Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning

0:00 welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are discussing how to study and learn that is what the scientific data say is the best way to study in order to remember information and to be able to use that information effectively in different areas of your life so for those of you that are still in school this could be any stage of school today's discussion will be very useful for you however even if you are not formally enrolled in any kind of school at the moment today's discussion will also be extremely effective for you to be able to study and learn better

0:46 information from say the internet or podcasts or any area of your life where you are seeking to learn and use new knowledge now one of the most important things that you're going to learn today is that learning that is the best learning practices are not intuitive so before we dive in keep in mind that whatever you believe about how best to learn for you is probably Incorrect and I confess this was humbling for me as well when I started to dive into this literature because as somebody who was a student for many years and in some sense still considers himself a student of science and health information because of this podcast and certainly somebody who still teaches University courses both to medical students and graduate

1:32 students and to undergraduate students at Stanford I thought I understood the whole teaching and learning process but I too learned that it is anything but intuitive in fact most of what we believe about the best ways to study are absolutely false fortunately today you will learn the best ways to study turns out there's a rich literature on this dating back well over a hundred years and the data are absolutely fascinating and Incredibly actionable it's incredibly interesting how the fields of Education the fields of psychology and the fields of Neuroscience have now come together to define the optimal strategies to study and learn before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at Stanford it is however

2:17 part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep both enough sleep and enough quality sleep now one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is that your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep and to wake up feeling refreshed your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3° one of the best ways to ensure all of that happens is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and with eight sleep it's very easy to

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3:47 8sleep.com huberman to save $350 off their pod 4 ultra eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by betterhelp betterhelp offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years initially I didn't have a choice it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health in fact I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise now there are essentially three things that great therapy Prov provides first of all it provides good rapport with somebody that

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5:19 trainings yoga NRA sessions and more I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our Focus managing stress and anxiety improving our mood and much more in recent years I started using the waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice what I and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations so it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation

6:05 practice both from the perspective of novelty you never get tired of those meditations there's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation and you can always fit meditation into your schedule even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate I also really like doing Yoga Nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical figger without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to waking up.com huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial okay let's talk about how best to study and learn and of course people have different learning styles Some

6:51 people prefer to learn by reading some people prefer to study in a group Some people prefer to highlight some people call themselves auditory Learners other people consider themselves visual learners but guess what when one looks at the research on preferred learning styles pretty much all of that melts away it turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives whether not it's auditory or visual or combined whether or not you review slides or a textbook or you watch small videos it turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting this is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout

7:38 today's episode rather than think about studying to learn and retain information I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind cognitive or motor learning musical learning math Etc okay so keep this in mind throughout today's episode the best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information you're trying to inoculate against forgetting that is the way to remember things that is the way to gain Mastery over them and I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer- reviewed literature now before I do that I want

8:23 to talk about what learning is I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuro plasticity before on this podcast for those of you that have heard those discussions this will serve as a refresher for those of you that have not heard those discussions this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience so any form of learning involves neuroplasticity neuroplasticity we sometimes hear as neural plasticity two words or neuroplasticity those are the same thing essentially the change that underlies

9:08 neuroplasticity at the level of cells which we call neurons or nerve cells generally involves three different mechanisms one is the strengthening of certain connections what we call synaptic connections synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another it's actually a gap between the neurons it is technically called the synaptic left it's a gap and within that Gap chemicals are passed across that Gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons okay so one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons and yet a

9:54 third form of plasticity which is often discussed in the media but is very rare actually in the nervous system especially the adult nervous system of humans is neurogenesis or the addition of new neurons let's just get this out of the way up front because the addition of new neurons again grabs so much attention in media articles but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion or frankly for most all discussions it is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olda factory bulb that are responsible for smell as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus an area of the brain that's important for memory in which new neurons appear to be added throughout

10:40 the lifespan but this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans rather the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of new connections between already EX existing neurons not new neurons okay now the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections we often think well that means forgetting or that means the brain is getting less good however so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies for instance the acquisition of a new motor

11:26 skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections so we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections removing new connections let's just leave it at this level mechanistically when you hear about neuroplasticity just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections and that neither strengthening of Connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or remove removal of say memories or information just know that these are the important mechanisms in fact if you look at a baby that is let's say I don't know N9 months old their motor skills are not terrific typically

