to solve this problem and the Very fact that our brain

42:56 requires that extra step means that we're more likely to perform better on the exam when the exam is given later on I think it's just something worth keeping the back of our minds that we want studying to be hard and you know like the analogy of going to the gym you don't want it to be easy if it's easy then yeah sure you might be having fun but you're not actually boosting your muscles just like if studying is easy it might be a bit more fun but we're not actually improving our brain performance so yeah that's interleaving and let's move on to the next video all right so welcome back again this is section two of this class we'll be talking about how to remember stuff and in this video I want to talk about the idea of re-reading our notes now there have been loads of studies that basically show you know spoiler alert that re-reading is probably a waste of time so for example that 2013 paper from Professor donlowski and his colleagues concluded that reading is low utility

43:41 and he says and I quote when compared with some other learning techniques rereading is typically much less effective the relative disadvantage of rereading to other techniques is the largest strike against rereading and is the factor that weighed most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low utility so that's a pretentious fancy way of saying that yeah rereading does work but there are so many better things we could be doing instead like active recall and space repetition and stuff and interleaving and categorizing and things that we'll talk about more later so how can re-reading actually be effective well I don't really think it can I mean I still reread my notes to this day some of the time but whenever I do it's because I have a very small amount of energy and because I can't be bothered to do something that's more efficient and let's say it's 11 pm and we haven't had a chance to do any studying the whole day and we're really really tired

44:27 but we want to get that rep in we want to make sure we've done some studying today then yeah you know I as much as anyone else fall into that trap of thinking you know what I'm just going to read my notes but I know it doesn't actually do anything it doesn't actually help me but at that at that point I can't bring myself to muster of the energy to do something more effective that requires more hard work so in that sense I think rereading is sort of useful it's useful to have as as the equivalent of going to the gym doing a single pull-up and then just going on your phone for the rest of the time it's that useful in my opinion having tried it a lot of a lot of the time I've been realizing that actually active recall is so much better but it's nice it's nice to have that option when we have low energy levels so moral of the story we probably shouldn't be rereading but hey if rereading works for you and you're very happy with your results then I'm not sure why you're watching this course because you probably won't learn anything but if you're doing lots of rereading and you're unhappy with your

45:13 results like you would rather get better results in less time then at that point you probably want to start using something like active recall and space repetition rather than rereading all right so in this remembering section we've talked about active recall like testing ourselves as the single best thing ever we've talked about space repetition and we've talked about my retrospective revision timetable and my friend Simon's prospective spaced repetition diary slash Journal we've talked about interleaving and wides good and we've talked about re-reading and why it's bad let's now talk about highlighting now highlighting is one of those things that we all love to do I love carrying different colored highlighters with me because it makes me feel Pro you know like I remember when my mum Was preparing for her medical exams and I would watch her studying she'd be like highlighting with this one of these like Stabler highlighter highlighters and I'd see her book with like tattooed pages with all

45:58 highlightings everywhere and think damn this is what studying is supposed to look like but unfortunately if we look at the evidence highlighting is not very effective so and there's that study from 2013 that I've been referencing a lot from Professor donloski and his colleagues and they looked at highlighting and all the evidence around highlighting and they concluded that highlighting is low utility I.E it's not very good um there is one study from 1974 which says that active High lighting is superior to passive re-reading of highlighted material like you know if you're reading stuff and you're highlighting it as you go along that's better than just reading stuff that's already been highlighted so for me personally highlighting doesn't detract from the Feynman technique and from the active recall that I'm doing it sort of helps create active recall questions further down the line but I think for me the most important fact is that highlighting just helps me concentrate a

46:44 little bit better and makes my notes look pretty which means when I do a top-down Instagram shot of them it looks like I've done a little bit of work rather than just have a blank slate so yeah those are my thoughts on highlighting sorry Professor dunloski I know you say it's not very good but I enjoy it it's fun makes me feel happy so that's highlighting all right so whenever anyone first finds out about active recall and space repetition um there's one concept that seems to always crop up and that is flashcards because flashcards are a marriage a marriage of active recall and space repetition so what is a flash card flashcard is basically let's say you have a piece of paper I'm going to use this trackpad as example and at the front of the flashcard you would have something like capital of Peru and on the back of the flashcard you have the answer so you might write lever for example so the

47:30 idea is that you have a question at the front and then at the back you would put your notes now lots of people in the past used to use physical flashcards and there was something called the Lightner system to help you kind of induce space repetition with that I think physical flashcards are a total waste of time now because we've got apps that are really really good for effectively doing flashcards so I'd recommend you download the app Anki and you can use that alternatively there is Quizlet and if you pay for Quizlet premium which costs like 20 quid a year I think then you get the space repetition built into that but why is Anki so good and I'm going to show you why anki's so Good by showing you on here how Anki works so here's what Anki looks like basically you have decks of cards and then you can do the flashcards and what you can do is you can either make your own

48:16 cards or you can download a deck off the internet most people recommend making your own cards unless you're studying I think I think with medicine specifically depending on what exam you're doing for example if you're taking the USMLE and you're following a resource like pathomo which is like a really common resource that everyone uses to Prep Pro to prepare for it then other people have already made Anki decks based off of pathoma so there's not much point in you in us like creating our own flashcards for that because the work's already been done but I think in most other subjects it does it does make a lot of sense to make our own flashcards because then obviously we're engaging with the information better it's a bit harder and therefore our brain's more likely to remember it downloading a deck of the internet is easy it's sort of the lazy option but it is it is doable so here is um some Decks that I've I've been making as I've been going along studying for

49:03 one of my exams and I am not necessarily using flashcards the right way in fact let's do this one um so the MRCP is the membership of the Royal College of Physicians and it's an exam that doctors in the UK have to take and so let's click on the basic Sciences deck and click study now and so let's see what the front of the photo of the flashcard says vhl syndrome is a something condition predisposing to neoplasia it's a due to an abnormality in the vageology located on blah blah so mode of inheritance I'm going to say autosomal dominant yes it is and I've hit the space bar to see what the answer is it is autosomal dominant and that means I can now rape this flash card as being again good or easy and I've set intervals for this so if I didn't get that it would come up again in the next three minutes if I

49:48 thought it was good I would get it in 15 minutes and if I thought it was easy I would get it in four days so I got that one let's say easy in four days hlas are encoded for by genes on chromosome six

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