How to Study for Exams - An Evidence-Based Masterclass

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 yes I got it right I can't believe that that was straight out of my head easy HLA something are class 1 antigens well actually something across two antigens I don't know I don't know what this is talking about okay so actually a B and C are class 1 antigens while DP DQ and Dr cluster antigens that does ring a bell but I didn't know the answer so I'm going to click again so this comes up again in three minutes time so you can see this is forcing me to do active recall by testing me on on like the knowledge of this stuff but it's also forcing me to do space repetition because if I got something wrong it means I can tell it to show it to me again in three minutes or in 15 minutes or or whatever and if I got something right it can tell it to show me it showed to show it to me again in four days and if I got that question about Von hippo lindau Syndrome again in four days time and I got it right again then the easy interval would change to like a month and so Anki has an algorithm for space repetition built in so that the the harder cards come more often and the easier cards come less often like you know you would actually space the intervals out um and there's been loads of people on the internet who have dug down into the maths and the science behind the Anki space repetition algorithm so I'll put links to some of those things in the in the video description Anki is really really popular in medical school because you just have a huge turn of information to memorize and so for the people that use Anki they swear by it but one of the problems with Anki is that to use it well and to use it properly ideally you want to keep it to one fact per card rather than just copying or pasting all your notes on a single card and ideally you want to be doing it consistently over a long period of time so I love using flashcards if I start early on and I can do it for isolated facts so yeah in an Ideal World we would have one examinable fact per flash card and we'd be doing it very very consistently but there are other ways of using flashcards so for example in my third year the Year in which I ranked first in the year or rather second in the year but won the prize for Best exam performance jointly with this other girl who came first anyway uh ranked really highly there um and well I was using flash cards extensively for that but in my third year I wasn't using flashcards for single examinable facts because it was entirely essay based I was studying ecology and our exam was 100 essays so we had to write essays about psychology and so what I was using Anki for is that I was using it to memorize different chunks of content so that I could basically drag and drop them from my mind into the essay in the exam so for example on the front of the flashcard I would write I don't know karpuki and blunt 1972 and that would be a reference to a paper and on the back of the flash card it would be an explanation of what they found and what the papers showed and what the results were and why it's relevant to me and so I would I would have lots and lots of facts on a single flash card but I would if you then told me you know at the time copycan blood in 1972 I would instantly know what that study was what they found and what essay I could I could put it in and this is technically not what you're supposed to do when you're doing flashcards because ideally you want to have one mem one examinable fact per flashcard but I think if you have got an essay exam then memorizing whole chunks of content like even for some of my essays I'd prepared really fancy nicely written introductions and conclusions and I put all of those into Anki so I would memorize introductions for my essays and I'll talk a lot more about this in the video called the essay memorization framework which again I've put on YouTube which is actually one of my most popular videos so that talks in depth about how I used Anki to memorize chunks for essays I just wanted to flag up that that is a potential use of Anki oh flashcards in general if you want to go the handwritten route but I don't know why you'd want to do that but again on the topic of flashcards let's talk about a few cautionary tales so what you don't want to do is you do not want to make a flash card for absolutely everything because then we get into flashcard overload and there are so many people like I I had this problem in my first year like I discovered Anki towards the end of my first year and I sort of like for for about two weeks I was making flashcards on absolutely everything thinking oh this is efficient why don't I make flash cards but then I realized very quickly that actually this is too many flashcards and I can't go through them so I ended up going back to my other techniques but a friend of mine called Catherine I ended up making flashcards for absolutely everything like for the whole year and she had like 5 000 flash cards by the end of the year and she realized that there was no way she could feasibly go through all 5000 flashcards and she felt that all that effort was was a bit of a waste of time so what I do now when making flashcards is that I only make flash cards for something if I absolutely have to um so if I'm making my own flashcard I don't usually make them in my first pass through the content usually I use the Cornell note-taking system for that but if there's a factor or a concept that's proving resistant to memorizing or remembering or whatever or that I find particularly tricky then I will make an Anki flashcard out of it or for example if I'm doing past papers on you know a website like past medicine or past test which is an online question bank for medical school for medical students if I get something wrong then I will copy and paste the solution into Anki so that I know that next time like I'm basically building up this Bank of stuff that I got wrong so that when it comes to cramming for the exam I can just kind of Blitz through all the stuff that I got wrong even that's probably slightly sub-optimal so the main word of warning is that be wary of making too many flashcards I think I'd recommend asking yourself do I really need a flashcard for this I've got a story that really kind of puts us into perspective and like once I made my video about Anki and about how I memorized essays with it I started getting loads of messages and emails from people saying that hey you know these are my decks can you have a look at it can you make sure I'm on the right track and there was one student tag that I found he was he was a medical student first year medical student and and he had like he had like sort of 8 000 flashcards and immediately I was like okay this is way too many water what are you doing and then I looked through some of these and the one that stuck out was here he had a flashcard saying where is the heart and the answer was in between the lungs you know where's the heart in between the lungs and that is one of those things that's just so obvious that you don't need a flash card for it it's also a bit pointless having a flash card because when you see the phrase where is the hot you know I would say okay fine if if you ask me where's the heart I would say all right well I suppose it's at the level of T5 vertebrae it's sort of in the middle media steinum it's surrounded by you know the anterior metastinum and the posterior metastatinum it's got the thoracic dog knee running alongside it's got the autocarch on top of it blah blah but if I look at the flashcard and the answer was in between the lungs I would feel cheated I would be like what the hell what is the point of this flash card this is a total waste of time so that's why I told him I was like look man you know avoid avoid making flashcards for obvious things and that's why I think that I wouldn't make I wouldn't personally make flash cards on my first pass through the content because who knows what the bits that I'll just know of by heart will will be and what the bits are going to be obvious and what bits aren't going to be obvious I would start making flashcards on my second or third pass through the content and only if I absolutely had to but that's all we say on flashcards for now all right so we've talked about how we might be able to use Anki as a flashcard software or Quizlet or you know do it on paper if you really want to and my friend Thomas Frank has a really good video on how to use paper flash cards and how to use a system to space repetition them uh if you want but to be honest he made that like four years ago uh before the flashcard app thing was like a really big deal so I'd fully recommend using an app for that but sometimes I don't like using flashcard apps like Anki I actually prefer to use Google Sheets uh just like a spreadsheet as a way like a sort of flashcard alternative especially if I'm not doing it like longitudinally over a very long time I think Anki is fantastic if you're able to put in the time to do it consistently over the long term but for example for my final year exams finally at OS Keys which are clinical exams where we have to um kind of talk to the examiner and basically show off on knowledge to The Examiner for that I only really started preparing about two months before the exam and I think that wasn't enough time to do everything properly in Anki so what I did instead was use Google Sheets as a sort of flashcard alternative and I've done a YouTube video exploring this but I'm going to put it in this video just for completeness because I think this is actually quite a good technique and I've had messages from loads of students saying that oh wow I've started using your Google Sheets technique as a flashcard alternative but equally I've had lots of messages from students saying oh I tried out your Google Sheets method but to be honest I prefer Anki and that's defined like as long as we're using active recall and space repetition in whatever study technique we're using it doesn't really matter if it's Google Sheets or if a tank here or whatever um so in a minute I will include the Google Sheets video here so you can have a look through that method if you haven't seen it yet but just a quick note I always use Google Sheets rather than Microsoft Excel because Google Sheets is free it's quick and it loads on any device whereas Microsoft Excel like takes ages to open up it's a big heavy lumbering piece of software and I suppose now they've got support for different devices but I mean if I'm at work for example and I want to do some quick revision I can literally just go on Google Sheets on on the web whereas I can't open up Excel on the word computers and you know there's all sorts of reasons why I use Google Sheets rather than Microsoft Excel but yeah here is the video where I will now talk about Google Sheets um I hope you enjoy it if you haven't seen it already I think you'll hopefully learn something from it thank you so we're going to jump in and I'm going to show you the Google sheet that I use to revise for my final year Medical School exams at Cambridge a few months ago and I'll just kind of explain how it works okay so here we have the Google sheet and you can see along the bottom I've got all the various different subjects so abdomen cardiovascular examination the respiratory examination neuro endocrine Durham owls thing it doesn't matter the point is the subject along the bottom and then the structure of the sheet is based on having questions in column A and answers in column B and it's pretty much that simple so let's look at my liver disease little category and I've got loads of questions to myself causes of hepatomegaly which means a big liver um what might be evidence of decompensation in liver disease what investigations would you like complications of cirrhosis classification of cirrhosis causes of ascites which means you know fluid in your abdomen uh how do we treat Society I mean all these various questions about liver disease and the cool thing is I've written the answers in column B but I have colored them in in font color white so I've wrote them obviously with font color black so I could see what I was doing but then once I've written the answer I know text color white which means when I'm looking through the spreadsheet I can't see any of the answers and therefore this is active recall when I see a question I have to actively retrieve the information from my brain which as we mentioned earlier and in all of my previous study videos is the single most efficient study technique so that's the whole point of this method it's just about having questions and answers and this is kind of like flashcards it's like having you know the front of a flash card as column A and the back of the flash card as column B but I just think this is a nicer way to look through a topic and we'll talk more about exactly why I like this method later on but that's pretty much the method questions in one column answers in the other column also you'll notice that I have color coded some of these so it's pretty straightforward green means I'm pretty sure I know the answer or I knew the answer six months ago when I was doing these exams um I don't think I can remember the answers to a lot of these but you know I'll do some space repetition and active recall of this particular spreadsheet later on yellow means I wasn't very good but I sort of half knew the answer and there's a few red ones down here what are some problems following transplantation that I could know the answer at all and sometimes I use orange for like you know a middle ground and towards the end of the revision period where it came to exams I was doing this thing where I would hide some columns that I didn't need like so between here and here yeah so there's quite a few green ones but I don't need to go through all the green ones so I can just hide these to um these two columns and then you end up cleaning up your spreadsheet over time and then you know if you do want to have a session or an hour or two where you're just going through every single question you can just bash through them and this is the Google Sheets method for active recall I hope you enjoyed it now let's talk about exactly why I use this instead of flashcards okay so why do I use Google Sheets instead of flashcards uh there's a few reasons firstly I really like the fact that putting it in a spreadsheet format gives you a systematic structure of reviewing your stuff flashcards are good because they tend to randomize the order in which questions are asked which is good because it means that you're having to dredge up information that's in different topics and there is this thing in efficient studying that you know interleaved practice that the more you learn from different categories the more likely you are to remember it but I'm not a massive fan of that especially within medicine and a lot of other subjects where the sort of recall you're going to be asked to do is going to be systematic like let's say I see a patient who has a stoma in their abdomen I'm going to be asked questions about the stoma they might ask me what the complications of stomas are like the question over here they might ask me about different indications for a stoma they might ask me what a Hartman's procedure is there's all stuff related to a stoma whereas if I had these in an Anki or Quizlet deck then I might get a question about what are the complications of stoma and then the next question would be how do patients with all to Thermal dominant polycytic kidney disease present and the next question might be what are the complications following a liver transplant I mean it's it's good to have this knowledge off the top of your head but I think I prefer the systematic approach where I can have you know this mental model of stomas and just kind of know everything about them in one place and actively revise that one Topic at a time rather than just getting a scatter gun of different questions about various problems in the abdomen secondly I really like how this lets me see at a glance exactly where the holes in my knowledge are with something like Anki inquisite I have to trust that their space repetition algorithm is going to flag up the things that I don't know and often I'll have to go through a hundred cards where I'm pretty sure I know like 80 of them and it's only 20 of them that I'm really struggling with whereas in this I have color coded in myself stuff that I'm put in red means that last time I tested myself on this I didn't know how to do it so that's the stuff I'm going to do first and if I just scroll through the ABDO exam I see there's quite a few red yellows and oranges so I'm going to spend some time on this today and I don't think oh yeah cardio exam there's more green green and yellow here there's a few Reds so I'd be looking at these Reds and this becomes a very quick way of reviewing questions I'm not a fan of reviewing notes obviously because that's not efficient that's passive it's just reading information I'm a big fan of active recall and this makes it super easy to see where the holes in my knowledge are thirdly I think the Google Sheets method makes it slightly easier to work together with friends so if you've seen any of my previous study with me videos from a few months ago when my friends and I were preparing for our med school exams we'd often have like sessions where I'd put up the Google sheet on my big monitor Zoom the font size in and we'd kind of sit there and work through the questions one at a time that is possible with flashcards I have done it in the past with flashcards but I just found that having tried both of them it was It was kind of nicer to just go through a spreadsheet and be like one by one next next next next rather than trust that random flashcards would pop up in the right order and finally the reason I prefer Google Sheets to flashcards is because flashcards become an absolute burden like I mentioned at the start of the video you see that you've got 150 flashcards to review that day and it just sucks all the enjoyment out of learning and yeah I know