12:12 compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent or Te You know despite the um poor table manners of some adolescence and teens and some adults for that matter they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant of course and believe it or not the Improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal that's right the removal of

12:57 neural connections as opposed to the form of neural connections however the neural connections that remain become much more robust they become much more reliable okay so that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today which is how to study and learn and as I mentioned earlier in my introduction most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs any time we hear new information so in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now and for reasons that will become clear later I want you to take a brief quiz now the moment people hear quiz or test typically it spikes their adrenaline they start feeling stressed

13:43 but don't worry you're going to keep your answers to yourself and you're doing this for a very specific purpose here's my question this is a two question quiz how many different ways mechanistically speaking does does neuroplasticity occur is it one mechanism two mechanisms or three mechanisms or is it four or five okay can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo which are reflective of neuroplasticity okay so the answer to question was is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity as you recall or as you may not have been

14:28 able to recall and by the way if you were not able to recall the three different modes of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity that is fine as you'll soon realize recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical and very useful way to retain more information even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know in fact especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know so the three ways are the strengthening of neural connection second the weakening of neural connections and third through neurogenesis the addition of new neurons why did I provide this quiz why did I test you well as you'll soon learn if you look across the total body of research on how best to study and learn

15:14 it involves doing exactly what we just did which is to periodically stop and test yourself on the material that you learned testing is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you've Acquired and which knowledge you have not managed to acquire it also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any kind and I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment so yes today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast and no there will not be a test at the end although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end I'm going to provide you with an excellent zeroc cost very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence of

16:01 having listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast so if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end there it is okay let's talk about some of the other practical aspects of studying and learning I know a lot of you out there who want to learn and want to come up with the best studying strategies are trying to think about how to structure your day or how much to study or when to study let's get the most important things out of the way first neuroplasticity and learning that is convert converting your studying efforts into retention of knowledge is a two-step process you probably heard about active engagement that's just a fancy set of words for focus for really attending to the information that you're trying to learn and it is very important anytime you're trying to learn new

16:46 information so focus goes with alertness you can't be focused if you're not alert this is prerequisite so you need to be alert and you need to be focused in order to pay attention to the information that you're trying to learn in fact it is the process of being focused and attending that cues your nervous system that something is important that something's different about whatever sensory experience you happen to be having when you're focused and attending whether or not it's the information you're hearing or that you're looking at or both that cue at the level of neurochemicals in your brain and body signals to the neurons hey you're going to have to change you're going to have to alter your connections either make them stronger or weaker or a combination

17:32 of those things in order to make sure that your nervous system can retain and use the information at a future time so that's step one and of course as a part of step one most people when they hear about optimal studying strategies they want to know you know what should they do what should they take in order to learn better well here's what everyone should take in order to learn better which is a great night's sleep the night before limiting your external stress although some stresses good because it cues up your alertness it actually allows you to remember certain things better we'll talk about this a little bit later no one can remove all stress from their life but we know one thing for sure your ability to be alert and focused is going to be greater if you slept well the night before okay so sleep is without question the best neut

18:17 Tropic right the word neut Tropic means smart drug I don't really like that term because learning involves all sorts of things it's not just about being smart it's about being able to attend it's about sometimes being creative flexible with ideas and information here's the point you're going to need to get your sleep right in order to be able to study and learn at your absolute best and I've done many episodes of The hman Lab podcast about sleep we have a newsletter about sleep that details in a short PDF format the various things you can do to get your sleep optimized so to speak you can find all that hubman lab.com by putting sleep into the search function we don't have time to discuss that material now but get your sleep right so that you can be alert and focused when it comes time to learn now the process

19:02 of being alert and focused on particular material that you want to learn can be enhanced by just having a silent script within your head silent meaning you're not saying it out loud where when you sit down to learn you're looking at a book or you're listening to a lecture perhaps a podcast like this you're thinking okay I need to learn this I need to learn this you can voluntarily ramp up your level of focus and alertness by telling yourself that information is important don't be a passive participant in learning this is the basis of active learning by expecting the information to be so interesting that it pulls your level of attention and focus out of you rather learn to engage your attention and focus voluntarily volitionally okay when we hear about ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity

19:49 disorder we know that people with ADHD can attend very rapidly they can really pay close attention for long periods of time if they like a given topic or a given experience or activity they have serious challenges however engaging their attention and alertness if they are not excited about an activity or information and so it is the Hallmark of all good Learners to be able to voluntarily force yourself to attend and to focus and when I say force yourself that means a constant bringing back of your mind's attention to whatever it is you're trying to learn it is meant to feel difficult I say meant to feel difficult because that strain that you feel that encouraging or in some cases

20:36 forcing yourself to attend sometimes even putting on a hoodie and hat you know literally putting blinders so that you can only attend to the material right in front of you that straining that you feel reflects in part the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine adrenaline in the brain and body which serve to cue the neural circuits that they need to change at a later time okay so the strength that you feel in trying to learn the strain that you feel in forcing yourself to learn how to focus that is good that's a c-tier nervous system that it's going to need to change that neuroplasticity needs to take place think about it if you didn't feel that strain and you were able to perform whatever it is that you were doing or remember whatever information it is that you're being exposed to seamlessly well then your

21:21 nervous system wouldn't have to change because it already has the capabilities within the neural circuits so that strain that you feel that agitation is great that's a cue that you are learning or that you set the learning process in motion now it's also the case that some people don't have great levels of focus and attention and there are of course pharmacologic tools I would encourage anyone that has clinically diagnosed ADHD to talk to their doctor about whether or not they should use prescription meds and or other methods great sleep is always going to be an important substrate for attention and focus for anybody but especially for people with ADHD I highly encourage anyone that's interested in enhancing their levels of focus and attention to also consider the

22:09 non-pharmacologic approaches so this is irrespective of whether or not you need pharmacologic approaches yes being well hydrated yes the appropriate amount of caffeine for you that allows you to be alert but not you know shaking and agitated can be very useful however the scientific data also support the fact that doing a brief say five to 10 minute mindfulness meditation each day these are the data from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University showing that people who do a 10-minute meditation per day where they simply sit or lie down close their eyes focus on their breathing their attention invariably drifts they bring their attention back to their breathing people who do that on a regular basis improve their level of focus they improve their

22:54 memory and recall ability and of course there are a bunch of other positive effects of that simple zeroc cost tool of mindfulness meditation so if you're interested in improving your levels of focus and attention for sake of learning I highly encourage you to explore the Oho valuable tool of mindfulness meditation just five or 10 minutes per day done on a regular basis you miss a day no big deal just get right back to it the next day does it matter if you do it morning afternoon or night no some people find that doing it too late at night might disrupt their sleep but if you think about meditation of the sort that I just described as a perceptual exercise maybe you don't even call it meditation you're just teaching yourself to focus you could even do it with Eyes Open by focusing on a visual

23:40 Target allowing yourself to Blink there are good data on this sort of approach as well and then just making sure that your visual attention and cognitive attention comes back to that visual Target over and over again it's a deliberate process of bringing your attention back to a particular location that is very valuable for improving your levels of focus in fact it is known to create significant improvements in your ability to focus which is critical for your ability to study and learn so I know that many people are interested in what to take what to do at the level of kind of um esoteric practices or things to buy there is stuff out there again I mentioned hydration caffeine great sleep and so on but the simple practice of mindfulness meditation or just what I

24:26 describe as a focusing perceptual exercise of bringing your attention back to the same location over and over again deliberately will train you to train your nervous system to bring your attention back to whatever it is you're trying to learn now I've done other podcasts about how to focus about attention specifically and ADHD again you can find all of those at hubman lab.com simply put ADHD or Focus or tools for focus into the search function and it will take you to the exact timestamps in those episodes that are relevant right now however I want to talk about the second part of neuroplastic which is that the actual changes in the nervous system the strengthening and weakening predominantly of connections between neurons that underly learning do not occur during the focusing and learning or rather the exposure to the

25:12 material but instead during deep sleep and sleep-like states and again I've done a lot of podcasts and talked a lot about tools for getting better sleep but I just want to remind everybody that the actual reordering of the connections the strengthening of connections between neurons that underly learning the weakening of those connections occurs during sleep in particular during rapid eye movement sleep which tends to predominate in the latter half of the night so make sure that you're getting enough sleep for you for some people it's 6 hours for some people it's eight hours and yes there is something called the first night effect the first night effect is the experimentally observed phenomenon whereby information that you learn on a given day is mostly Consolidated during the night's sleep that you have on that first night after the learning occurs does this mean that

