Memory Techniques for Data Science, Programming and Statistics with Memory Expert Anthony Metivier

today we're going to be taking a look at how we can utilize memory techniques to learn things alike of data science computer programming statistics and different types of things like that so I have the privilege of being joined to find my friend dr. Anthony Matvei who has taught a number of students memory techniques in order to do things like join up languages in just a matter of weeks or learning complex mathematical formulas within a matter of minutes so it'll be really interesting to see how we can apply these skills to make learning easier now what this video doesn't really cover is some of these specific things about you or want to learn for learning each of these types of topics one of the things that we discussed is that figuring out what you actually need to learn is one of the most important parts of effective and effective learning strategy now that's going to depend a lot on your type of background and what your actual objectives are for example for me to learn a new programming language is going to be a different strategy than for me to say teach my kids programming or for if you're say a professional working to transition your career into more advanced analytics data science is going to be a different strategy than if you were say still a student if you were coming from a background where you're maybe managing teams and you want to be able to communicate with data scientists and programmers and different things like that it's going to be a different strategy than if you were say actually a pretender so picking the right type of strategy in the right kind of path for what you want to do is a really really important aspect of this whole learning journey and it's something that I plan to break down in a number of other videos because I often get the question you know what should I study how should I approach this and the answer is it really depends on where you're starting from and where you're trying to get to now if you haven't already if you'd like to subscribe and hit the notification icon then you'll see as soon as those videos come out if those videos are out already there will be some links in the description below where you can check those all out now I gotta be honest I was a little bit perhaps skeptical in a way about how memory techniques could maybe be used for some of these different areas because I haven't used memory techniques myself for like loading a lot of these skills but after going through and having a chat with Anthony about these different techniques I can definitely see how some of these skills could definitely augment the whole learning process and I definitely wish I had some of these skills available when I was studying for certain exams and I think even now I will be applying some of these skills that I've even learned through this video to learning out especially different symbols new terminologies and everything like that because whenever we get into these different fields I mean data science is the combination of statistics mathematics computer science and some domain level knowledge and expertise and all of these each of these has a lot of its own language that that can be a lot to learn and so having somebody who is an expert at learning of different languages and has taught other people to do the same is definitely interesting to have a chat to so during this video of me seeing how Anthony would approach memorizing this formula right here now for those of you who are familiar with statistics this is the correlation coefficient of a population now why would you want to learn something like this when these days you could really just use a three-letter function in R to do this calculation for you well I think there's a few key reasons first of all if you're doing some sort of a certification exam you basically need to remember these formulas now even if you're not studying anymore one of the nice things about mathematical formulas is that they're an extremely nice way of concisely representing quite a lot of in from and what you have a formula you can actually kind of see the relationships between different variables and kind of manipulate them and play around with them to be able to make the function do different things for you once you get an understanding of this particular formula you'll actually have understood quite a few different concepts in statistics now Anthony doesn't actually have any background in data science or statistics so what I find really interesting about the way he goes and breaks down this formula is that it basically goes through and converts these symbols which are effectively meaningless to him at the moment and converting them into some human kind of imagery which kind of forms a more efficient index that different ideas and concepts and definitions can be attached to an order for better recall this effectively reduces the cognitive load necessarily necessary to remember these terms in the future if you're new to this channel and you're keen to learn the latest tips tricks and tools for working more effectively with data please hit the subscribe button for weekly videos dr. anthony mateo it is fantastic to see you today and i thought this would be yeah i thought this would be a great conversation to have so for those of whom for those who don't know you you are a memory expert and a bit of an entrepreneur and everything as well got a great course online on personal branding as well as memory techniques and learning techniques so one of things i guess we wanted to take a bit of a look into you today and to see if we could help people is to take a look at how we can use different learning and memory techniques in order to learn technical skills like programming and data science and that sort of thing yeah yeah it's something I get asked about a lot and one of the I mean you introduced me as a memory expert and I certainly deny that and I've become that but I started just as a memory enthusiast and my goal is to make people experts over their own memory right because that's ultimately with what if you just learn how your memory really really works then your brain doesn't really care about the information your ego might but your brain