you can set them so you review 20 at a time but then sometimes you want to change that amount and sometimes you want to work more and then you have to actively go into the options and change that blah blah all this stuff essentially Google Sheets just makes it a super low commitment thing to sit down and study even if I have five or ten minutes I can just go open Google Sheets find the things that are read and actively try and recall them and then look up the answers or Google or Wikipedia or look at a textbook for the stuff that I don't remember and that you know even if I have five or ten minutes that will work whereas for a flash card yeah it does work if you just have a few minutes at a time but I often found when I was using flashcards intensively in first and second year that unless I had like an hour or two to sit down and do my flash cards I used to treat it as such a big deal that I ended up not reviewing them very often so I like the fact that Google Sheets is low commitment you can do it as little or as much as you want that's kind of nice it's kind of nice going through them and there's that little gamification element of it as well where once once you've recall something well then you mock it as yellow you mock it as green and it gives you that little burst of endorphins that make you feel good about studying overall so yeah if I have some spare time and I've got exams coming up I just bash open Google Sheets on my iPhone or iPad or laptop or even a random browser and it just works it's just pretty magical finally I just want to end by addressing a question that I've had from loads of people over the last year or so that I've also mentioned this Google Sheets thing and people always ask what do you make a flash card for and what do you use your Google sheet for and I really don't have that distinct categorization in general if I was to come up with a rule of thumb I prefer flashcards for very very isolated facts so for example what is the dose of co-amoxiclav for I don't know a community called pneumonia and it would be about 625 milligrams four times a day or three times a day or whatever you know it's an isolated fact what type of virus is a flaby virus it's a double-stranded DNA RNA virus that does blah blah you know discrete isolated facts I kind of prefer Google Sheets for more General understanding concepts I said in one of my previous videos that I quite like the phrase what's the deal with polymerica it's a bad question to put on a flashcard because if you look at the evidence running flashcards people always say that it's better to have you know a distinct fact whereas just explain polymerica is a very broad open-ended question I think that's the sort of thing that I like putting in my Google sheet because if I don't know what it is I'll just Google it and I'm on the computer anyway because I'm going from a Google sheet so I'll just Google it find out what it is and then you know either write some of it down on my sheet on my sheet or just make a mental note in my head to repeat that information to rehearse it to active recall it and then I can mark that particular box as yellow another question people often ask is do you write out your whole answers in full in the flash card or in the Google sheet and the answer is sometimes if it's a simple if it's a simple thing like what's the differential for aortic stenosis I.E an injection systolic murmur there's just four points here hocm vsd aortic Sclerosis at least at the medical student final level only four things I can write four things in down in my little spreadsheet column but if the question was explain polymerica I probably wouldn't write down anything in the column because I would trust that if I don't know what it is if I can't explain it to myself in my head I'll just Google it and then I'll be able to explain it so a lot of the time I think we can waste a lot of time making the flashcards but especially for stuff like medicine where every single thing is just to Google away there's almost no point in adding tons of information and duplicating that information and making your own notes because you can just Google it if you don't know what the answer is so yeah hopefully that clarifies those two points um I don't really have that distinctive categorization between flash cards and sheets but I kind of prefer Google Sheets for more general concepts and flashcards for more distinct facts even though there's a lot of overlap and secondly I sometimes don't write out the answers in the column at all if I can just Google it so yeah I hope you found this video useful we've talked about why I use Google Sheets we've talked about how I use Google Sheets it's pretty much the same as flashcards but I think the Google sheet method addresses some of the issues that I personally have found with flashcards and that's a point that I want to end on this is just what works for me this thing about Google Sheets being better than flashcards is obviously not gospel truth the only gospel truth in this whole study tips stuff is active recall and space repetition in fact it's better than gospel truth because there is a mountain of evidence supporting it controversial active recall space repetition things also things like elaborative encoding and interleague practice you can find out more if you read the book make it stick but I'll be working on videos over those on those over time um but yeah this is just like a personal preference thing I'm making this video because a lot of people have asked about it I prefer Google Sheets to flashcards for some things that's not to say it works for everyone alright so that was the Google Sheets method as a flash card as an Anki alternative all right so we are continuing our Saga of effective techniques for remembering stuff having of course established that step one is to understand and only step two is to remember and in this video I want to talk about mind maps or spider diagrams now the basic idea is that you have a concept in the middle of your page and then you have like the the branches of that concept sort of going out from the middle then you have the subcategories of that branches going out from that and I quite like mind maps and the reason I like them is because they help me get a broad understanding of what the content that I'm looking at is and so here is for example what a mind map looks like so hopefully you can see on the page this was something that I wrote uh on a piece of paper and then I scanned it into OneNote because I was using OneNote at the time before notion was a thing and so you can see in the middle we've got bleeding and clotting as sort of one of the strands of hematology which is the study of blood and I've split that up into prokaryate so clotting disorders and anticoagulant so bleeding disorders so things that make you clot and things that make you bleed and we can see the program is split up into her military and Acquired and then we've got a few different things within Acquired and we've got a few different things in hereditary and then anticoagulant is calling Factor the blood vessels platelets platelet number plate and and so you can see that hopefully that this gives me an idea of what all the different categories are and kind of like in in the video earlier on if you saw that about scoping the subject a mind map is sort of like where you start with the base of the tree and then you Branch out into different things then you can put the leaves and flowers and stuff on the branches I don't know how far this metaphor extends but so for example if we're talking about protein C deficiency or protein s deficiency I know that they are deficiencies I know that they are hereditary I know they're pro-coagulant so they make you clot and I know they're sort of within this branch of clotting hematology disorders and so this is sort of what a mind map looks like and I think this is great because otherwise like you know I'll use the example of med school but apply this to whatever subject you're doing otherwise you know if we if we looked at the the textbook and we looked at kind of bleeding and clotting disorders in the Oxford Handbook of clinical medicine thing we would just have a long list and I think having it in this sort of Mind map format makes it really obvious at least for me in my head like where the thing fits into the bigger picture and this is something that I talk about a lot that I think is really helpful to keep in mind that no one really explicitly tells us that whenever we are learning anything we want to make sure we want to First understand where it fits into the bigger picture which sort of goes hand in hand with scoping the subject so this is one example of a mind map so this is my mind amount for Pediatrics I've just basically put the whole syllabus on one one single page so that if I am revising Pediatrics for example I can just look at this and I can go one at a time I can be like okay do I know do I know everything about bronchiolitis asthma viral wheeze uh croup and epiglottitis CF cystic fibrosis and pneumonia okay cool that's fine I'm done with respiratory let me look at gastro right do I know about inflammatory bowel disease do I know about functional abdominal pain do I know about necrotizing enterocolitis do I know about hush prank disease do I know about gourd gastroesophageal reflux disease do I know about hus about gastroenteritis caused by fluids and dehydrated now I know about pyoric stenosis do I know about intussusception do I know about Scenic disease these are all the gastro-related things within Pediatrics so firstly what I can do is I can look at the Mind map and then try and active recall everything I know about these things and then I can highlight the stuff that I didn't know and look it up so that was one way of that I would do this stuff but secondly what I can do is I can turn I can turn this over or get a blank piece of paper and see if I can recreate the syllabus from scratch so it could be like right Pediatrics right we're going to look at a little bit of respiratory what are all the Pediatric respiratory conditions that I know of and I will sit there and active recall this stuff so I'll be like I know that cystic fibrosis is a thing I know that asthma bronchiolitis croup epiglottitis viral wheeze is there anything else within Peds respiratory and I'll be like okay I can't remember and then I'll look at this thing and see oh actually oh damn pneumonia obviously pneumonia is obvious but I didn't think of that as being a respiratory pediatric thing but then I'll add that to my to my mind map so I use mind maps for all different sorts of things but a like I said they help with understanding where stuff fits into the bigger context as a whole but B they helped me also use active recall because then I can kind of redraw the Mind map and it's just like like really fun like when I was in my second and third year I would redraw mind maps a lot as a way of memorizing things and it's just quite it's kind of nice you open your pucker pad to a new page you get in different colored pens out you read you draw the spider diagram or the Mind map from memory and I don't know at least when I was doing it it would start off feeling really hard and then as I knew I'd mastered the content I'd be able to recreate these spider diagrams in my sleep so it was like really satisfying and really sort of nice so I absolutely love mind maps and I will swear swear by them to the end of the Earth okay so we are continuing a barrage of evidence-based techniques for remembering stuff with the caveat that of course step number one is that we understand stuff and step number two is that we remember slash memorize the stuff and now we're moving on to memory technique so we're going to talk about mnemonics we're going to talk about the peg system and we're going to talk about memory palaces and I've used all three of these to various extents in various different years of med school and in this video we're going to be talking about mnemonics so what is the mnemonic well I mean technically a mnemonic is just anything that Aids on memory but traditionally mnemonics are considered those sort of like an acronym or sort of like like an easy way to remember uh slightly difficult to remember thing so for example medical students are taught that if you want to remember the bones of the hand you use the mnemonic some lovers try positions that they can't handle some lovers try positions that they can't handle and that corresponds to the scaphoid lunate triquetral pisiform trapezium trapezoid capitate and hamate some lovers try positions that they can't handle great and even kind of just thinking about that eight years after I first learned it and having not really gone back over it since I can remember that because it's such a strong mnemonic and sort of the way that a lot of these memory techniques works like the sort of sort of hacks for memorizing stuff is by creating a a vivid picture or some sort of association between one thing and another thing that makes it easier to remember so as humans we're not very good at remembering words but we are very good at remembering songs we're very good at remembering pictures so if we can turn something into a song or a poem or a picture or something funny or interesting then our brain is more likely to remember the interesting or the novel and I think this even applies like even when we're doing stuff that that doesn't necessarily um sort of lead to something something interesting like that so um one thing that I found really helpful when preparing for my final year Oscar exams which are clinical exams is that often you have to kind of recite a Spiel of things that you're looking for on inspection so for example if you're examining a lump on the skin there's a few different things you want to be looking at and there's different ways of remembering them so the way that me and most of my friends did it if I can remember now was like the four s's four T's and three p's or something so the four s's would be site size surface and shape the t's would be tethering temperature tenderness and trans illumination and the peas would be I can't remember I can't remember what the peas are maybe it's just four T's and I'm confusing with something else but you know at the time obviously this was fresh in my mind because that exam was coming up but now it's like three years later and I can't remember these very often um but yeah there's all sorts of different ways that we can we can turn stuff into mnemonics and so especially with medicine where it's just a torrent of stuff to memorize uh one thing that I found really helpful was as like if I if I ever came across a list of things that I had to know I would I would be thinking okay can I like rearrange this list of stuff so that it spells out something interesting or so that it's some sort of mnemonic some sort of acronym I can turn it into and a that just makes studying a bit more fun because it means it's more of a game be like oh what sort of funky way can I remember to to remind myself of the the different types of lumps in the testicle and you can you can make something funny for that or what's the sort of mnemonic that I can use for to you know for the cardiovascular examination so essentially like what I'd recommend is whenever you're studying anything that requires learning a list there's almost always a way to turn that into a mnemonic of some sort but with a caveat that it's too it's very easy to become overly reliant on mnemonics and what you shouldn't do is rely on mnemonics at the expense of understanding uh so there's all sorts of stuff about you know if someone says what are the causes of atrial fibrillation there's basically three things ischemic heart disease rheumatic heart disease uh thyroid toxicosis and alcohol is sort of the force of the fourth one those are the common cause of atrial fibrillation which is one of the conditions you can get in the hot but someone on the internet has made a long as demonic spelling atrial fibrillation and it's pretty ridiculous because I I have no idea what it even is but I just saw what saw it one day and I was like what the hell is this because there's like 15 different causes of atrial fibrillation but it doesn't tell you what the most common ones are which is just a bit well maybe alcohol thyroid toxic dramatic heart disease if those four are the most common then I'll be then I'll eat my hat alcohol thorough toxicosis rheumatic heart disease and ischemic heart disease Atri but if it's any other in any other order I'm gonna I'm gonna be livid about that mnemonic because well what we don't want to do is rely on mnemonics and so if a doctor were to ask us you know hey what are the causes of atrial fibrillation we don't want to be reciting the mnemonic and thinking oh there's this that and the other and get the really rare stuff before the really common stuff we want to be sensible about it and give it in a reasonable order so that's just kind of the only thing to keep in mind when using mnemonics is that we shouldn't become overly reliant on them especially if it comes at the expense of understanding but having gotten this far in the class I'm sure you know by now that understanding is by far the most important thing and only after we've understood the content in depth do we bother trying to memorize it using all these kind of memory hacks but yeah mnemonics are one of my favorite things and one of the things that made studying fun for me so I hope you get some use out of them if you're not using them already all right let's talk about the second memory technique and that is the peg system which usually helps for memorizing numbers now I first came across this in 2012 in the summer before starting University because I stumbled across a book by by a magician called Harry Lorraine which was something about like how to develop a superpower memory and I decided before my first year of University I thought to myself you know what I want to learn these techniques for memorizing stuff because I know I'm going to have to memorize lots of stuff during medical school and so