25:59 if you get a poor night's sleep on the first night after learning something that you are forever going to forget that information that it cannot be Consolidated into your neural circuits no however it's very clear that the first night after learning you want to get the best sleep possible so if you're learning BS you're studying is going late into the night and you're drinking a lot of caffeine be mindful that the sleep that you get after drinking that caffeine late into the day the all nighters that you're pulling those are not serving you're learning well so you need to structure your life as a student of any kind so that you can get focus and attention to what it is you want to learn and you can get sleep to the best of your ability and of course people who are raising young kids or who have stress in their lives for whatever

26:44 reason perhaps won't be able to optimize their sleep on that first night or even subsequent nights but do your best to get your sleep right it's the single best thing you can do for your mental health for your physical health and for Learning and performance of any kind and it's really worth the effort Now with an understanding of the mechanisms the focus and alertness and the Sleep phase of neuroplasticity what are some other things that you can do to enhance whatever studying and learning you've obtained I already talked about a tool a behavioral tool for enhancing Focus what about a behavioral tool for enhancing plasticity if your sleep is great or especially if your sleep isn't great and there I highly recommend you explore non-sleep deep rest or nsdr there's a

27:30 script for this in the show note captions nsdr sometimes referred to as Yoga Nidra although those things are similar but different is a 10 or 20 minute practice that you can do to restore your mental and physical Vigor if you haven't slept enough so you could do it first thing in the morning when you wake up if you feel you haven't slept enough you can do it in the afternoon you can do it in the middle of the night if you're not able to sleep and offset some of the Sleep loss that you otherwise would have experienced nsdr is a very powerful tool in order to enhance neuroplasticity and I'll talk more about this in a future episode there's a lot of exciting data coming out about nsdr and yoga Nitra but if you're sleeping well and even if you aren't I highly encourage you to incorporate a 10 or 20 minute nsdr into your schedule someplace

28:17 again where you place it in your schedule isn't as important as the fact that you do it in order to enhance neuroplasticity that is the reordering of connections between neurons to serve the studying and learning that you're doing now let's talk about how the best students structure their days turns out there are great studies on this there's a really nice paper in fact that surveyed close to 700 students these were medical students approximately equal number of male and female students and analyze the most useful learning habits that is the learning habits associated with the most successful students now anytime you do a study like this where people take surveys there's always the issue of causality in fact we can pretty much set aside any possible

29:03 causality for instance I'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to study for about three or four hours per day but you could easily say Well they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day they don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students and you'd be exactly right okay we can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation about reverse causality and on and on however none of that is the point here the point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again regardless of what classes they're taking regardless of where they are in their Arc of their learning trajectory and so what we know based on this study and I'll provide a link to it in the show note captions is that there are at least 10 study habits that the highly

29:49 effective students use I'm going to focus on the top five or six just for sake of time because it turns out that most of the effect it appears of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits first of all they set aside time to study they literally schedule time to study now this probably serves several roles the first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions and in fact that's the second thing that they do they are very effective or they make it a point of putting their phone away and off of isolating themselves that's right they're not studying with other people they study alone which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying but the best performing students seem to study alone they put

30:35 their phone away they tell their friends and families that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time and yes they study for three or four hours per day but they break that up into a couple of different sessions typically two or three sessions so they're not doing a three or four hours studying about all in one shot so they're managing their time they're eliminating distractions and they're studying for a consistent amount of time at least 5 days per week okay presumably they're taking some weekends off although that wasn't made clear from this paper the other thing that they do and this is very important is that they make an effort to then teach their peers to teach other students in the class now some of you may be thinking and I'm thinking back to college here mostly

31:21 that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students that teaching them the information is kind of kind of a freebie for them and it's harder for you meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair Advantage for not having done the work now while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the Learners from the other students got an unfair Advantage it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students so don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test this is key to test and develop Mastery of the material now in my laboratory for years we used

32:09 to have a saying which I simply picked up from the Laboratories I was trained in I didn't come up with a saying which was watch one do one teach one and that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing or doing an antibody reaction or a western blood or things that you do in Laboratories watch one do one teach one watch one do one teach one of course should be reserved to anything where no one's going to be put in danger by the watch one do one teach one procedure right some procedures especially in Laboratories can be dangerous given the materials you use Etc and of course today we're talking about learning and studying generally so provided it safe watch one do one teach one is an excellent means to learn that is to study new material to develop proficiency and even Mastery and over time perhaps even virtuosity we'll