doesn't and the techniques don't care and the information doesn't care because as you know is that the data specialists information is just inert so to speak it has energy you know it needs certain shaping and so so there's a an old saying that you know tick or a bucket the ocean doesn't care and it's the same thing with memory you just have the right tools and you have the tools that accommodate the tasks that you want such as you know a bucket or a spoonful of the ocean of information really don't have the limits that it seems like you have so long as you bring the right tool to the ocean so that's what I like to help people do is be prepared to be able to get as much of that ocean of information as they want into their minds the question is do they need what they want or can we get them to focus on what they need which is part of being an expert over your own mind is focusing on what you mean yesterday which it may be in conflict right right okay because yeah there are actually a lot of different techniques and tools available to actually learn and memorize stuff isn't there so I mean often people use the term you've mnemonics and everything like that and sometimes we think of little things like imagining different imagery and different things like that but I think you teach a number of techniques which are kind of I would say probably next-level kind of mnemonics kind of techniques and everything so there's certain West there are more or less than the average memory training there's a reason for that and that's because a lot of the memory training in the 20th century and now the 21st century comes from memory competitors and they're not really focused on real everyday life situations they memorized volumes of information at different capacities in order to win prizes and there's other all of that is actually pretty amazing and we learn a lot from it but it doesn't translate as directly to how am I going to get a raise at work right because I want to be the person who works the fastest the most efficiently the most accurately and I'm able to connect the dots at a higher level than the other person in my organization and you go from just loss um antic information to expertise to knowledge and real knowledge is the production of new ideas because you're able almost like a rhizome you know those plants that they are they're decentralized so to speak rather than a tree that has this sort of root structure you can be both the tree with a solid root structure but also just have these amazing new ideas that are decentralized and then you become more of an innovator and you're able to compete better in your profession all right okay that's that's interesting and I was having to look at a few of your YouTube videos on your YouTube channel as well which is a great resource for anybody who wants to check that out um there was some really interesting ideas on there that that you have actually so I was watching one of your videos on certain I think it was memory myths or kind of and so there were a few concepts that you're talking about there for instance the idea that you don't necessarily need to understand all the concepts before you memorize certain things sometimes and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit more yes yes so this is one of the problems with memory competitors teaching memory for learning yep I've heard it so many name any names because they're really good people and you know forgive them father they know not what they do kind of thing but some very accomplished memory competitors have said do not member nice things you don't understand right this is nonsense this is absolutely not good advice it's very bad advice and the reason is and I know this I've got a PhD I got two mas I've got a BA I've got certificates in a couple of areas like hypnotherapy and neuro linguistic programming I've even got a certificate in how to serve alcohol right and I can write now that you can learn so much more faster if you just commit things to memory and then think about them in your memory to make those connections that we just talked about that de-centralized the knowledge that you can have this kind of epiphany like structure aha moments right but if you're like oh I'm not going to commit this to memory because it understand it we will lock yourself potentially forever out of that information or just make it a lot to learn it so for example I'm studying a very ancient philosophy called adwaita pedometer and it is a mind bored I never would have understood what I've come to understand out of it if I sat around trying to understand it I just memorized both in Sanskrit and in English what they say and then I was able to percolate make the connections almost subconsciously or unconsciously and then I'm reading continuing to read him to say AHA now that's my current sort of learning project but that's what I did when I was in University and I was studying philosophy studying languages I studied history of science history of Technology and so forth I'm instead around waiting to understand things I just plowed through texts memorize things regardless of whether I understood it or not terms no architectonic tautology I still in learning new things about architectonic tautology but you know you won't catch a real student waiting around the memorize stuff you memorized so that you might understand not wait until you understand to memorize makes zero sense and it's really bad advice but the better advice is is memorize same thing in language learning just memorize and then you'll make so many connectors there's so many words that mean different things if you would just memorize one of those things it becomes the platform of all the other or a sufficient number of the other definitions will come into play and if rent honest and ethical about what your own journey as a language learner is you don't even know the half not even a tenth for Tom and if you would just memorize a few things of what different words could meet you will open up so many pathways and gateways just understand as you go and memorize as quickly as you can that's my philosophy in it it works ok know that that's interesting would you say that even works for things like mathematical formulas and different things like that Sarah because ya