I I spent a few weeks just like committing this sort of system to memory I ended up not really using it in my first year but it ended up coming pretty handy in my second and third year the PEC system it's based on the concept that we like as humans we have a very poor memory for numbers and for words but we have a very good memory for Concepts like we can imagine a chair in our minds but it'll be a lot harder to remember the number running at 55 or 1984 or whatever because we don't have like numbers and words are like abstract things and our brain is not very good at remembering abstract things whereas if you can visualize something then it's a lot better at remembering that so the idea behind the pixel is that you want to convert numbers into words and then you can visualize the words this is Harry Lorraine's kind of Peg system for memory and I think in Darren Brown's book a trick of the mind he's also got another Peg system but this is just one of them so here's how it works so the sound for one will always be a t or a d and you imagine that a t has one downstroke the sound for two will always be an N because if you imagine like an N has two downstrokes three is M because M has three downstrokes with it two one two three um the sound for four will always be R which is the final sign of the word four so four is r five is L which is a Roman numeral for fifty six is ETC so you know that that sort of sound um which is sort of like the letter J turned around sign for seven will be a k the sign for eight will be F of V someone will be P or B it's not for zero will be S or Z four zero so that means if we need the number one we're seeing we're thinking of the sound the number number two number two would be the sound number three Ma and so if we want to turn those into images One becomes Thai because the only sort of consonant sound in Thai is just a ter so we know tie is one nine is B because the only consonant sound in in nine is in B is a b and we know bird is nine but if we're combining numbers together let's say we're doing 54 that's the word lure because we know five is L and four is R so Le lier lior so I would probably convert I would I would be thinking either Leo or liar or a liar as in the type of music musical instrument the point is it's got two consonant sounds the Le and there are so I know that when I think of lure or liar I'm thinking of the number 54. equally you know 76 we know that seven has a k sound based on this thing and the way I remember is that seven sort of looks like a k sort of and if we look at the number 76 we know that six is the soft J or J or sure sound based on what we've memorized with our Peg system so we know that cage will be Kirch which is 76 and so if we imagine an image of a cage we know that that must correspond to the number 76. so this this takes a little bit of effort right so if if you want to use this properly you want to get it to a point where it's completely second nature and I'm quite Rusty in this because I haven't had the need to memorize this sort of stuff uh kind of recently but I do kind of wish I'd stuck with it because I I have this pretty much down like the back of my hand in my second year of med school and the way I would use the system is when I was trying to cram for my second year essay exams and I knew that in our second year to get a decent Mark in your essays you need to include references to different scientific studies and I could I sort of knew what the studies were but I never knew what like uh what the name of the author was or what year it was in so you know copper King blunt 1972 or Hodgkin and Huxley 1942 or whatever so what I did is for for particular essays I sort of built up a story and so I memorized the the year of the of the paper by using the the peg system so let's say you know it was 1976 that's L that's so I would have thought thought of something like lip cage so sort of the image in my head is like you know a really big set of lips inside a cage and it's huge and so if I imagine lips in a cage that's lip kudge which is 1976. and if I was looking at I don't know um Robinson 1976 let's say that was that that was the name of the paper it wasn't but let's say it was I would imagine uh a friend of mine from primary school called Eleanor Robinson and I would sort of imagine her sort of like holding up this big cage that had lips in it so I would know it's Robinson 1976 Robinson lip cage and then I'd be able to associate that with the story of the study and I managed to do this like like the night before the exam when I was like oh crap I don't have enough experimental evidence but thankfully I had this I had this Peg system in my head and so when it came to writing these essays I could recall the peg system in my mind and recall the images I had for these things and I think that had I tried just kind of brute forcing this uh you know it's really hard to remember Robinson 1976 because like like how did you even remember that um but I managed to remember it to the point where I got a first in my essays for that year and I think you know I I would attribute some of that success to this Peg system because it helped me get that final little bit of spice that we needed to add to our essays to make them be first class essays so yeah Peg system it does take a bit of effort to get set up with it but then you can kind of apply it to anything all right so let's continue with our quest to find out about these techniques for helping to memorize stuff again with the caveat that obviously step one is to understand the content first and there is no point trying to memorize stuff without trying to understand it God I really sound like a broken record at this point but oh well anyway in this video we're talking about the Memory Palace technique which loads of like world champions of memory so famously there was this guy called Dominic O'Brien who used the Memory Palace technique to memorize the order of 54 decks of cards and you might have come across the Memory Palace technique before it's something that Sherlock Holmes famously talks about a little bit and the idea is that you try and develop a sort of a mind a mind Palace of like different places so one way of doing this is to like literally imagine a palace in your mind where every room in that Palace is a different room that you're very familiar with so if I was making one then one room in my Palace would be this living room one room would be my bedroom one room would be the bathroom one room would be my bedroom at home one would be the dining room at home one would be the kitchen of this house one would be the kitchen at home one might be the doctor's office at my job you know so I've got these eight different rooms and so I know that in my head I can imagine I don't know a cage with lips inside it on the wall of this you know Above This Monitor and that would be the first thing in the living room and I can say that the living room then corresponds to physiology and the kitchen corresponds to Anatomy or whatever and the idea is that we build up this Memory Palace no I haven't like I'll be honest I haven't really used this to use this extensively but we're just including this in this class because I used it for a little bit I think in my second year of Med yeah in my second year of med school I used a technique to visualize myself along that path to Asda and I use that to help myself memorize differ I think I think it was different types of viruses but I really can't remember at this point but I haven't really felt the need to use it since which I sort of regret because everyone who uses it talks about how amazingly powerful a technique it is and Harry Lorraine in his book about memory talks about it I think Darren Brown talks about it in trick of the mind as well and there's all sorts of articles on the internet about how you can actually use the Memory Palace the Mind Palace technique sort of Sherlock Holmes sort of style to memorize like vast chunks of information I think it's worth trying out I'll try it in second year I thought it worked quite well but I don't know I just didn't really give it the time that it deserves but who knows maybe one day when I've got a bit more time on my hands I'll actually try and adapt the Mind Palace technique and then use it properly but yeah just gonna book end that there just to say that that is one possibility of something that you can do all right so we've talked a lot about the different ways that we can remember stuff now I made a video I think last year called how I ranked first at Cambridge University the essay memorization framework and that video is on like two and a bit million views at this point it's one of my most popular videos of all time and that's a video that so many people have watched and have emailed me and have replied in the comments saying that that technique has really changed the game for them so I'm going to include that here just for completeness but if you have seen that video on YouTube then obviously there's no point in watching this but hopefully like you'll see that this sort of this essay memorization framework is what I used when I was in my third year to you know get the price for number one in the exams and it combines all of the principles of effective studying it combines active recall space repetition interleaving categorizing mind maps all sorts of stuff and this was like this was the year that I picked in performance and after that year I was like okay cool I can I can take my foot off the accelerator now um but yeah let's include that video now and I hope you enjoy it if you haven't seen it already so there are basically two stages to this method the first stage is the creation stage and the second stage is the memorization stage so in the creation stage the objective is to create First Class essay plans for every conceivable essay title that they could throw at us in the exam and in the memorization stage we're going to be committing all of these essay plans to memory by systematically using active recall space repetition spider diagrams and flashcards the idea is that by the time the exam rolls around you'll have memorized so many essay plans that a lot of them will just come up in the exam anyway because you've predicted the titles and you'll just be able to regurgitate stuff from your brain onto the paper but even if stuff comes up that you haven't memorized you'll know so much about the subject and you'll have so many content blocks in your head that you'll be able to generate a First Class essay from scratch so that was a general overview let's now talk about the two components the creation stage and the memorization stage in turn so the broad objective of the creation stage is to create a large number of really really good essay plans that you can then memorize in the memorization stage and regurgitate onto paper during your exam now it's probably beyond the scope of this video for me to teach you how to write a good essay and probably also be on the scope of my own expertise but I will share some tips on three main questions and that's firstly how you decide what essay titles to pick secondly how you plan the essay and thirdly how you make sure your essay plan is really really good so let's deal with those in turn so firstly how do we decide what essays we're going to prepare the objective here is to scope the subject and find essay titles that cover the entire breadth of the syllabus now the easiest way to do this is to look at past papers and look at whatever past papers you have available and see what essays have come up in the past and you start off with those and then once you've planned out those essays you'll know enough about that subject in particular that you'll be able to put yourself in the shoes of examiners and start thinking okay what's a good essay title that I've not yet asked about if you haven't got past papers available then I'm very sorry to hear that you're just going to have to put yourself into the examiner's shoes from the get-go or you can actually you go to your teacher or your professor your lecturer whatever and say hey what's the sort of essays that might come up in the exam what are some things that are things I should be thinking about so having made a list of what essays we're going to plan we then need to actually plan those essays and this is the fun part this is the part that actually requires doing some doing some cognitive labor so the way I would do this is that I'd give myself one day per essay plan so in in the first term of uni I was a slacker I only made like five essay plans in the second term I made about 10 and then in the Easter holidays I really ramped it up and made about 35 different ones and the way I do it is that I'd start off with a question so for example do animals have a theory of mind and then I would use Google to get as much information as I can about that particular question I would ignore the lecture notes initially and I would ignore the recommended reading I'd start off with Google because Google was it was like a really good way to find the answer to any question that you want and often I'd be linked to review articles and review papers and I'd be reading through those review papers oftentimes the review paper would directly answer the question in which case I've pretty much got my essay I just need to turn it into my own words um but a lot of the time I'd be following references from the re from the review paper and then once I'd created my essay plan I would then look at the lecture notes and the recommended reading and this meant that a lot of my material was hopefully more original than everyone else's because most other students would have built their essays based around the lecture notes whereas I was building my essays on a random Google search so I would start off by creating a research document on that particular topic and pretty much copy and paste every relevant bit of every paper I could find so this is my 10 page document about theory of mind I've copied and pasted various bits and rephrased various bits um and you know very random I don't even know any of this anymore uh this is and you know included Links at the bottom to where I got the information from so if I need to return to it I'll be able to find it again and then once I've got my research document I spend the next few hours planning out the essay and actually writing it out properly so here is my plan is theory of Mind a useful concept for understanding social cognition in animals and yeah I've got an intro I've got a preamble I've got subheadings I've got evidence and I've basically taken all of this from these various different resources from books from the review papers from the lecture nodes from Google and I've Consolidated them into this one essay that I'm ultimately going to memorize and as you can see over here I've pretty much done this for everything within my subject so this is section B comparative cognition which is all about the thinking of animals can animals plan for the future causality cognitive Maps the convergent evolution theory of intelligence do animals have a theory of mind is a theorem unusual concept and you can see here I've written Anki beside them which is a foreshadowing as to what's going to come later in this video so now we've done a research document we've planned this essay we've pretty much written it out based on our research document and we only given ourselves one day to do this because of Parkinson's law that work expands to fill the time we allocate to it but how do we make that essay plan actually good um a lot of things go into good essay plan but in my opinion there are three things that count number one structure number two actually answering the question and number three having a bit of flair a bit of a little spice that you're sprinkling in your essay plan and I think the introduction is the most important part of the essay because in the introduction you can signal to the examiner that you're doing all three of these things and when the examiner's marking your paper they're probably really bored they've read hundreds of these scripts already you want to hit them with like a really legit introduction so here's an example of an introduction from one of my essays about whether judgment and decision making is cognitive or illogical or affective I.E emotional so I've written that the historical View and the social sciences has always been that judgments are based solely on content information with individuals being assumed to form judgments by systematically evaluating all available content information in an unbiased manner oh my God however over the past three decades a considerable amount of research has challenged this assumption by showing that judgments may be formed not only on the basis of content information cognitive judgment but also on the basis of feelings affective judgment it is now well accepted that judgment can be both effective and cognitive and here's where the good stuff comes whether it is one or the other depends on a multitude of factors number one the salience of the effective feelings number two the representativeness of the effective feelings for the target number three the relevance of the feelings to the Judgment number four the evaluative malleability of the judgment and number five the level of processing intensity and here is the ultimate Clincher for this I will discuss these in turn and ultimately argue that that generally speaking in day-to-day life the circumstances are generally those that result in affective rather than cognitive judgments and decision making so if we can disentangle all the verbosity from that paragraph what I've done is I've laid out the five main bits of the essay in terms of structure and I've used numbered points for that rather than just a list because numbered makes it really really obvious to The Examiner that I've got a good structure I've also said exactly what the answer to the question is the question is asking whether our judgments are cognitive or illogical or effective emotional and instead of wishing washing around it I have said in this essay I will argue that