32:56 return to that later those distinctions so going back to this idea that the best students set aside time they designate time to study alone without distractions that is sure to help them anchor their focus and attention they know that they're going to need to use their focus and attention during that time and we know with absolute certainty that focus and attention are a limited but renewable resource in the human brain the longer you're awake the more is the buildup of a molecule called adenosine in your brain and body it makes you sleep sley makes it harder to focus when you sleep adenosine levels are pushed down again you're able to focus again you feel more alert you can think of adenosine as limiting your attentional budget which is not to say that some people don't study best in the afternoon or in the evening or even late at night

33:42 right I recall times during University when I'd study between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2: a.m. I don't do that any longer but scheduling time where you know you're going to need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things toward being able to focus and attend to the material now if you're taking courses you probably are going to be a slave to the timing of the courses you aren't going to be able to tell the instructor okay listen I want you to do this course at you know 3 p.m. because that's when you learn best or at 8: a.m. because that's when you happen to be able to attend best however to the extent that you have any control over the time in which you're going to study keeping that at a regular time or times perhaps one block early in the day one block later in the day perhaps two blocks early in the day and so on is going to be beneficial it turns out

34:29 that's also supported by the research literature that the brain just like with its sleep wake cycles that entrain to a regular schedule that is your brain and body get used to being active and inactive at particular times based on your exposure to sunlight your exposure to activities your social rhythms Etc if you regularly meaning for the course of about three days make it a point to focus and study at particular times again pulling your attention back it's not an automatic process but pulling your attention back to a specific location perhaps on a page or that you're listening to in a lecture your body and brain will start to entrain to that Rhythm such that you will be able to focus and attend better simply by virtue of the regularity of the timing

35:15 of the exposure to the material okay so you probably need about two or three days to break into a regular schedule of focusing and attending and studying at a given time or times allow yourself that transition period but then make it a point to schedule those times to study set aside your phone tell people you're going offline turn off the Wi-Fi if you need to or have to you may need it for your studying I don't know depends on what you're studying but limit distractions at all costs and learn to just focus on the material and this is a skill this is the most important thing to understand it's a skill to be able to focus and study and it's a skill that you can learn very quickly especially if you schedule it for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which to adapt to those schedules and

36:01 times and then try and stick to them as regularly as possible perhaps even on the weekends if you're approaching you know the end of the quarter or semester perhaps even on the weekend even if you're not in the quarter or semester keeping those regular times will entrain your nervous system to study and learn at its best at those particular times I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 the reason for that is ag1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available what that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals but also probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life

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37:34 into specific ways to study in order to maximally offset forgetting notice I didn't say in order to learn but rather to maximally offset forgetting AKA learning stably learning material there's one other point that I wanted to pass along from this uh really nice study on the study habits of highly effective medical students that I've been referring to and that is when one examined or these people were asked about their motivation for studying the best performing students had an interesting answer they had a very long-term understanding of how or belief rather about how their success in medical school would impact their family how it would impact their life Arc how

38:21 it would change them and they weren't particular about the ways in which it would change them or their family in fact it was a rather broad abstract aspirational way of thinking about their study efforts so what I like so much about this paper is that you know in addition to having a fairly large sample size close to 700 students that were evaluated and yes it's purely uh you know self-report and this kind of thing nonetheless it Bridges the two extremes of studying and learning you know it gets right down into the nitty-gritty of how long they study when they study the things they do to limit distraction that we just discussed but it also gets to their underlying psychological motivations and the thing that they use in order to pull them forward through their study efforts perhaps especially

39:06 when their desire is waning or their uh level of fatigue is increasing I don't know that I'm speculating here but this is this aspirational component of going to medical school which it turns out in the country in which the study was done um only very very select few of the very best students are able to achieve that they have to learn the in a different language altogether which is incredible I always Marvel at that you know I have friends that did their PHD thesis in Italy they're Italian by birth they now happen to run a laboratory in Italy and they had to do their PHD training and write papers and give their thesis dissertation and defense in English even though English was their second language so talk about a challenge and um that's just one example