know well I don't have to take my word for it because Robert a dude who has yay math he's a prominent figure I mean maybe not viral because it's math and this very concentrated focus but years ago he created some videos for my course on memorizing math he memorized nine formulas very very quickly I think that he said is Wow by memorizing these formulas not only do I know them when I'm teaching I don't have to refer X book I can just write them on the board but these connect instructor or to see parallels and so forth because it's in my mind it runs part of you it literally becomes part of you because all your memory is stored in chemicals in the same way that information is stored in you know positive and negative charges and computers it's no different positive and negative ions in the brain so yeah it doesn't it again it's that principle your brain doesn't care what the information is only your ego gets in the way so if you would just memorize you will have that understanding ever it may be ok you want to memorize it or do you actually need to memorize it in order to make rapid advancements forward that's what we always need to keep in mind ya know that's a that's an interesting question that because I guess the other thing is is what are the things that are really worth memorizing these days as well because we can look up so many things by the internet and you've got Google and everything and so you know what you know what are the things that are really worth focusing on especially in the area of tech I find there's a lot of things that change very frequently so libraries get updated languages get updated and there's a lot of reading of just what the basically what the latest updates are there are certain things that don't change like some of the sort of underlying principles of certain things and so if you kind of go back to the original formulas and everything like that and effectively you could work out everything from that and those are probably the more difficult things to remember so for instance if you're working out the formula for a correlation well these days you could just call a function could see you are like core to figure out the correlation for that but remembering the sort of formula for that is perhaps a little bit more difficult before we talk today I was kind of going over so I mean just to give you a little bit background of myself as well so I teach a lot of our programming to different students and one of the ways that I kind of managed to effectively kind of get into data science actually was basically the fact that I had the opportunity to work with students and I I came from more of a programming and information systems and business intelligence sort of background myself and I had the opportunity to work with various statistics I insist about statistics but it's got a lot of programming as well so I managed to help these statistics from them but statistics is not my own it's not my background myself so it's one of the things that I definitely want to work on improving because I know it's really important and I know it enough to teach well-known statistics but you know keeping up with the conversations with students I can sometimes be a little bit more of a challenge sometimes and well just as a simple example I didn't catch everything you were just saying but as you were saying things I get a particular process going so R and Core right and it's just in my you know I'm starting to build a set of associations and so if I was reading a book on statistics and I came up on terms like our and you know oh I can just search for core and that's gonna bring up a certain formula then I'm gonna think of our that's people to make the apple core exposed or whatever and then maybe you say another thing and you're talking about statistician so now I'm gonna have this graph bursting out of the apple core right and you know as you go and save more things I can just compound on to this little mystical imagery that I'm making in my mind and I'm paying total attention to you not distracting myself or anything in fact I'm paying more attention to you because I'm encoding in my mind what it is you're saying you can do that while you're reading you can do that while you're taking a video course and this is the way that learners who are really good tend to operate anyway they just aren't necessarily aware of them doing it so you just become aware and then actually be more strategic about it so that you know we meet in a year or whatever hey how's things going with you know on our and working with statisticians do you ever memorize that full formula for core you know I don't remember what the whole thing no it had something to do with cor and it would populate you know whatever it is that you need so I was I was having a little bit of a browse actually I was just looking up a different formulas and so I I wrote down the formula for correlation correlation coefficient here actually and I'm not too sure if you can see that all right yeah and so after I read this I kind of thought oh right okay yeah that that kind of makes sense I probably learnt this quite a few years ago when I was doing we're not studying for a CFA but some at the same time I I realized that somewhere along the lines in the last seven years or so I I kind of forgot this formula and you know looking back at it now it's like okay well I can kind of understand what's going on which is which is still kind of useful but if I was learning that from which I would have at some point in time how would you actually like understand like okay well what are these different symbols and everything like that could you remember it without necessarily remembering what to all these symbols and everything are okay so there's a couple of ways to approach it but if it's correlation and coefficient right I don't understand what any of that means but now I know that that's what you're talking about right first I didn't quite catch what it was because I was focusing on the core thing but if it's correlation and coefficient and so forth then those things whether I understand them or not we can just start to have them as words right right so I saw that there was something like cor and then an equal sign yes so look let's be realistic here you're not gonna