they are emotional rather than cognitive in most elements of day-to-day life so I'm telling the examiner look I'm answering the question this is what you're going to get from me and finally I've added a little bit of flair hopefully with this stuff about the historical context I probably got that from a textbook from a review paper somewhere and I've probably phrased into my own notes and obviously this is just my plan so in the exam I won't quite be using it word for word so it's absolutely not plagiarism it's using you know useful resources to create a bit of flair by adding a bit of historical context so hopefully this introduction covers all three points structure answering the question and a bit of flair now I'm going to leave it at that for this section of the video obviously you know there are entire university courses and entire books and and stuff devoted to the art of writing a good essay I don't personally think I'm very good at writing an essay but I think I'm pretty good at using Google effectively and copying and pasting stuff into a research Word document and then turning it into fairly legit sounding pros and then I think I'm pretty good at systematically memorizing all that information so um if you want to know more about how to write an essay how I write an essay then let me know in the comments and I'll maybe try and do a video on it if I can kind of break down the process a bit further but now let's talk about stage two of the process the memorization stage okay so by this point we've got a load of really good essay plans that we have created in Word documents now the objective in the memorization stage is to upload all of those essay plans to our brain so that we can then regurgitate them in the exam and we're going to do this using three main techniques number one Anki flashcards number two spider diagrams and number three a retrospective revision timetable so again let's talk about these in turn so firstly Anki and I've basically used Anki flashcards to memorize every paragraph in every essay plan and this might seem a bit Overkill but it worked for me um so what I've done is as you can see I've got keywords on the front of the card like Bower 1984 or damage atal 2006 or lsatel 1997 or ah short-term versus long-term memory introduction I've even put the introduction into an Anki flashcard and then over time I'll memorize these because pretty much anything that goes into my Anki flashcards because during the exam term I'm going through my flashcards every single day and I'm doing and key space repetition algorithm I just know that anything that that's in my Anki is just is going to get uploaded to my brain with a small amount of effort put in by me to actually actually memorize this stuff so yeah I've got I've got the keywords and I've got the content so basically if I've put you know a paper Russell and fair 1987 I'm describing in the Anki flashcard what that paper shows which means that overall I've Crea I create these blocks of content that every Anki flashcard is his own little block and that block can slot into my essay that I've planned but also if a weird essay comes up that I haven't explicitly planned I still have all these blocks of knowledge in my head and that means if there is a paper that's relevant I'll know what it is I'll know what the reference says I'll know what the content is I'll know how to know how to describe the experiment and I'll just be able to put it into even new essays that I'm writing on the spot in the exam so that's all well and good but obviously knowing uh taversky and Kahneman experiment from 1974 or musweiler and Strack from 2000 those things aren't that helpful unless you can also associate them with their own essays and that's where the spider diagrams come in alright so the second prom of the memorization stage of the essay memorization framework involves spider diagrams and this is the book that I made almost quite a diagrams in so having memorized a ton of content blocks from my essays using Anki flashcards what I've now done is from the 20th of April onwards I made spider diagrams one page diagrams of every single essay so here's the first one about implicit versus explicit memory we've done you know various topics within memory cognitive maps of metacognition and the idea is that we've pretty much got the whole structure of the essay along with the keywords in the spider diagram so this is the essay about shorter memory versus long-term memory it starts off with an introduction then something about single system memory then something about the two components and if we zoom in over here we see I've written G plus C 1966 and that actually refers to the flashcard over here where I talk about ah glanzer and Kunitz 1966 and in my flashcard I've got the content blog where I'm describing the experiment and actually this is just like a whole paragraph another GNC experiment this G 1972 is a glance in 1972 to Craig 1970 b h is badly and someone else I think I've oh badly in hitch yeah 1977. so I have all these content blocks in Anki and I've just put the keywords onto the spider diagram so that when I'm creating the spider diagram and I write G plus C 1966 I know exactly what that refers to obviously I've never forgotten four years later but I used to know exactly what that referred to back in the day and I've done this for every single one of the 40 50 essays that I've memorized and the way this would work is that every day I would just draw out various spider diagrams from memory so on the 20th of April as we can see over here I did implicit explicit recollection familiarity semantic episodic short-term long-term memory then on the 21st I did Future planning I did theory of mind I did theory of Mind useful usefulness metacognition cognitive Maps uh gosh personality genes black and white differences in IQ and intelligence controversial subject um the Flynn effect explanation multiple intelligence wow I was clearly very productive on the 21st of April 2015. but the point is that every single day I'd be drawing out these spider diagrams from memory and if there were any bits that I didn't know or that was shaky on I would look up on my master spider diagram or in my master essay plan or in Anki and I'd actively work on those so over time this ended up being like a really effective way to systematically use active recall to ensure that I knew absolutely everything and like in the time before the exam I was just bashing through these so you know 8th of May we've done this one we've done this one we've done that one another one another one another one another one I think this is all on the eighth of May another one wow yeah this was like about a week before our exams and on the 8th of May I've just absolutely bashed through and planned about you know I've just like drawn out my plans for about 15 different essays so we've got our content blocks in Anki we've memorized them using Anki we've got our kind of essay structures using spider diagrams we've memorized them using active recall the final piece of the puzzle involves systematic spaced repetition so how did I decide what I was going to do each day if you've seen any of my revision videos you might have come across the idea of the retrospective revision timetable and that was what I used I've made a whole video on this I'm not going to talk about it in depth basically it actually I'm just going to show you over here uh where are we ah here we go this was my retrospective revision timetable so it split up into section a section B and section c so let's see implicit versus memory ah here we go this actually works so on the 20th of April I studied implicit versus explicit memory so I've marked down the date as the 20th of April and then I've marked down all the various things I did on the 20th of April and then I think on the 21st I did some of B and C yep so you can see on the 21st of April when I actively called these essay plans over here wherever they are I've marked them in the retrospective sheet and then the idea is that the next time I do them I am marking the date for that and then I'm color coding it in red yellow green whatever depending on how well I knew it at the time so I've been doing I've done this for all the essays that I've memorized and I've done it for all of my subjects within psychology so there's much more detail in the video specifically about the retrospective revision timetable where I explain exactly how it works how I'd recommend using it and why I think it's better than a standard prospective version timetable but yeah that is the third prong of the memorization stage of the essay memorization framework so that was an overview of the essay memorization framework that I used to systematically memorize about 45 to 50 different essay plans using a mixture of active recall space repetitions flashcards and spider diagrams so that was the essay memorization framework I hope you found that useful if you haven't seen the video already if you had seen the video already then I'm not sure why you're watching this bit of the video but yeah that worked really well for me and you know that book of essay plans that I showed in the video is still it's still on my bookshelf to this day behind like over there somewhere and it's still my pride and joy because I sometimes flick through that and think wow the amount of work I put into these third year exams this is some good stuff all right so we've got another video that again I've released on YouTube under the title of something like how my friend ranked first in medical school because a friend of mine um basically I gave a talk in in my third year when he was in his first year of med school about active recall and space repetition and so he took that idea and ran with that idea to its extreme and basically just wrote questions for himself so if you haven't seen that video yet I will include it in here just for completeness sake but if you have seen the video obviously there's no need to watch this video in the class um yeah again this this technique also combines active recall it combines lack of taking notes it combines a little bit of highlighting because he color coded stuff in different ways so hopefully you'll see how it applies the techniques that we've already talked about in this class and maybe that'll work for you and actually this is the technique that I use to this day because I avoid trying to take too many notes what I do instead is I write questions and sometimes I won't even write the answers to those questions I'll just write the questions themselves because I know that I can always look at the answer if I need to and it's just a bit more efficient that way so yeah active recall framework coming up and I will see you at the end okay so the method is as follows basically instead of ever writing any notes instead of ever trying to summarize content from lectures or textbooks what my friend say did is that all he did was just write a ton of questions for himself and then when he was revising he would just go over those questions over and over again and after a handful maybe like three or four repetitions of these questions he pretty much knew everything and every subject inside out so how does this work um let's hop into the laptop as they say and I'll show you these these were the documents that he made for each of the subjects so we've got hom which is physiology we've got Mims which is biochemistry and we've got Anatomy which is uh Anatomy so let's start with home which is physiology so essentially he's gone he's gone through the lecture notes and through a textbook alongside and he's basically converted everything into questions so the first lecture was about cell membranes and stuff so his question is what are some roles of the cell membrane then it was about Control Systems when is ballistic control good and what what's an example let's scroll down a bit to um what's another topic so we've got muscles as another topic what is the size of a motor unit determine what is the kinetic State diagram for this why is there a constant isometric Force below 2.2 to 2.0 microns um basically a ton of questions so 60 questions for muscles for Cardiology we've got how many questions is this wow this is a lot of questions my God this is how you rank first in medical school whoa 216 questions for Cardiology he was a bit of a Cardiology nerd so he kind of fleshed out the lecture notes with some information from textbooks but again never made any notes from the textbooks all he did was just write questions for himself um more stuff respiratory questions from the lecture notes uh 100 plus 158 quick questions about the kidneys and as you can see he's basically got an entire like 37-page Google doc slash word doc literally just filled with questions he hasn't wasted any time in making notes and in summarizing all he's done is just write questions for himself and the idea is that he's done this for every subject and then when he's sitting down to study he decides in advance or like on the day what subject he wants to study that day so let's say he's doing I don't know anatomy and he wants to revise the Upper Limb then what he's going to do he's going to open up his Upper Limb document and all he's going to do is he's going to go through the questions one by one and ask himself if he can feasibly answer those questions in his head he doesn't really write anything down he just sort of tries to answer them out louder in his head so let's move on to why this method looks and this whole method is based around the principle of active recall I have been preaching about active recall for the literally the last two years and actually even longer than that since before I got this YouTube channel just like in talks and lectures and stuff that I would give and be like active recall is literally the best thing ever uh it's the best thing ever because active recall is the single most efficient study technique that's ever been discovered there is a mountain of evidence supporting it I've got a 25 minute long video that I'll link in the video description and then a card up there somewhere where I go through the evidence in much more detail but essentially what active recall means is is testing yourself and the reason testing ourselves is so amazingly valuable is because the way the brain works it's all based around how many times and how how much you retrieve information from your brain so we all have this misconception that in order to study we have to put stuff into our brains but actually it's it's flipped on its head if you look at the evidence the the actual way to remember anything and to make anything stick is by retrieving information from our brains rather than trying to put it back in so let's say we read something once and we've understood a topic at that point the most effective thing we can do with our time is ask ourselves questions about that topic yeah that's basically how the method works I'll stop droning on about this now let's now talk about the method in a bit more detail and I'll show you how you can use various different apps to achieve this same effect all right so let's talk about this method in a bit more detail and one of the common questions about this method is you know what do you do if you don't know the answer to one of the questions that you've written so at the start we've gone through our lectures and we've just converted everything into just questions we've gone through our textbook and we've just written questions for ourselves but then when we're going through the questions obviously there's going to be stuff that we don't remember the answer to so for example if I read what is the capacitance of biomembranes you know I might not remember that from the lecture notes but the key thing of the Sage's method is that he never writes down the answer to these questions he trusts that he'll be able to find the information in the lecture notes or in the textbook or on Google and therefore he doesn't have to waste the time to actually write down the answer for all of these and that's obviously a benefit because it means we save time and it's a bit more efficient but obviously the drawback is that then when we're going through stuff it does take a little bit of time to then find that information in the right place but this isn't necessarily a bad thing it's not necessarily a bad thing that in order to get information we have to go back to election notes because at least for us in Cambridge the lecture notes are usually quite well structured and quite well organized and so the act of finding information in election notes means that we'll be like we'll we'll be able to see what section the information's in be like okay that's the capacitance of biomembranes and we'll see where it fits into the bigger picture equally if we're having to go into a textbook textbooks are usually very well written because you know they've been around for years and they're written by clever people and stuff um and so if we're finding information in a textbook again we're going to be getting that info information in context in the context of the rest of the subject and then maybe instead of just reading about the capacitance of biomembranes we'll read a little bit more about biomebranes and kind of just understand the subject a little bit better and so what state is doing is like number one the first pass through the lecture he's just converting into questions and then the second time he comes around to revise the subject he's going to go through the questions ask himself one by one and then what he does is that he's color coding um in red for example over here the questions that he didn't know the answer to so that the next time around if he's short on time he won't go through every single question he'll just go through the questions that he's marked read and then let's say the third time around if there are questions that he didn't get in the second time he'll mark them as blue and then the third time around he'll just go over the blue questions so this becomes a very efficient way of only doing the questions that we know we got wrong previously and obviously