How to Absorb Facts 3x Faster in 7 Days (from a Med Student)

if you clicked on this video cuz you know that studying is about 50% memorizing and not just understanding things like your teachers keep telling you then you're in the right place cuz throughout my undergrad and postgraduate degrees and now at Mid School I've memorized tens of thousands of random facts for exams and I didn't just use active recall and space repetition I used a better method that helped me become a top 2% med student and it's called the atomic method and it helps me memorize a lot faster so that I have enough time left in the day for other things in my life so I'll give you three very simple steps by-step parts to help you do this too so before I get into the whole of the atomic method I'm going to explain the core of the method first which is active recall and space repetition cuz most people think they know how to use them but I've seen them being used wrong quite a lot and I'll start by testing you do you remember exactly what I said three sentences ago probably not cuz you are passively listening to me and that's how most people try to memorize things doing things like rereading the same lines or highlighting bits of text doesn't engage your brain enough for memorizing efficiently and for exams you have have to reproduce information by retrieving it from your brain so it's the opposite of passive and that's why active recoils have been proven to work it's where you go through a topic make questions on that topic and test yourself on those questions and this actively digs information out of your brain which builds physically stronger Connections in your brain to remember better so as an example if I had a list of treatments for heart attacks in my notes I'd make that into a question and do this type of thing for basically everything so here's a list of some things you'd want to know from your classes or lectures but you can't do these questions just once cuz a model known as the forgetting curve shows us that if we don't try to remember something we forget that information over time and this gets us to what you've done as a child which is spaced repetition cuz what helped you learn language was hearing the same word again and again over time so now it's when you do those active recall questions at increasing intervals over time and that resets the forgetting curve so that you retain the information for longer and you have two choices the first is doing something I did 2 years ago where I made a page of questions and notes for each lecture manually checking through them and setting dates of when to apply spaced repetition and the second is what I've been doing since then where I use Ani which has space repetition automatically built in and any automated space repetition app works but I stick with Ani and to save you from the mistakes that most people make where the questions are too frequent making it overwhelming or too far apart that the forgetting curve is too far gone just copy the settings I've used for the past 2 years in Ani that made it possible for me to remember literally thousands of these notes of mine so that's the first part covering active recall and space repetition but now you need to know how to effectively use them especially for making your questions and answers and this is where more of the atomic method comes in and I'll start with an example what do you imagine in your head when I see the words phone or laptop you won't spell out the words in your head you'll most likely visualize your laptop or your phone and this should change how you make your questions in two ways with the second being something that most people don't do that can double how fast you memorize so the first is to use images in your questions cuz they're a lot easier for your brain to interpret and remember than words and it makes sense cuz back in the tribal days being able to visualize and remember the poisonous berries from the Edible Ones was necessary for survival so if I'm doing a question on the causes of a heart attack I'll have an image showing the causes so that when I see the question I'll immediately visualize the problems from the image so for school or uni literally just use the images from your lectures lessons textbooks or even from Google Now for the next point I'll give an example about heart attacks again which sentence is easier to follow myocardial inunctions are precipitated by hyp cholesterolemia and hypertension or the risk of heart attacks can increase by high cholesterol and high blood pressure the second simpler one right cuz just as how you're more likely to visualize your laptop or your phone from the previous example personalizing your answers to be more familiar or simpler makes it easier to remember so write your answer notes in simple form write it in a way that you'd speak or at least somewhere in between and think similar for your actual questions like in an exam you'd be shown how many marks a question's worth so give hints for how much you're expecting yourself to answer for a particular question and at this point you might be thinking this sounds like a long process and a few years ago it was but the next thing you should do to speed up this process is to use AI like chat GPT to organize your questions so after you've made some of your notes and questions put them into the AI application and ask it to use them as a template for making future questions so that when you make new notes literally just copy them and ask it to make questions for you based on your initial style of questions and that saves you hours of thinking of your own questions and again just copy what I do so it doesn't miss anything now the final part of the atomic method is about understanding how to go through your questions as efficiently as possible and it's in two parts and the second part's going to help you do this consistently without fail so first let's go back on the examples that I gave one was on treatments for heart attacks and the other was on causes of heart attacks and one reason why I stuck with the same problem of heart attacks is because they're wellknown and not vague like card's syndrome and in med school making sure to learn the bigger topics first is more effective than learning Niche content so when you go through your questions prioritize your memorization like at school or uni look at the bigger topics in your syllabus make questions for them and do those first or pay more attention to what your lecturer or teacher seems to emphasize the most cuz that's what's more likely to come up in exams and that follows the 8020 principle that 80% of the important information is in 20% of the content and as a bonus try to memorize similar topics one after the other like if I've learned about heart attacks I'd then go into other heart problems like heart failure cuz that reinforces a web of connections which helps retain information so in your syllabus go through the higher U subtopics underneath a general topic heading together and now you need the mental energy to do these questions regularly as part of the space repetition system so that you keep resetting the forgetting curve to retain all that information and what helps with this is structuring your studying to be as effortless as possible cuz how many times have you sat down to study but what you're trying to learn takes too much effort to remember so you just give up usually it's cuz it takes a lot of effort to learn something new when your brain isn't properly warmed up so what you should do is after you've had a few days of doing questions and the same ones come up again as part of the space repetition system start by reviewing what you've already done first cuz questions or facts you've already seen have a lower activation energy for your brain to get into the studying mindset so by the time you get to the new information you're ready for deep work but there is another big problem that basically everyone has when it comes to memorizing and it's that it does get boring pretty quickly so it's hard for you to focus for too long so in this video here I talk about how I can focus straight away and maintain that Focus for hours so click the video so that you can do this too

Channel: Salim Ahmed

Views: 432,099

Keywords: Productivity, Medical school, Boost productivity, medical student, how to be productive, university, productivity tips, productivity hacks, how to increase productivity, Ali abdaal, med school productivity, Memorize faster for beginners, how to memorize faster, how to memorize 3x faster in 7 days (from a med student)

Id: EvCsXi1Rr2k

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023