flash a code like that at any memory competitor and they're just going to be like core equals you know x over five three two one and then some symbol I've never seen before with the it's like a Greek you know Zed or something like that very few people are going to do that however if I have that actual probably nobody is going to do that not even an eidetic er which means something like photographic memory which actually doesn't exist but if I was able to study that for a while or Robert I do too in my training shows how he did nine formulas that look like that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have that same apple core and because I know that there's an equal sign or at least I seem to have seen an equal sign next to a cor yep I'm gonna have something like an apple core and then I'm gonna have my guy that I use for equal signs when I need it which is pretty rare but I need it and it's bound with two machine guns right it's gonna be in a memory palace so a memory palace is basically a mental representation of a room or a home or a sidewalk or you know there's different ways to do and I'm gonna map out in the exact linear formation of that milah an apple corer in this case it might be the band the course you've got lots and lots of options right it could be Corey Hart but whatever I'm gonna do I'm gonna have something for cor and I'm gonna remember what was a correlation and coefficient yes that's right I'm going to think something about those things whether I understand them or not right I mean in an ideal world you already understand but I'm gonna have that there and I'm gonna then have something that says the equal sign and then whatever comes after that I'm gonna work with it so you know I've been on live streams and people have thrown formulas that we're a little less complex than that and you know I just on the fly when they're a little less complex and I understand the symbols if it's a time symbol I'll just have Jesus throwing a cross where I might have the the monkeys from space odyssey' and instead of the bone flying up it's a cross like two bones making a cross and then you can have that sort of similar the question that I always have in my mind is you know when does that become useful to have that much sin that symbols in a formula memorized but I can tell you that no matter - even if you have a division line right you could just imagine in your memory palace the old Donkey Kong platform and above and below right and so something will be happening above and something will be happening below and you just sort of mentally project in your memory palace a Donkey Kong screen and you know just zoom in on that one little part so you have that this is above and this is below speaking of Donkey Kong one way that you can really help your mind is as you are doing this in your mind you can draw it out on a page so this is a Chinese word which is you ain't dumb which you know has to do with exercise and fitness and so forth and so what you can see here is the YouTube symbol and then the UN building you in and then dumb Donkey Kong and he's actually got a donkey I'm not a very good artist and you don't have to be a dump his Donkey Kong barrels and he's lifting it for fitness right and it's just easy peasy lemon squeezy you just got to get your head out of ever thinking that this is work ever thinking that it's tough take a spoon or a bucket ocean don't care just figure it out and if you study this craft this part the science of memory see just fun and easy it is and it's just a matter of being persistent and consistent so that you learn the skills progressively as you would know as well you know you got where you were but being consistent and and making it work you know that's really interesting I mean it's really interesting just to see the imagery that you apply to this actually it definitely does make it a lot more visual because to be honest for myself personally I've never really thought of myself as a very visual kind of person actually I mean when I kind of visualize this formula here I do have a visualization but it's really abstract because I mean because I I know what this kind of looks like as well I can visualize the scatterplot that this kind of basically relates to so and the different kind of patterns that a scatterplot might have but then you know you'd need to yeah you'd probably need to know a little bit more about statistics to sort of actually kind of get that in your head but then that's kind of what I would kind of link it back to you actually so you and your viewers you said scatter shot right scatter plot okay so okay but so scatter plot right well instantly I'm seeing William s Burroughs who actually used to put buckets of paint in front of a canvas and he would use a gun to roll them scatter shot paintings in any case I thought maybe that maybe that's how I misheard it on the note of being visual it's a big misperception that these memory techniques have anything to do with being vision and it's our fault as memory teachers because we say just get an image in your mind cetera and it's very hard to catch myself because here's something very exciting I don't have a mind's eye and only recently in the last two weeks or so did I start to see anything in my mind and then that they call a Fantasia which is the lack of a mind's eye I don't believe it's a but nonetheless I've had a bit of controversy by sort of being skeptical of this but the reason why I'm skeptical is because I've done well at memory competitions Lynne Kelly who's a very good memory competitor she apparently has no mind's eye and yet we still are able to use these techniques without seeing pictures in our minds so how does that work what's because it's never pictures anyway it's multi-sensory so we have a formula in the magnetic memory method world called cave cogs right which is kinesthetic auditory visual emotional conceptual olfactory and gustatory and spatial and for me the visual is the least of it this out to help students see what's in my mind so to speak because I'm just thinking about YouTube conceptually I'm thinking about the size of this little icon etc I'm which is the spatial element I'm thinking about emotions that I have to these things the UN building you know it's very very important