before the exam and at some point we want to be going through every single question because one of the other Concepts in effective studying is called spaced repetition and again I'll link my video about that down here and then a card up there and you can check it out more but basically the idea is that crumming isn't effective it obviously works in the short term we've all done cramming for exams but actually if we want information to stick over a very long term period we want to be repeating that information at spaced intervals to overcome What's called the forgetting effect or the forgetting curve that was discovered by a guy called ebbing house in like the 1800s I think but yeah more information in my space repetition video basically it's all about active recall and space repetition and this method really works in that sense and we can see here he's even color coded some of them in purple and I suspect those are the questions that he was a little bit struggling with on his fourth pass of doing these doing these questions this isn't the sort of method that you can just kind of do once and then forget about and then be like oh well I haven't done any work for a year therefore I'm going to cram this in two days before the exam you probably could uh but it would be cramming it wouldn't be long-term knowledge that would stick whereas doing this and applying space repetition to it would really be magical and I'll just show you how I would apply this method personally so um I've you know active recall is the best thing ever so I've been using variants of this method for a few years is now I just haven't used them as well as I say it has because I feel you know I get lazy and I'm not great but he is really good at kind of actually doing the work anyway the other day I Was preparing for a supervision where I'm I'm teaching physiology and so I was going through the uh hot and circulation lecture notes and I was basically doing a sage method of going through them and writing out questions for myself so again here I'm using the app notion link below I've got a link to a few of my videos on that if you if you care but I think notion is really good because they've got this toggle feature which means what I can do is I can for example if I go into fetal circulation what I've done is I've written questions for myself what why does the fetal circulation need to be special what does the oxygen dissociation curve look like various adaptations fetal shunts I've written these questions for myself but if I were a Sade I would just write the questions and not the answer but because like at the moment I'm not really in the market for just memorizing information I've written the answer down to some of these as well again through a toggle box so actually I haven't written down the answer to that because this is kind of weird but like what I do is that for for questions that I know I know the answer to or that I know I can figure out the answer to or I know I can find the answer easy in the lecture notes or then I wouldn't bother writing it down so why does the fetal circulation need to be special clearly that's because we need to overcome the problem that when you're a fetus I.E inside your mum uh you don't have any lungs that work therefore you need to get your oxygen from the mother's placental blood flow and all that stuff therefore you need to be adapted and your hemoglobin needs to be adapted and your circulation needs to be adapted to try and get oxygen out of the mother's blood and I know this so I've written the question for myself but I don't need to waste the time writing the answer because I know I know and if I ever get to the point where I read that question and think oh I don't know what the answer is then I will go back to the lecture notes but I'm just trying to be efficient in minimizing the amount of information I'm having to put into my notes because as we've said and as all the evidence shows summarizing information taking notes with the book open is just not a very effective way of studying anyway this one what is the oxygen dissociation curve for hemoglobin look like comparing maternal versus fetal I know what it looks like in my head and so when I see that question I'll be drawing it out in my head maybe I'll draw on paper if I feel like it but crucially I have actually included the oxygen dissociation curve in this togglebox and this is very easy to do um so here is a screencast of myself making these notes because I've screen recorded myself just in case I was going to make one of these videos and you can see that on the left hand side I've got the lecture notes open and on the right hand side I'm creating this document in notion and what I'm doing is that for a lot of the stuff I'm just screen grabbing bits from the lecture notes I'm not copying and pasting I'm rarely writing it out myself I'm just kind of using the screenshot screen grab shortcut on the Mac to select a particular area of the screen shoving it into notion and then that makes it easier for me to find this graph when I need to see it so yeah I can immediately look and look at this graph now and think okay that's what I thought this dissociation curve for hemoglobin look like and then I can untoggle this and move on what are the various adaptations of the fetal circulation so number one two and three so these are stuff that I wrote down because in the lecture notes this was in a few different sections and so I just thought you know what I'm gonna take 10 seconds just type out what these answers are but for example if I looked at fetal Hemi hemoglobin relinquishes that oxygen at lower oxygen tensions if that sentence didn't make sense to me I wouldn't just take it at face value I would obviously go back to the lecture notes or go back to my textbook and figure out what I'm struggling with why this sentence doesn't make sense to me and work out what like to try and understand what's going on and this all comes back to like it's all very well at doing active recall it's all very well doing space repetition and doing all of this stuff but really the thing that trumps all of these things is to understand the content there is literally no point in just memorizing facts if we don't understand the broad principles that underlie them and so as I'm going through these questions as any of my friends who do effective studying as we're going through our questions we're trying to understand the topic and if we ever get to a point where we're like oh I'm not quite sure what that means we will take the time to look it up because especially with effective learning like this is again there's this misconception that learning should be easy that you know the best way to learn is by finding a really condensed set of notes and just reading it and getting that information into our heads but again it's sort of the other way around it's the more effortful the more hard it feels to be learning something the more we're actually going to be learning it and there's again so much evidence where people have have done studies on students where they rate how hard they found the subject and how hard it was to learn about it and you find that those students perform better on the exam and learn more consistently and and have that knowledge for a longer period of time because as we're grappling with stuff as we're putting effort into learning our brain is forming these connections and the way I think of it is sort of like going to the gym and it's like you know if I can bench press 80 kilograms I can't I wish I can probably bench press about 70 kilograms but you know when I bench 70 kilograms that is effortful that is when my muscles are going to grow whereas when I bench 20 kilograms then you know basically nothing's going to happen because it's easy so it's kind of the same with studying like when it's difficult we your actively forming Connections in our brain and then we sleep and then those color connections get solidified when it feels easy when we're just like oh yeah reading like reading and highlighting and making notes is really easy that's why we love doing it because it feels really productive we kind of go through pretty colors and we write down stuff but we're not actually using our brains and the more we use our brains the more effort for learning is the more its information is going to stick anyway um next one what are fetal shunts and what do they do again I kind of wrote some brief notes here you know foramen of Valley ra to LA because fetal lungs don't work and this information like makes makes perfect sense to me but for example if you were a first-year medical student studying this for the first time and looking at my notes you'd see R A to the LA because fetal lungs don't work like what the hell does that mean you know it's it's a sort of information that requires more context and note taking again I'm going to make a video about this it's sort of a balance of compression versus context textbooks and lecture notes have a lot of context they're very long very broad but they but they give you the context they help you understand the topic whereas when we take notes we have compressed all that information down and so when I see rated LA because Visa lungs don't work I know immediately exactly what that means I could explain it to a five-year-old if I wanted to but if a first-year medic who had never done the subject before were to see that they wouldn't understand it and so that would be a case of going into into the textbook and actually understanding what's going on coming back to this idea of understanding um and then I've just kind of done this for all of the stuff within within Cardiology so far so cardiac cycle I've written about the phases intrinsic regulation what were Frank and starling's famous experiments so at this point I'd read the question I think huh okay something about a dog dog heart preparation and then uh yeah experiment one increased preload experiment two there is something there should be something there um but yeah I've just literally screen grabbed stuff from the lecture notes and a diagram just to save me a little bit of time um but I think if I were actually studying the subject if I were actually taking exams I probably wouldn't even write down the answer I'd force myself to go into the lecture notes or go into the textbook and find the answer so long story short basically this is a Sage's magical method for active recall and the reason he actually came about this method was that in 2015 I gave a talk at the University about how to study for exams because in 2015 I was studying psychology for my third year and I'd been actively looking into all of this evidence-based study tips and all that stuff um and initially I was I was supposed to be giving a talk at the Islamic Society prayer room for like five people because no one turns up um but we made a Facebook event of it and suddenly like people started sharing it amongst other members of the university and then I think at the end of it like 20 000 people had viewed that event according to the analytics instead of like seven and like a hundred and something people turned up to the event and so we had to kind of like expand the venue and kind of do in one of the colleges but in this talk I basically talked about the magic of active recall the magical space repetition uh and when my friend has said heard that he was like all right we're done and from that point onwards like for the next two months all he did was create these questions for himself and the cool thing is that he didn't do that much like that much anal work for the rest of the year that sounds weird um he kind of kept up with his essays and he kind of understood the subject and and read a few textbooks and the lecture notes just to keep on top of things but it was only two months before the exam in the Easter term that he discovered this this magic of active recall and spent the rest of the two months making these questions and answering them and so if he were to have started that method from day one I suspect you know and wanted to put in the effort over a very long term period of time for the whole year I suspect that would have been even more efficient and he would have even spent even less time studying anyway yeah this has been a very long very rambly video basically explaining this concept of you know if you want to do really well in your exams it's really all about testing yourself and this is sort of testing yourself this is the concept of active recall taken to its logical extreme where you're not spending any time at all writing notes because that's a waste of time you're spending 100 of your time writing questions for yourself and then answering those questions dredging up the information from our brains and then sort of solidifying those connections all right so that was the active recall framework thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next video how to use flashcards properly and the appropriate settings for Anki and kind of how we think about building almost like building a second brain using Anki as your flashcard app the advice in here can apply to any sort of flashcard app but to be honest Anki is the most famous one it's the best one it's open source it's free except on iOS we have to pay 20 quid for it it's totally worth it so yeah this is the discussion between me and I said about how to use Anki properly I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you at the end and here's your Bible Anki Anki is essentially so the the Anki decks the material on the backs of of the cards yeah that I learned in in a somewhat religious way okay whereas kind of these offhand notes which I make really kind of have no real importance to me okay unless I I unless I put it into Anki and make an active decision to learn it I may as well never have written it down so you treat Anki as an extension of your brain absolutely if something is an Anki it will be uploaded to your brain at some point yes absolutely and so are all of your notes from medical school in Anki do you use pre-made decks how how do you how to use that so um in clinical yeah as I said in pre-clinical my my way of studying was orientated towards learning information incredibly quickly for the exams in clinical because I actually want to remember this yeah just just the exams I use Anki because it facilitates long-term retention okay and as I mentioned ankisa is an extension of my brain now the thing with clinical medicine is that it's it's a somewhat Universal discipline and it's it's not that sort of Cambridge is what we're told that Cambridge is going to be radically different to anywhere else yeah whereas the specific undergrad curriculum that we have in Cambridge is quite specific um and what that means is that you can use Dex that other people have made and so for example the us only step one there are amazing decks out there um there are decks on there's a deck on pathoma for pathology which I found really useful yeah uh my my housemates he made a deck based on past Med which I found incredibly useful in the run-up to sort of the exams for learning the clinically oriented material that wasn't in the USMLE yeah other other than that there are some decks which I have made myself okay so which have been specific to particular exams so for ethics so actually for for ethics and law I didn't make a deck the one of my friends sat now he made a deck and really kindly shared it with me and that was pretty much all I used for the exam but separately for the SBA exam I made another deck uh which was based on Oxford assassin progress yeah now I never actually had time to go through that deck before the exam but the information in that deck is something which I do intend to learn for my clinical practice okay so if it goes in Anki it you have decreed it legit information enough to be uploaded absolutely oh interesting because it seems like in the US like the it seems like the majority med school U.S Emily strategy is based around Anki yeah it just makes sense because it's the the perfect thing geared up to this stuff and like your Microsoft Word document active recall framework my Google Sheets space repetition method and all this stuff these are all hacks for when you have to cram for an exam exactly that's like two months away or if not less less time away whereas Anki it's like yeah there are ways of using Anki yeah um kind of not really how it was intended but but to achieve that same objective the cranning where you where you essentially cram information on Anki um I found that if you do a deck twice yeah um if you do if you get cards right twice that's often enough for an exam that you have which is just around the corner and the reason I say that is the first time when you're learning the information it's not synthesized with the rest of the information so you'll learn individual facts but they won't come together in your mind it's the second time you go through the information that you'll Link cards to other cards like in your mind conceptually so you think it's okay the first time around because one of the issues that I have with Anki personally and that I know a lot of people struggle with is that you it becomes very easy to lose the forest from the trees how do you kind of deal with that or do you just sort of accept that yeah the first time around I'm just going to know these in isolation and I'll build up the model over time well no um as I said I can't bring myself to learn a card unless I kind of understand what's going on so I would never just really memorize a card um except in very rare sort of exceptional situations that would you just be some kind of logic for why why the structure is added as it is or the answer is what it is um having said that even if you can understand a card in isolation it doesn't mean that necessarily you can synthesize all the cars in a coherent framework in your mind at that point that's where the second run through facilitates I I mean and and honestly even the third run through it's like I mean it's like watching a sort of a complex film many times you know so each time you watch it you you realize