39:52 that I can think of there are many examples of that these students students that I'm referring to in this study are not necessarily constantly thinking about how their efforts will transform themselves and their families but they certainly were able to report what it was specifically that they are seeking what they're aspiring to besides just trying to do as well as they can getting into and through medical school so the high level aspirational stuff within you whatever that is for you it's going to be highly individual is certainly important and it offers a bookend to the nuts and bolts kind of stuff that you're going to do I would hope in order to best study and learn the specific material so the specific actions that you're going to take each day to learn specific bits of

40:39 information that will pull you toward those important aspirations and now again if you love the material you're learning this aspirational component is probably not as important right I can recall during University and graduate school and so on thinking oh my goodness this is like the coolest thing I've ever heard probably say that about a million different topics like oh my goodness circadian rhythms seasonal rhythms melatonin neural circuits dopamine I was just a wash with excitement about what I was learning but of course sometimes I would take a course where the material was I don't know if it was more challenging or not but I had a harder time getting engaged by the material either by virtue of how it was being taught to me or the material itself so the ability to attach to some aspirational goal to pull you through can be very valuable you're not going to love every topic you have to

41:26 learn however I will say that at least in my experience some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the courses that I struggled with the most and in fact that's the basis of the next and easily one of the most important studying tools so a key theme in all of the excellent literature that is the peer- reviewed research on how best to study is that studying that feels challenging is the most effective I know nobody wants to hear this everyone wants to hear about flow everybody wants to hear about information just sinking into their brain by osmosis I think it was a Garfield cartoon where he talked about learning by osmosis there's this very cute real world video of a kid in a classroom uh I believe uh it's in China

42:13 where he's taking the book and he puts it on his head maybe I can find this clip and he's just kind of like trying to wash it into his brain it's super cute clip but guess what that doesn't work I mean it works to put the book on your head it doesn't work to it's not going to get the information into your brain uh perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into neural circuits right now we know we've known for hundreds of not thousands of years that effort is the Cornerstone of learning so I know there probably some gron about that I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell you how to study so that studying wasn't painful I think I can accomplish that by the end of today's episode but in order to do that let's take another quiz okay so here's the quiz again you can answer

42:59 these questions in your head you don't have to tell anyone but you could write them down or say them out loud if you want the first question is when during either your states of alertness or sleep does the remodeling of neural connections occur I like to think this is a pretty easy one okay the answer is during sleep the second question is what is one behavioral tool that you can use to improve focus the answer is simple mindfulness meditation which I'd prefer you think of Simply as a perceptual exercise so again just sit or lie down close your eyes focus on your breath when your attention drifts bring your attention back to your breath and so on or if you prefer you

43:46 can do this Eyes Open by focusing on a visual Target either a foot or two feet or 3 ft away whatever distance is comfortable for you allowing yourself to Blink as needed but forcing yourself to focus on that visual Target for say 1 to 3 minutes maybe even 3 to 5 minutes maybe even 10 minutes again please blink you don't want your eyes to dry both those tools will improve your ability to attend to focus to other material when the time comes okay the circuits for focus and attention themselves are subject to neuroplasticity and then the third question is can you name or List off in your mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use I can think of limiting distraction by virtue of

44:33 putting away phones and telling others you won't be in contact with them two and I'm getting these out of order I realize is to isolate to study alone and the third that I can recall is to teach others in the same course okay you can probably think of a few others now why are we taking these silly little quizzes Well turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you'll remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to it over and over again but that if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the literature in the peer-reviewed literature about how students can learn information better it's testing and I

45:19 know I know I know we think of tests as a way to evaluate our knowledge but it turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge to retain our knowledge and again to offset forgetting now the study of testing as a learning tool not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned goes back over a hundred years there's a classic study that was done in 1917 where grade school age children read biographies so they read biographies and then the kids were divided into different groups one group read and reread and reread those biographies over and over another group read the biographies once and then were tested on those biographies but get this

46:08 they tested themselves on those biographies simply by having to think about the information that they had read and trying to remember the information like what was the biography who was the person who are they married to what did they do when did they go to school what did they do in school what did they do in the world what role did they play in life so they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biographies now keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography to three four times might seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that they had read just once right you could imagine that thinking about the biography involves

46:54 more effort and indeed it does but keep in mind also that the kids in the second group were only exposed to the biography once and yet when you look at the percent of accurate recall of information from those biographies the children that read the biography once and then made a deliberate point to think about that biography in their own mind to effectively test themselves on that material just within their heads over and over but an equal number of times as the kids that read the biographies directly on a page over and over vastly outperformed the kids that read the biographies over and over put differently reading and rereading material and re re rereading material is