that it's not about seeing in your mind on its own I don't believe anybody sees anything in their mind because our my imagination you don't have to be visual you just need to find your style find how you think build from your existing competence and anybody who understands what we're saying right now is extraordinarily competent to understand mental content and then start and woman behold seventeen eighteen years of practice one day I'm sitting here and I'm memorizing cards and I get to the nine of hearts which is corporate commander and all of a sudden I saw him after years of practice nearly two decades of practice I see Cobra Commander and as I told Alex Rivera who runs a Fantasia meow which is overcome a Fantasia I said you know I almost wish it never happened because now I am being more visual in my mind and that's interrupting my focus because I want to be with my wife and not thinking about the girl down at the cafe and now all of a sudden what was thinking about the girl it's Kathy I see her in my head as I get lost so you know be careful what you wish for and you don't need to be visual in order to use these techniques it was never needed and it's just a bit of a it's a bit of a flaw and not a flaw but it's a bit of a a feature of and we keep using pictures other languages that talk about memory technique they don't they don't do that they have other ways of talking about it so in German they call easels Broca which means donkey bridge right and bridge has that aesthetic physical spatial feeding to it here that donkey carrying the information you want to memorize over the bridge to your memory right it's it's not a visual thing it's it's something more bright bright okay now that's interesting that yeah because there's lots of different ways that we can associate things with in our mind basically right and each one of those is perhaps a little bit more individual to ourselves because we have different backgrounds and different associations and I think that's probably one of the key things with kind of memory techniques basically that it is forming I guess you said like more bridges more associations so that you have easier access to that to that information and so actually perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about the memory palaces actually because from what I understand of it anyway basically it's it gives another sort of reference point which can tie things together so not just memorizing things but being able to memorize things in sequence is particularly useful so I think some of these techniques that you teach would have been extremely useful when I was perhaps studying for certain exams and I wish I had some of these earlier and so yeah could you tell us a little bit more about the memory palace and how that helps us remember sequences and so the memory palace I believe is the strongest association power that we have and I believe that it's very difficult to explain exactly how and why all the time so bear with me because it's very simple but it's something that sounds more complicated than this but essentially not about a memory palace that's just a term that we use some people call it mind palace some people call it the journey method some people call it Roman room some people call it all kinds of different things method of loci and basically what you're doing is you're making space a mnemonic you're making it a location-based move on it so that you have a canvas upon which to build or a maybe a better metaphor is a theatre stage right and so you become a sort of theater director and you say oh I gotta memorize something with coefficients you know and and it's got to be Co R equals and this sort of stuff and so now we're going to have on our theater stage which could be the corner of this room or it might be above your shoulder Jonathan you know that this location-based mnemonic allows me to start to leave together other associations from that Cape cogs model right and now when we know we're just talking about a location-based one we have in our minds the big source ever because most of us have lived in more than one home in those homes there are more than one room we've most of us been to hotels we most of us been to cafes restaurants churches movie theaters museum cetera those are our friends all the homes of our families etc if you just get out a piece of paper write down a to Z and you go who do I know his name starts with a alan they're due to be and you know oh i don't know any be go on to see can you just start to gather this pool of rich associations businesses etc and then you draw squares on a piece of paper to help your mind if you're not visual like me and even if you are original hooked your mind craft a journey and so what i teach people to do is how do we make the most efficient journeys possible memory palaces i prefer that term but you know call it whatever you want I had an old man who couldn't this until he came up with his own term which was apartments with compartments and then after that he prized dozens of bones he learned German he was reading his old love letters with his girlfriend from World War two and he died happier you know and he actually to this day in the free worksheets that I give out his sample of the A to Z memory palaces as an example of just how easy this is so the note 88 oh man can do this anybody can and speaking of older people James growing one of the magnetic mary method students he won the 2019 Canadian memory championships as a retiree and he had already over the years broken a number of Canadian records so it's not about your age it's about your willingness to just dive in and figure this out and I'll be the first to admit that it is something that each person needs to figure out there's multiple points of entry it can be confusing because some people call them memory palaces will go to mind palaces etc and I sort of am guilty of adding to the confusion but I always try to the point that it's not it's about the fact that we're using location as a higher-order mnemonic to weave together our other known mnemonics like guys with machine guns like apple cores or the band of course or Corey Hart or whatever we're going to do to get this set of associations together right and so it's very very simple fun and it's a journey