more you understand a bit more have you seen the Dunkirk I've seen it once I've seen it once and the first time I did not realize the three storylines were happening I I just did not realize it right and I I treated them as like as if it was as if it were just one continuous thing I was like okay this is the right film but I know that if I were to watch it a second time with that knowledge suddenly a lot more things would make sense absolutely as in having kind of that kind of sort of foundation laid where you kind of have the ability to recall other cards even if you can't do it in a very crisp way yeah um means you can start linking information together and synthesizing the cards together into a more coherent picture in your mind um and that's why actually in some ways Anki allows you to memorize in order to understand um yeah I've always felt a bit uneasy with that that sort of concept the way that I would like to be able to approach things is to sort of start off with a broad brush stroke these are the 30 topics within Cardiology and here's how they relate to one another yeah yeah yeah and now I'll use Anki to Blitz memorize the same points about each of them I would say understanding is an iterative process and understanding is prior to memorization yeah for me at least yeah so I'll understand each card and then memorize it yeah but when I do when I do the cards in the second time let's there might be a kind of a bit of a tension between one card that I'm currently doing and another card which I have in my memory there might be a bit of a conflict in the information there and in order to try and resolve that in order to harmonize the two that that process will increase my level of understanding and Anki facilitates that because it lets you essentially memorize everything and and you you shouldn't expect to have that really kind of high level synthetic level of understanding at that stage because you haven't kind of filled in the hot you haven't really battle tested your understanding by by instead of testing that everything is coherent and by kind of bringing up these pieces of information Anki is really testing you is your knowledge coherent is your understanding coherent so the image that sort of comes to mind is sort of like a kind of 64-bit pixel drawing of something whereby kind of the Anki cut like each anchor card is an individual pixel and over time as you learn more and more more and more pixels you start to see the bigger picture and then only when you really step back absolutely once you've once you've got all the pixels in places you say oh I now see the bigger picture except you're also sort of forgetting pixels you kind of learned you know the forgetting code space repetition all that stuff um a lot of people say that there's a lot of value in making your own flashcards um I wonder what you what do you think about that because I wouldn't I probably don't agree with that advice I mean I don't have any evidence either for or against the advantage of making your own flashcards is that you will most likely understand them unless you've copied and pasted them usually when I use decks made by other people I have to spend a little while on each card on understanding making sure that I actually understand the card yeah um I would still say that the net time taken is significantly less than where I to actually try and make the deck myself but it's definitely easier to learn a deck the first time that I've already made than say a deck that I've got from someone else so if you were to go through medical school again kind of from day one yeah and kill all the way basically um there was a dude who came he came second in my ear and like literally ordered the subjects who was Anki from day one and that was his Bible yeah well as I said I mean I didn't I didn't particularly like using Anki back in first or second year just because it took a lot more time than just blacking out questions where the answers were in the notes and because it forces you to review things the rate at which you can progress and learn new information is substantially lower because you've got these like I've got 80 cards to review before I get a new material absolutely and and I think to a certain degree in the first the first two years the knowledge that you're learning isn't necessarily something that you want to keep forever yeah yeah and a lot of it you will forget whereas Clinton clinical medicine to a much larger degree this is something ideally you want to remember for the rest of your career so I mean I mean I think Anki is a very versatile tool and you can use it in multiple ways you can use it in you can essentially do this question method on Anki you can just kind of write the questions on the front of the front of the card and and just and just learn it like that I mean it's it's essentially exactly the same thing um or you can do a more comprehensive way where you're at where you write out all the answers and then I actually do the reviews and I think again it depends what you want out of it whether you want to kind of cram to like learn some information that you probably for the exam which you won't really need in the future whether or whether this is something which ideally you want to know for life and so I've read quite a few uh bits on the internet about how to use Anki properly and some people say that well each flash card should only have one fact on it or you shouldn't be tested on one factor per flash card and yet for me when I was in my third year I was sort of using Anki to memorize entire paragraphs or essays and things which is probably not the intended use for Anki and certainly doesn't you know go into this one flat one fact per flash per flash card how do you approach this like how big yeah for me it's not one fact but flash card but it's one concept for flash card okay and a concept can be like deep right and it can have multiple things in it for example one treatment protocol um I would consider as one concept I think there's a risk where if you only learn one fact at a time it's very difficult to actually re-synthesize the information on the spot yeah um and you'll have a lot of disconnected information at the time in your mind which is it's hard to really recruit and recall so so for example if you would atrial fibrillation be a single flash card for instance for instance atrial fibrillation maybe in a particular context okay uh such as how you would manage paroxysmal atrial fibrillation might be a particular flash card with the first second line yeah you wouldn't have separate flashcards for first line for process okay because you're you're kind of um fragmenting the concept that there should be some kind of Reason in your mind why something is prioritized over another and if you kind of split them up between cars I think you lose that kind of yeah uh bigger picture understanding yeah so I think like what we're saying then is that overall Anki is a great tool for a set of first actually hacking hacking on memory because of the active recall on the space reposition which as we both know are the most efficient study techniques and yet there is this tension there that actually overall throughout like you want to build up this mental model of the subject you want this thread of understanding to run through everything yeah yeah and there is a danger that if you just kind of wrote memorize with flashcards which you can do quite easily with Anki that you will miss miss the forest absolutely and so it's about I suppose it's about keeping that in our in the back of our minds and thinking and being aware when we are in memorization mode and being like okay I'm just I'm just memorizing stuff but really if someone asks me you know what you know to explain liver cirrhosis I'm probably going to be able to because all I have is these isolated like well I can tell you what Gene you know contribution deficiencies but I really don't know what the resources you know yeah exactly exactly awesome um do you have any other tips for Anki what Anki style flashcards while we're on that topic just because I know you're yeah I would say it is probably worth playing around with some of the settings on Anki um there's a particular website which I can't recall at this point yeah I know what you mean I'll put the link in the video description of wherever people are watching this yeah but I think what's probably most useful at least from my perspective is changing the actual intervals yeah with which you um test yourself and I think the standard Anki intervals are 1 and 15. so I if you get it right it'll ask you again 15 minutes later if you get it wrong I'll ask you one minute later then if you get it right then 15 minutes later so my intervals you know what let me check what are they so this is my deck setup okay right what is what does all this mean so basically so I do not have a one minute interval okay which means if I get things wrong it will ask me 15 minutes later 15. oh which means I have to retain information for quite a long time before it counts as memorized and on top of that on the converse it actually facilitates quick learning yeah I hit the one minute interval because so by contrast if you know something the next time it'll show it to you is one and a half days later so that's the next interval 2160 minutes okay the third interval 1080 is seven days later and the fourth interval is 28 Days Later wow okay and what this means is it's basically only when you can remember something after 28 days that it really counts as you having learned it yeah um as opposed to when in the typical setup where after sort of you getting it right after 15 minutes it considers that you've learned it yeah um and then it goes into its own review calculation which can which which when it calculates how long to space between reviews it has its own calculation algorithm which can basically create problems where if you if you start getting things wrong multiple times then it's very difficult to increase the interval back up again and so you'll keep being tested on a card again and again when you don't necessarily need to be tested on it that's what I used to find frustrating about the default Anki settings whereas this makes sure that doesn't happen because you're because in order for a car to graduate to that review stage I mean you have to remember after 28 days which already indicates a very high level of retention um okay what about the other options on here do you have anything else um so the other ones aren't really too significant to be honest So Max reviews per day a thousand I mean again that's something you can just change so do you do a thousand reviews a day or do you describe no no however many sort of I feel like I've just put Max reviews at a thousand so that if they're out whatever they are it does show me because I don't typically have more than that um but yeah I know so I'd say the main benefit of this is that it facilitates a deeper learning because you have to recall for 15 minutes and also if you do already know things you can get through a deck faster because you don't have to do things twice on the same day you only have to do it once yeah you only have to get it right once on the first date as opposed to advice yeah oh interesting and can you talk us through just your what Your decks look like at the moment so if I go back to the dials so this at the top is the ethics and law deck which satnam made and and he gave for me based on kind of the lecture notes for that and that's something which I basically crammed before the exam this is my step one master deck here which has all of the information from the US Emily step one which is which is the zanky deck plus a few I mean I've edited the cards myself now there are a few different sub decks here okay because sometimes there are certain topics that I want to focus on and is that subject that you've created yeah so for instance sounds has kind of I mean sound has cardiac sound and respiratory sounds in it like actual yeah actual kind of like auscultation right noises to train me to recognize those okay and you've done that because they were in the master deck and you've just filtered them by tags or something exactly okay um and then sub actually I mean right now sounds has some other stuff in it as well but that's initially what it was for okay uh subject subject two I think has uh neuro in it subject three I think as psychiatry in it subject four with cardio and renal um at this point I can't remember what I put in subject five and six and you find it handy to split this up into subjects I guess because it lets me study one thing at a time yeah and that makes sense rather than getting a random fact from renal and then a random fact from neurology and absolutely but when I've learned them I'll move them back into the the master deck so in the sense that I'll put them in the sub deck so that I can get so that I can learn them quickly without without sort of getting derailed by other subjects yeah exactly if you're thinking today it's gonna be my renal day exactly through I'll put the renal cards in another deck do the renal cards yeah and then I can go back to my main deck and do the reviews for the day okay without without having to finish all the renal cards necessarily but then when I have learned renal I'll move it back into the main deck okay and how often do you review do you just kind of review this as and when you feel like it yeah exactly I mean as I say I haven't really done this since May but before that I was doing it quite regularly oh yeah sure um okay then this is Doc's Internal Medicine deck and another deck from Reddit this isn't something I've really used that much um I'm not sure whether I will use it Dukes pathoma deck is the deck that I used in the run-up to um our kind of SBA exams in fifth year and because there were quite a few subjects I had done with zanky but there were a lot of other ones which I hadn't done about half of the topics within medicine I hadn't covered um just a few weeks time instead of just because you haven't got around to it exactly and and it's too with zanky again you have that kind of structure where each card has one piece of information usually yeah whereas Duke's deck relatively has a lot more information like on each card which isn't great for long-term retention so much but it means you can learn it a lot faster if you're coming for anything if you're cramming exactly right um so what going back to zanke is that based on pathoma zanky is based on performer and USMLE first aid and first aid for step one and so is is it that you download the deck and then you just start going from it or how is is there some level of you hide all the cards and apart from the subject I'll suspend all the cards okay and then unsuspend the ones that I want to study but the ones after I've learned them and I'm reviewing them I won't resuspend them I'll I'll sort of keep going to keep going through the reviews and that's why I use Dex to separate subjects within unsuspended cards with an unsuspended card okay so within this the step one master deck you've probably still got loads of suspended cards that you haven't yet covered absolutely yeah but then let's say one day you just say you know what I'm gonna do all the Cardiology today yeah you would unsuspend all of the Cardiology because unsuspended Cardiology I'll do Cardiology now say I want to do renal I'll unsuspend renal but Cardiology is also unsuspended so I'll move renal into another text got to separate them and so while you're learning renal itself on the day it's in a separate deck so you can just bash back absolutely focus on that but then later on later on now now you're reviewing renal and Cardiology which is subjects you're not familiar with and now I'll move maybe Psychiatry into another deck and I suppose that said that helps solve this conundrum of you know if you took all of medicine and just started random randomly learning these 10 000 active cards you would not understand the thing absolutely but yeah with this method you can take one subject at a time and in a way you can sort of have an active subject that you're sort of actively bashing through just that subject and then you've got those Bank of reviews of stuff that you've already done absolutely that's really good and and I mean even within that even within renal I'll do the physiology and Anatomy first yeah and then do the pathology again to make sure I've understood what's going on before I learn what's going wrong and so in for example the zanky deck is also it's taxes yeah according to that kind of division and you can just kind of run a query on Anki and say find me we don't even need to run a query you just use a tag browser oh so you can just click on renal plus anatomy and then you'll get all the cards exactly yeah that's pretty good okay um what about what about for decks that your friends made so can I can have a look at this one um and so if we browse through this deck what do these cards just generally look like uh so I mean so this is satinum's deck again which is based on ethics and law um so I mean this is kind of so I should go through this um right eight principles of confidentiality wow okay so loads of information per flashcard but yeah this is information dense but it's it's kind of get was learning very quickly for the exam okay so this is an information necessarily you'd want to retain absolutely forever well no I mean certainly I've forgotten this pretty quickly um if we go back if we go to browse and I'm just trying to see safety I mean so again you you've got sort of describe a book versus GMC 2005 case description here yeah so this is sort of how I was using my third year where I'd have on you know for example uh badly in hitch 1972 memory experiment and then I'd instead of yeah one experiment they did and what the results of it were and absolutely yep so it seems like we can use Anki just basically as a second brain of sorts for stuff like medicine with the caveat that actually can for conceptual things perhaps I I mean anki's Anki is also good for conceptual things it's just that it is I