47:39 far less effective than reading material and then thinking about that material testing yourself on that material forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your own mind and this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material but also accuracy of recall of that material and that at least to me was pretty surprising at first until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of testing as a learning tool and then you start to realize that testing yourself is Far and Away the best tool for studying and learning not just for evaluating your knowledge but for actually studying and incorporating that knowledge into your neural circuits okay so I realize that anytime I or

48:24 somebody else talks about a study that was done in 19 17 we think of people in these you know like wooden shoes and um in these School houses that look so different and uh kids dress so different let's get a little more modern here um keep in mind however that the nervous system hasn't really changed much in tens of thousands of years um nonetheless I think it's nice to think about a more recent study of how best to study and this study which by the way we'll provide a link to in the show note captions as well as a couple of reviews that include results from similar studies again I'm pointing to a body of research not just one study here looked at whether or not studying material four times so study study study

49:11 study was better in terms of locking that information into people's minds allowing them to use that information flexibly which is an element of creativity essentially giving the Mastery of the material then a different Group which studied once studied the material twice studied the material three times then was tested on the material or a third group that studied material once then took one two yes three tests on the material now so what I just described was three groups all of whom read a passage this was a passage about animals about biology some other topics too in different experiments again three groups one group studies

49:57 four times they study the material 1 2 3 four times then later they take a test the second group studies one two three times takes a test on that material and then later takes a test the third group studies the material once then takes three tests on the material and then later takes a test so what's analyzed and compared between these different groups is their performance on that final test okay what I put in as the fifth bin there right because it was think about it as ssss so study study study study and then later test or SSS T study study study test and then later test or sttt study test test test and

50:44 then later test so what's compared and contrasted is performance on the test some period of time later now some experiments made that final test of the material a couple days later other experiments made it a couple weeks later other experiments made it much later month or even a year later okay the point here is twofold first of all based on everything I've told you thus far you can probably guess who performed best on the test that occurred some period of time later okay right the performance on that final test was essentially proportional to the number ofest one had already taken on the material okay that should be pretty much

51:30 obvious given the way we've been going today in this description of tests as a way to offset forgetting okay so the more tests that you take as a way to expose you yourself to the material the better you're going to perform on that material at some later point now of course at some point you have to be exposed to the material for the first time right that's why it's studying and learning but after one exposure to new material taking more tests on that material even if you don't perform that well on those tests as long as you're able to see the accurate answers to those tests and compare your answers to those answers will lead to better performance on the ultimate test and retention of that material at some later time put differently it's not about how many times you study the material or how many times you're

52:16 exposed to the material it's about being exposed to the material doing your best to focus and attend to that material and then self- testing yourself on that material or as the case may be if an an instructor is the one giving you the test but nonetheless taking tests on that material not just once but ideally two or three times that's what really locks the material into your neural circuits that's what's going to lead to the most pervasive change the most durable change we should say in your neural circuits that carry that material that hold that material in your mind what we call Neural encoding okay so the the more times you test yourself or that you are tested on material the better your retention of that material now some

53:01 people will immediately say well goodness what if I learned it and then I'm tested and I'm somehow consolidating the wrong or inaccurate material but it doesn't appear to be the case as long as you learn what the correct answers to the tests are even if you're getting you know 40 or 50% or less accurate on those tests that you take immediately after the studying period that's still going to be a better strategy than rereading the material which ought to be somewhat surprising it certainly was surprising to me but you know what's even more surprising and a little scary and that we all should know and I wish I had learned when I was like in the second grade is that if you ask students how confident are you in the material that you just learned how well do you think you would perform on a test

53:48 what you see consistently in these studies I'm chuckling because it's kind of mindblowing is that the students who study the the material that is who were exposed to the material four times think that they are going to perform best on the ultimate exam however the students that study the material once and then are tested three times on that material they think that ultimately they're going to perform least well for instance they ask them their confidence how well do you think he would perform on a test of this material in two weeks or in a year or in six months or even tomorrow they report that is the students in the study test test test group report much lower confidence in the material much lower sense of Mastery of