it never ends I've been doing this for so long I hope to be doing it the rest of my life because it's great and there's evidence actually there's a guy named Tim Dalgleish who has done some research into how this can help you get out of depression how it can help you with anxiety and it seems to me always that it's lifted my mood it actually saved my life in grad school I was so depressed and I found this stuff he never cured my depression but I felt better and I think it in some of the research I've read I think it has to do more dopamine more Mylene potentially more norepinephrine in the brain and all of these things are also sent supplement of habit formation and then of course when you're using space you feel more connected to the world right because you're now switching on this relationship that you have to your external environment you're no longer alienated you're no longer in this existential you know thrown miss or abandoned to just survive like some feral child that has no connection to anything know your using the world and you're making the world part of your ability not to survive but to thrive so it's really profound and in the Greek tradition Talese who's considered the first philosopher in science he said mega son took was offensive category which means base is ultimate because it contains all things what your brain except for a chemical bath that is the ultimate organization of space you're just you you I'm just me we contain everything we're ever gonna know in the space of our brains we are everything at some level that's a beautiful little abundant access to whatever we gain at a moment's notice so long as we train yeah no that's that's really interesting that and I mean you've used it for learning actually many languages I'm not too sure how many languages you actually speak now but so I understand you because the number doesn't matter there's all kinds of guys to leave there you know proverbial proboscis is in the wind about how many languages they speak I actually am just focusing right now on Sanskrit and Chinese but I have in the past become very good in German have experiences with Biblical Hebrew and others or images if I'm in Spain for a while I can usually within you know three month or so or just eat but I will make tragic mistakes because my beard used to be quite long but the last time I was in Spain I used the wrong word and then it ended up being very shortly and it's been shorter ever since so about I'm not I'm not so about my laurels I'm more concerned about what we can help other people do so we've got a man in Markham she learned 200 words in ten days of running time which is an Aboriginal language it only has something like 330 words I should memorize exactly how many words that but I imagine it's changing and most of them start with the letter A which was she found the magnetic mary method she actually wrote a big article about how helped because it's so frustrating with all these words that start with a she said that she had a 70% boost in the in the fluency in that language next thing you know she's going to meetings with these people and sharing some of their ceremonies and so forth there's a guy Eldon clamp in Israel he memorized a thousand words in ancient Ethiopian just six weeks and then he went on to read a thousand pages which is just incredible right so forget about me look at look at what's happening to this community that I serve they're tremendous things I never could have anticipated was possible I very much have called coaching effect and I've had it before in my career actually I was a script consultant mr. does they sometimes called her a script doctor I would never write you know a successful screenplay but I've helped people do much much better on the market with their movies and that's what every teacher hopes for is that your students will be better than you I'm just blessed and honored that people follow the teaching and make it real for themselves so and yeah if you really want to listen to me speak or sing Sanskrit or you know however long it 75 now by all means I'll throw down I've gone and competed I did half as well a guy named Dave Barrow who has two Guinness World Records but that stuff I find is dangerous to talk about because it can discourage people hmm everyday people use this whole time James going again he his first thing when he said when he was interviewed my memory isn't better than anybody else's I won the championships but it's not any better it's just trained and used in a particular way so yeah it's so much fun and it's so easy but I'm very cautious about discouraging anyone with really you know yeah I think that makes a lot of sense sometimes I even as a sort of teacher myself I always struggle with the balance between well how technical do you need to go because some of these things you know sometimes you know we're talking about programming and data science statistics and all these different types of things I mean there's certainly many many things that I'm still learning myself and there will always be kind of more to learn but even with sort of some more entry level sort of things there's a lot that you can do right so as soon as you know how to code and know a few concepts and stuff then you can start automating things start making your life easier it's such a I mean it's a it's such a joy to do actually right it's being able to just kind of practice those skills and then it's one of those things you can take it as far as as you'd like to really and I I imagine the same it's the same form sort of memory techniques yes no yeah I think there's a you want to be able to make it accessible for people and I guess show them well here's the here's the roadmap here's okay well if you'd like to get started here's how you can get going and even with this you could probably do something really pretty useful like whether that's brushed up for a language that's your for your next holiday or studying for exams there's always lots of certification exams when you're when it comes to programming data science all those all those kind of things you know there's a lot of technology that's always to learn lots of austere terminology and so you know I think perhaps skills that you've taught to people to learn different languages could