mean I can show you sort of one of the cards I have let's let's see it might be in here yeah because in my kind of second or third year when I was using Anki properly I it was it was an extension of my brain it was as if like the incident I added something to my Anki I knew without a shadow of a doubt that that would be uploaded to my brain just by virtue of the fact that I was going through Anki for several hours each day and that was such a nice place to be because it just simplified everything well I mean that's that's exactly what you want to sort of really two so this is an example of a very very information Rich card but it's actually just entirely one concept what's the close https pump and the luminal membrane of the G intubated cells are stimulated about Australia what is the purpose other effects so I mean basically this is considering the role that aldosterone plays in generating a contraction alkalosis with the paradoxical acid urea and it's quite it's relatively complex I mean there are three ways but even within those ways there are some kind of categories so you'd be spending a long time so I'm going over this I so in the sense that I would I would spend a long time on this card but in reality it's all one concept yeah and one that one concept like loads like that whole explanation follows from one concept and once you've understood that yeah it all makes sense rather than it being distinctive facts that you have to memorize each other exactly exactly interesting and is this as I could call it this was a zanky card which I've edited okay so you're you're comfortable just adding stuff to flush them out and add because you don't as you said you want to be able to understand stuff yeah so if you see something in zanky in an in a pre-medanky deck that you don't understand you just Google it blah blah and then you add the information to the card yeah yeah I mean honestly in order to understand this one I feel like I spent six hours just Googling until until I found the answer but after that I felt like the whole of renal medicine just kind of opened up to me interesting I have to check these cards out it was it was the key in many ways fantastic you're heavy on the pre-made decks you're heavy on understanding before memorizing yeah yeah and even though you can sort of use Anki to in a way memorize before you understand like alongside as you're doing a card you don't just take things at face value no if you don't if something doesn't make sense you will spend the time Googling it absolutely you wouldn't think you're wasting your time because actually you're you've got efficiency Savings in the long run yeah yeah I mean absolutely I mean that that kind of sort of research in order to understand why a card is the way it is for me is in some way they're resistible as I was saying before so I could spend hours really trying to understand it particular card and I wouldn't really and and for me that would be kind of interesting so I wouldn't really consider it a waste of time all right well you've inspired me to get a personal subscription uh tonight and get the zanky deck so yeah this is the discussion between me and I said about how to use flashcards specifically Anki properly and how to think about it so I hope you enjoy it alrighty welcome back we are now moving on to step three of the class and that is about Focus so we've talked about step one which is understanding and step two which is remembering but permeating both of those steps is this idea of focus we need to actually sit down and do the work in the first place then when we're sitting down to doing the work in the first place we need to not get distracted while we're doing the work and sort of related to that we need to be able to take breaks appropriately and we need to not burn ourselves out studying because that would just be bad for our physical health and our mental health and it would also be quite bad for our exam results so those are the sort of topics that we're going to be talking about in this Focus section and in this video I want to share my tactic for dealing with motivation issues and part of that is the phrase that motivation is a myth now I've talked about this a few times in a couple of different videos and like podcasts and stuff but I haven't really fully explained it and the reason motivation is a myth is because motivation like what is motivation we only need motivation to do the things that we don't want to do and usually those are things that require a short-term pain in order for me to get long-term gain like we never say I need motivation to sit down and watch Netflix or I need motivation to hang out with my friends we say I need motivation to work and I need motivation to go to the gym because we know that those are not very pleasant in the short term but actually lead to good results in the long term um and the way our human psychology works is that we tend to very much overweight short-term benefits rather than long-term benefits because especially if it's like oh anything to do well in my exam so that I can get a job in 10 years time that's far too long term to actually be a reliable method of motivating Us in the present so why is motivation a myth well I think the gold standard approach is to just scrub the word motivation from our vocabulary and replace the concept of motivation with the concept of discipline so um there's an article on the website called Wiz domination which I'll link in in the shown a bit of this uh this class which basically says that screw motivation what you need is discipline and they argue that you know there's the the thought of I should do this thing and then there's the action of doing the thing itself and motivation kind of lies in the middle it's like like we have the thought I should do this thing motivation is when we say I need to feel like doing this thing and the action is then just doing the thing itself so what this article argues and what I completely agree with is that there is absolutely no need for us to feel like doing something before we do the thing like you know this morning filming this class I didn't feel like filming this class but I did it anyway because I recognized that the way I feel is completely inconsequential to whether I do the thing or not at all and there's a few other bits in the article that are quite nice it says that um I think at one point in the article they say that a three-year-old bases its decisions on what it feels like an adult bases its decisions on what it knows it needs to be doing and so today when filming this class I was trying to be an adult but you know what I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do it as opposed to oh I need to get myself to feel like doing it first so the idea of motivation is this this sort of infantile fantasy that we need to feel like doing something before we actually do it and in fact we can just operate discipline and just do the thing anyway that's kind of the gold standard um realistically you know I have motivation problems the same as anyone else especially like you know especially when it comes to going to the gym I don't actually don't mind sitting down and filming this class because it's quite fun I don't mind studying because it's quite fun but I really don't enjoy going to the gym and therefore I need to motivate myself to go to the gym I recognize that yes in an Ideal World the word motivation wouldn't even be in my vocabulary in an Ideal World I would as Nike would say just do it I would just go to the gym but it's kind of hard so I personally you know I've got a few different ways that I use to help me sort of pluck up the motivation to you know overcome that activation energy to actually sit down and do the work in the first place so I'll break down how I think about this and then hopefully you can kind of take the concept if you like and you can like apply it to your own life but essentially when do we need motivation for stuff we need motivation for Stuff where the short-term uh sort of short term it's not very pleasant and usually where the consequences for not doing the thing are not very great so for example if I if I told you you know I would give you a million pounds to sit down and do your homework you and Johnny will sit down and do your homework like it's not hard if I told you that I if you don't do your homework you're gonna die you would Jolly will sit down and do your homework but usually we don't operate within those extremes of motivation because there's no need for motivation there because in one in one Circumstance the situation the outcome is so pleasurable in the here and now that we're going to do the work and in the other one the punishment for not doing the thing is so great that we're going to do the thing and those are the two elements of it so it's like how pleasurable is this thing to do versus how punishing is the is the alternative of not doing it and those are the domains that I think we can Target when it comes to motivation so the way that this works for me is that when I sit down to study I want it to be a pleasant Pro process and so often I'll go to a nice library or a hipster coffee shop or sit on my desk and make sure my desk is clean so it's a nice process I'll make myself a cup of coffee or buy a cheeky latte and I'll have my kind of Spotify study with me playlist playing through my headphones so that overall it makes the process of studying more pleasant or less unpleasant with enough of these techniques for me personally and because I enjoy my subject and I treat it kind of like a game that's another useful tactic to treat studying as a game because then it makes it more fun like I enjoy studying enough to the point that I don't really need to motivate myself to study anymore because it's just kind of fun to do equally the other way of of addressing this this quandary is by targeting the punishment aspect of it so there's a few of these websites where you know let's say you make a commitment that you're going to lose 10 kilograms in the next six months then six months later if you haven't lost to 10 kilograms it will debit let's say a thousand pounds from your account and donate it to charity even donated to the KKK or you know whatever you want the idea is that the punishment for not doing the task is so great that it's going to make us want to do the task in the first place um the other technique that some people find helpful for this is let's say say I was genuinely serious about wanting to go to the gym every day I would give a thousand pounds to my housemate Molly and say Molly this thousand pounds is yours keep it safe if there is ever a single day where I don't go to the gym without a very very very good excuse then you can do whatever you want with that thousand pounds it is now yours so now I've sort of hacked my motivation equation because now there is a big punishment for me to not go to the gym therefore I'm more likely to go to the gym and so those are just some of the ways that we can Target this motivation thing I think step one is to recognize that you know just the idea of motivation is an infantile fantasy that you'll you know I have to feel like doing work before I sit down and do work you know sometimes I don't feel like going to work in the morning I still go to work in the morning you know it's it's not an option um but for some reason we don't treat our sort of study lives or our Hobbies or our physical health or our mental health even to with the same level of professionalism that we treat our work like it wouldn't be an option for me to not go to work because I don't want to get fired I don't want to let the team down etc etc but I'm quite happy to not go to the gym because you know it's only my body that I'm I'm screwing up I'm quite happy to get a takeaway like I ordered pizza today rather than cook something healthy because it's only my body and I don't know why that is but anyway kind of the the Top Line gold standard is that motivation is a myth and that we should scrub the word motivation from our vocabulary but you know we can recognize that that is an ideal that most of us don't attain including me and so we can then try and make the thing more pleasurable or try and make the alternative more unpleasant now there is a good book called the motivation myth which you can read if you like that talks about this in a bit more detail and I'll link to this Wiz domination article like that sort of changed the game for me when it came to thinking about motivation as being a myth and discipline as being the thing all right so we have plucked up officially the motivation or rather the discipline to sit down and do the studying now how do we not get distracted by our phone by the Internet by something else you know a bird flying through the window how do we not get distracted while doing artwork well firstly I think that kind of comes from enjoying the thing that we're doing usually again like you know we tend not to get distracted from watching Netflix we tend not to get distracted from hanging out with our friends or playing sports we tend to get distracted from doing work why is that often because it's not that fun and like sometimes for me when I'm in that real like Flow State where I'm really kind of enjoying what I'm doing I look up and look at the time I'm like damn an hour has passed and I just never noticed it and I didn't even think about getting distracted because I was really enjoying what I was doing and I was fully immersed in it so I think that's Point number one like if you can enjoy your subject and and even if you don't enjoy it if you can like really fully focus on it there's a book by Cal Newport called a deep work and he talks about this idea of like really deep intense focus on something that level of focus this flow state is generally very pleasurable says the evidence about the stuff so that means we're less likely to be distracted the other the other culprits of things that distract us are firstly are phone so what I do if I'm studying is I would turn my phone to do not disturb and I would put it face down on the table in front of me or in my bag or even sometimes if I'm really desperate I would put it in a different room and yeah sometimes people say oh what if there's an emergency but like realistically when was the last time you had an emergency that you genuinely needed to respond to on your phone and if there is an emergency the Do Not Disturb setting I think lets people call you if they ring twice in a row or you can set up like safe people that you know if my if mother calls me or if my kid calls me then I'll then the phone will ring but if anyone else messages then it won't so that's another super easy way it was a super easy thing to do because even even to this day I find myself scrolling through Instagram and being like Oh how many likes have I got on that pick uh whereas if the phone is face down on silent mode or in a different room entirely then I just don't think about it I just kind of do my thing there's a few other things we can do with the phone um we can increase the amount of friction that it takes to do bad things on our third so for example what my brother does is that he uninstalls Instagram the the app from his phone so in order to go on Instagram he has to go on safaric on instagram.com log in and then he's on Instagram and those added few steps mean that he's significantly less likely to actually go on Instagram well another friend of mine does is that she buries her social media apps in like some random folder on like page 8 of the iPhone so in order to get there she has to like Scrolls Scrolls scroll page a click on the folder and then click on Instagram and that supposedly is enough friction to make a knock on Instagram and in fact like that that friction is great because like while we're while we're doing the thing it just gives our brain a chance to think you know do I really want to be doing this is this really a good use of my time um and sort of on that note one technique that I found that's completely transformed my sleep is the fact that I now put the phone across the room from me and on days I find where I'm like oh you know I'll just go on my phone for five minutes I end up staying up why is this off I end up staying up for like 20 minutes so like even two hours sometimes when I've got work the next morning at 6am and I'm staying up for an extra two hours until 3am just scrolling through Instagram on my phone and kind of hating myself for doing it but on the days where I leave the phone on the bedside you know across the room on the chest of drawers I don't get distracted from it and then I get a much better night's sleep and I'm much happier for it there's a few other things you can do you know there's all these apps that block apps from your phone like from your computer you know self-control and stuff blocks Facebook and you know there's all these Chrome extensions to remove your Facebook feed if that's what distracts you another thing you can do is you can set your phone to grayscale um so you know if you just Google I think on on iPhone you can do it in the accessibility options and display options so it just removes all the color from your phone and kind of seeing your phone in grayscale just to be like oh that's a bit grim and then it just makes us less likely to want to go on our phone because it's in grayscale mode that's another thing you can do but all of these are basically hacks to try and help us Focus whereas I think that the main thing is to just be able to enjoy the subject and to focus intently on it because if we're doing that then it becomes fun and then we don't feel the need to get distracted by all these these other bits and bobs all right so we have developed the motivational the discipline to sit down and do our work we have um been able to not get distracted by using our phone and now we're focusing for an extended period of time but we probably want to be taking breaks during that during that focusing session because there is some evidence I've got a research paper here that says we propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused from a practical standpoint of research suggests that when faced with long tasks such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task so basically we should be taking breaks while we're studying but we should be intentional about the breaks that we're taking and one of the most popular methods for doing this is called the Pomodoro Technique and that was invented by a guy called Francesco Cirillo in the 1990s and he named it after the timer he used to use a tomato timer to time his Pomodoro sessions and that's why it's called the Pomodoro Technique or the Tomato technique and the idea behind the Pomodoro Technique is that you work for 25 minutes then you you have a five minute break and you work for 25 minutes have a five minute break work for 25 minutes five minute break well for 25 minutes five minute break then after doing four work sessions and a five minute break you then take an extended half an hour break or 20 minute break or something like that and then you repeat the process and the idea is that that 25 minute timer is enough to give us sort of ample time to focus on the thing but it also means that we have a regular break so that you know when we're never gonna kind of get tired of focusing as such and it it's it's quite a nice sort of rigid structure that we can impose on ourselves to help us maintain Focus for longer there's a few pros and a few cons of this and I don't really use the Pomodoro Technique in that sort of version of it anymore I used to when I was in my first and second year and the reason I used to use it is because it's quite a social thing like I would go to the library with my friends and we would all collectively pump together we called it plumbing and so we would start a pom you know with like a a tap on the on the desk and then we would end the Palm with a tap on the desk and then we would end the five minute break with two taps and that would be a sign that the next problem is going to begin and it was just quite a fun like social thing because everyone could be doing different subjects and in fact we were we all were doing different subjects but we were all in the same library at my college Emmanuel College um and we would kind of pump together and it would feel like a sort of shared community group learning session even though we were all doing different subjects so that's one of the advantages the other Advantage is that if you like if we find it hard to focus on the thing or what we're doing is really isn't fun like doing our taxes or whatever then that at the end of that 25 minute session is sort of like a light at the end of the tunnel and we can think oh yes you know I've only got seven more minutes to focus and then we can focus for seven minutes and then we can breathe a sigh of relief as we take that break so that's sort of the the benefits of the Pomodoro Technique and of course it forces us to take breaks so it's good um the reason I don't really use it anymore in that in that particular realm is that usually when I'm studying I don't have a problem with focusing for more than 25 minutes if I'm doing something that's really boring then I do but most of the stuff that I do in my life is just generally quite fun and if I'm studying renal physiology or preparing for an exam or something then I actually kind of focus for about 40 or 45 minutes before I can sort of internally just sense myself losing focus and at that point I'm like okay cool it's been 45 minutes I'm gonna take a 15 minute break and make myself a cup of coffee or something like that I think the Pomodoro Technique does have its benefits but I don't think we should we shouldn't like stick to it so rigidly like we should use a technique as as a tool rather than being a slave to the technique and I know lots of people who who say things like oh I tried the Pomodoro Technique but I got really annoyed when the 25 minutes was up because I actually needed an extra five minutes you know if you need an extra five minutes to finish the bit that you're doing take the extra five minutes like this is just a guideline it's not really a rule sort of like the pirate's code in Pirates of the Caribbean um but yeah that's what the Pomodoro method is useful for and so many people swear by it there's a few different apps that you can use for it um I think if you just type in Pomodoro Timer on Google it's got one built in so we wish to use that one there's a website tomatotimer.com that also works and then there's the app that I used to use for this when I was in my fifth year of med school and that app is called forest and the idea behind Forest is that you start your pom session and uh the way it works is that it kind of grows a tree for you and if you go off the app or if you go to a different app on your phone during that 25 minutes then your tree dies and you have to start again so as your tree is growing you have to kind of stay on the app screen watching the tree grow for 25 minutes which forces you to not get distracted with your phone and then the five minute break kind of times it for you and then it starts a new tree there's a quite a nice way of pomodoring or Plumbing because you know that you can't go on your phone because then your tree is going to die um and they've got like a leaderboard and you can like connect with your friends and stuff so you can see who's doing how many Pomodoro sessions in a given day and you can be like oh damn Marcus did eight hours worth of pumps yesterday he must be doing really well in exams why don't I you know motivate myself to do a bit more studying so that was how I used to use Pomodoro method in fifth year when preparing for my Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatrics exams but like I said I don't really use it as really rigidly anymore I think I'm now at the point where I can just kind of focus for 45 minutes 50 minutes at a time and then I'll take a break and yeah that's all good so that's the Pomodoro method all right so we've motivated ourselves to sit down and do the work we're not getting distracted we're doing the Pomodoro Technique but do we listen to music or not and that is the age-old question isn't it basically what the evidence shows and I'm gonna do like a proper YouTube video on this in a while but I'll give you a you know a heads up what the evidence shows is that music with lyrics is probably the worst because the idea is that the lyrics if they've got words in them they interfere with our working memory and the phonological loop which is sort of the kind of random access memory sort of the function within our working memory that processes words and if you've got lyrics in the background or in your ears and you're trying to read words at the same time that will cause interference and that's going to be bad so music with lyrics is generally considered a bad thing when you're trying to study music without lyrics so instrumental tracks are sort of a middle ground um there's a few different a few different theories about this um working in absolute silence is probably the most optimal uh because working in absolute silence means that we're not going to get distracted by the music firstly and there's this effect in memory which is that if you're studying for something like an exam in a similar environment to when you actually take the exam then your performance is going to be increased so for example when we take exams usually we're in a very quiet room surrounded by the rustling of papers and people in the sounds of people writing and the occasional cough but not much else going on there's certainly no background music unless you're in like the Senate house in Cambridge and there's someone busking outside outside the door there's no background music um there's no like lyrics in the background definitely basically Silence with like scratching of papers so basically the sort of sound environment that you would get in a library and they've done some studies where they've compared people who learn like a series of words underwater then they do better when they're tested underwater compared to people who learn it on land and then they do better when they're tested on land but if you learn words on land and you're tested underwater or you learn them underwater and you're tested on land then your performance gets reduced and the idea behind that is that our brain has to somehow has this association with this sort of environment that you're in when you learn something and the best way to recall the information is to mimic the environment as best as you can the evidence does suggest that we should probably be studying in silence but I'm personally going to ignore that and study with instrumentals which I think is a good middle ground between complete silence which is boring and music with lyrics which is incredibly distracting so hopefully that was helpful Okay so we've talked about the Pomodoro Technique which is all about taking a break uh sort of within your study sessions so 25 minutes of work and five minutes a break but in this video I just want to talk about some general tips for maintaining a healthy ish work-life balance while studying I think the most important thing is to realize that really like our physical and our mental health comes far above any sort of exam and stuff and yeah I get that sometimes we have high stakes exams but for the most part our exams really don't matter in the grand scheme of things especially if they're coming at the expense of a physical or mental health and I just find that that's something to to keep in the back of my mind because I've got I've got so many friends who kind of burnt out because you know it's it's so easy when you're at University or you're in school and in the right environment or in the wrong environment rather to sort of everyone to sort of work each other up to the point where where we feel that oh my God this exam is literally the most important thing in my life and because everyone around us seems to be working then we'll kind of trying to kill ourselves working as well and I don't know it's just not an ideal way to go about it because you know as we're saying physical and mental health comes first secondly in terms of work-life balance um personally the thing that worked for me was that I would go to different places to do work and then I would have my room as like a work-free zone so for example when I was in university I'd be going to different libraries and studying and lived in in the different libraries but then when I'd come back home I'd sort of had a rule for myself that I'm not gonna I'm not gonna let myself study when I'm at home I would have to study outside the house and that was a very distinctive sort of work-life Separation but also sometimes what I found useful is to do more of a sort of work-life integration so especially when it comes to preparing for multiple choice exams where where the technique for preparing for those is to just bash through lots of questions on an online question bank I found that me and quite a few of my other friends um the technique that worked for us was that we just sort of casually be working and doing these questions as we're going about throughout the day so for example let's say we're all chilling in a room and we've just ordered some pizza and stuff some of us would be on our computers or our laptops kind of doing Anki flashcards or doing questions on past test or past master and while also kind of having a chat so that's a sort of more like it's not a very focused way of studying but it's a way of getting in the Reps of doing the flashcards of doing the questions while also hanging around with friends and kind of being a little bit sociable the other really important thing is to you know eat well and exercise and stuff like a mistake that I made uh during exam season was I thought oh you know you know in in exam season I need to sort of really just focus on studying and not actually go to the gym but I found that for the weeks where I did that I ended up personally feeling like less good about myself and that sort of bled into my studying whereas even today if you know I've got I've got a whole day where I have to churn out a bunch of videos or prepare for a supervision I still make it a point that you know two or three times that week I'm going to go to the gym because I recognize that actually in the grand scheme of things you know my own physical health my own nutrition my own mental health and stuff all of that is far more important than you know doing a few more questions or preparing one more YouTube video or like preparing a few more slides for the supervision so I think the work-life balance thing is really just about recognizing that our priorities and recognize having that studying is not usually top of our priority list sure depending on the exam and some Heist takes exams it has to be but the other way I like to think of this is that it's okay for life to be out of balance for a short amount of time like we can have different seasons in our life where you know let's say it is the week before our exams it's probably reasonable to spend that week just full-on focused on cramming and and kind of neglecting our friends a little bit because it's just for a week it's just for a very short amount of time but I think like what if we're going that far out of balance we should really keep it in mind and try and redress the balance later on so yeah just a few General tips on work-life balance all right let's talk about one of my favorite topics and that is how to study effectively with friends now this was something that I I was doing like from my first year of University onwards and I think it was one of the few things that really kind of changed the game in terms of making studying a lot more fun for me and there's a few tips I've got for studying with friends so firstly you want to find the right group of people who is all motivated to study at around about a similar level um there's not much Point getting people in the group who absolutely hate studying them who are going to distract everyone so you kind of want to have a group of friends who who are like you know a bit of a nerd themselves ideally secondly I think it's really important that someone in the group takes charge of what the study session is going to look like so for me and my friends I was usually the one that took charge because you know someone's got to do it um and and and the way that we would do the session is we would all get together in the library of Emmanuel College and we'd be using the Pomodoro Technique so we'd have 25 minutes of work and then five minute break 25 minutes work five minute break and we would kind of tap on the table to Signal when these breaks were starting and finishing and we had one person who was like the Pomodoro master who would have the Pomodoro Timer up on their screen and who'd be sort of time keeping for everyone else in the group a few other pointers so if you're studying the same topic it can be very easy for you know one person to stop you know shouting out all the answers and the other people to just sort of be like oh yeah I knew that so one point that we would do is that whenever we we got multiple of our uh usmetics in the room together and if we if we were all studying the same thing collectively we would for example see a flashcard on the screen and then we would impose like a 10 second silence where everyone had a chance to think about it and ideally write an answer down on paper so they committed themselves to paper whereas if it was just a free-for-all then you know Paul you know who knew the answer to everything would just shout out the answer and the rest of us wouldn't have a chance to actually use active recall to try and dredge up that information from our brains so the main thing I would say is that if you are doing the same thing make sure you give everyone in the group a chance to do the thing and if that requires imposing moments of Silence that's absolutely fine you might have to be a you know totalitarian Tyrant uh for a little while but everyone will appreciate it in the long run because they'll appreciate kind of being guided through this process of studying with friends so yeah studying with friends is great and I'd really recommend you give it a try alrighty so thank you so much for watching the videos in this class I'm not sure how many of them you watched but thank you for enrolling the class anyway I really hope you found something at least something in here that you can take away to hopefully apply to your own life to your own studying to make the studying a little bit more efficient and hopefully a little bit more enjoyable so that we can you know enjoy the time that we're spending studying but that we can also free up our time to do other things that are more interesting so yeah um if you have any comments any questions or anything please do leave a comment in the discussion section down below and I will be replying to stuff you can definitely check out my YouTube channel for more study tips including some content that's not in this class there's quite a few things on on YouTube for that and if you're interested in specific apps to help with studying I've got loads of stuff on how I use notion Google Sheets and key and a few other different apps to kind of maximize the efficiency and the enjoyableness of my studying so yeah thank you again for watching this class and all the best with your studying and see you sometime soon bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 603,337

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, time management skills, how to manage time, time management for students, how to manage your time, how to stop procrastinating, time management for high school students, time management motivation, focus, focus for studens, how to focus as a student, how to stay focused as a student, student focus tips, evidence based focus tips, study tips, how to study for exams, how to study for exams as a student, study tips for students, study tips students, study

Id: Lt54CX9DmS4

Length: 169min 37sec (10177 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023