54:35 the material compared to the students that were exposed to the material four times who are saying yeah I think I would do pretty well or very well and guess what the exact opposite is true put differently when you're exposed to material over and over and over again you think you've learned the material in fact your confidence that you've learned the material increases with each subsequent exposure to the material but actually you haven't learned it at all compared to the people that are exposed to the material and then take tests on the material often times straining to get the answers right on those tests in fact sometimes getting those answers dead wrong and then realizing they get those answers dead wrong or sometimes they just sense it but guess what testing yourself once twice maybe three times prior to the ultimate test of your

55:22 knowledge of that material is Far and Away the best way to lock that material into those neural circuits now I say I wish I had learned this when I was a student because to some extent I used a self- testing approach the one most Salan example of that is I took a course when I was in college I still remember it was bioscience's 169 L neuroanatomy laboratory taught by Ben ree he's still there I believe and he was known then and I'm sure still now if he's still teaching as extremely challenging Professor extremely challenging not as a person not as personality but a ton of detail and rigor and high high high expectation for this laboratory course

56:08 in neuroanatomy which involved lectures it involved a neuroanatomy textbook where you'd look at you know essentially panels of different brain sections from different species different types of stains of different brain tissue mind you this is an undergraduate course and then there was a laboratory component hence the L in 169 L where you'd have to go from microscope station to microscope station identifying structures based simply on what you could see down the microscope and therefore you had to know what the stain was you know what was essentially visible to you on the slide because certain stains reveal certain things like the what we call the cell body of neurons versus the um the sort of wires what we call the axons between neurons etc etc I remember thinking this is a really hard course it was a very difficult course and my mode of studying

56:54 for the course involved of course going to class doing the dissection we dissected a sheep brain at that time um so we're literally dissecting an actual brain we're doing microscope work we're learning about it from the textbook and from lecture and there was a ton of new nomenclature about rostral codal dorsal vent all the stuff of neuron anatomy and then at some point I made the decision perhaps on the basis of sheer overwhelm to study for neuron Anatomy by laying down on my bed in my studio apartment I lived alone and closing my eyes and flying through the nervous system from different entry points through the ear review my coar anatomy through the eye

57:42 review my retinal Anatomy through the dorsal surface of the brain think about the susai and gyri and then the Corpus colossum and then I got and and I can still see it in my mind's eye so my process of studying for neuroanatomy yes involved exposure to the material but it involved hours upon hours of thinking about the material within my own brain so it's a little bit meta unto itself there as a consequence I like to think in fact I believe um with some confidence that I have uh very high Mastery of neuroanatomy in different species as well now that's my particular area of expertise I don't think I'm any kind of savant with respect to neuro Anatomy I just spent hours upon hours learning the material and then reviewing

58:28 the material within my mind so in other words testing myself here's what I would do if I were moving down a trajectory of a of a neural tract for instance between say the the hippocampus and a neighboring structure and I didn't know what was next I would then go look it up in the textbook and then I'd go back to this you know mental exercise visualization type studying it really wasn't studying is the point the point is that I was testing myself I was trying to find the points in which I no longer had the knowledge to move further through in this case my mental image of the brain but through the material and this is the key aspect of testing it's not about just knowing how many things you get right how many things you get wrong it's about recognizing exactly what you know and don't know and an

59:14 important component of testing is running up against those things where you say h i can't remember I don't know what comes next or I'm certain that that structure is the fimbria and then you go and you look and you go it's not the fima but guess what I'll never forget for instance the location of the habenula or what it looks like a structure which by the way since these names are kind of uh esoteric at that time we didn't know what it does it turns out it's involved in disappointment it's key to the depression circuits or the circuits that underly depression in some individuals it is um suppressed by viewing of morning sunlight we know that too and by getting too much artificial light exposure in the middle of the night you enhance activity of the habenula beautiful work not done by my laboratory but other Laboratories demonstrates that so what I just did for you there was

1:00:01 hopefully teach you a little something about neuron anatomy and depression but more importantly to just illustrate that how you test yourself can be highly individual to the ways in which you learn best now that contradicts what I said earlier which is that this notion that people have different learning styles and you know some people are verbal Learners and some people are auditory Learners and Etc doesn't really hold up so well anymore but which by the way is not to say there isn't any research to support it it's just that it's heavily contradicted by other research that contradicts that idea but your approach your mode of best testing yourself on material for sake of offsetting the forgetting process and for identifying where you have gaps in your knowledge or where you thought you knew something but you don't or you knew

1:00:47 something but it's wrong that can be accomplished through the approach that's best for you which in my case turned out to be lying down and thinking about the

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