be extremely useful for that I think we're doing some was taking a look at some articles as well about how different people were using memory palaces to basically learn up text books and you know basically here's the 23 principles of making certain programs faster and then different things like that so you know I think some of these can be incredibly useful it's just it's so simple if you if you set yourself up with the fundamentals because if I was if you were a text book and I wanted to track my way back to scatter plot and to correlation and coefficient and core equals expert are to deal with status decisions all I need to do is have these skills that let me know if I got anything wrong but you know all I need to do as I'm reading is have a memory palace in place and then I can just track my path back and then I ask myself questions you know like what is correlation in co-efficiency anyway or you know what is all her and then you know I can go and look and now I have this field that I've started to watch out and if it is if it was scatterplot you know I can now start to think of these other sort of diagrams around it what are how that connects to coefficients and you know all these things that we've talked about it's the same thing if you're meeting a textbook but you need to then go and ask yourself questions in your mind what were those things and then start to expand so that you're able to have more and more connections because the more you know your you can it's very important I mean just to give a little bit more reference let me just draw a quick scatterplot here so you've got actually can't see that right now but okay so don't know how you see that but that's basically a scatter plot you've got x and y axes on here and you've got lots of dots that's basically what a scatter plot looks like and then you've got this line which kind of roughly goes through AB dots and that line either kind of points kind of up or down or kind of in different directions and the slope of that line that's the that's what the correlation coefficient is so it's a number between 1 and negative 1 and it just I mean what's the useful thing to remember it basically shows you how well things are related to each other so if x and y are perfectly sort of correlated with each other related to each other then you have a number of one and if they're kind of going completely opposite directions then you have a number negative one and if they're kind of just randomly related to each other like this basically if there's no relationship then you're going to have a score close to zero so that's basically what the correlation coefficient is and we we use that to yeah see if one fact there will be a good predictor another one it's basically what that's used for so you know anything that you want to memorize you can memorize and then if there's numbers involved like one and zero and so forth and I think I saw on your diagram there that it was something times 11 you know if you saw an 11 I don't know if that's what I saw but if you add on 11 you can have an image for 11 that's a that's my sort of elongated dot but it is just a we're gonna put that previous formula with the core equals yeah that's uh yeah I should probably have popped this up on like a little slide or something like that where far easier to see than my scruples on a piece of paper so sorry about that but yeah yeah that's that there's actually a very structured systematic way to have an image for every number so if you said 0 I've got an image for 0 is a 1 I've got an image for boys a minus 1 then I've got an image where I can now just add like a knife sticking into the image for 1 and if I saw an 11 and there's an image for that there's an image for every digit every two-digit from 0 0 to 99 and so those things come into play and then when you start to expand and explain how this works I can now start to bolt on I call it the principle compounding bolt on these different things and that's assuming that I was learning and this topic which big one day I will at the end of the day though what really works is that people and this is the thing that I can never provide I can just give ideas on how to make it happen people need to bring their mission you know and they need to know the 80/20 rule and focus on the 20% that gives them the maximum output so that when they are memorizing their memorizing the stuff that really matters and as we started dividing themselves from what they think they want and really focusing on what they need to be that best possible professional self that they want to be and the catch is is you don't always get to know right by the same token there's many professionals like yourself where you could hire your consulting hour or something and you can give guidance about what that best you know 20% to focus on might be or you know if they're not able to do that they can go at school for example go to the secretary's office call it secretary it can I look at a previous exam or get in touch with there's no end of resources for the person who's open and willing to track them down and people want to help you if you're serious student yeah so it's really just a matter of making a mission for yourself there clipping yourself with the skills yeah I think that makes a lot of sense I mean sometimes the biggest part is actually figuring out what to learn in the first place right because you probably know this better than I do but the average language has I don't know how many different words in it but to be conversational you only need to know a sort of relatively small kind of percentage of that right yeah and yeah I mean like you said if you're studying for exam probably one of the best things to do is go get the posterior exam papers and and make sure you learn everything that's necessary to be able to do them right now I guess once you finish doing exams and you get out into the real world there's I guess there aren't so many previous year exams and that's other things to reference so I don't find myself spending ages just doing tons and tons of research about different approaches for for doing different things and solving different problems because yeah some of the sometimes the answers come from within the domain sometimes they come from out and the other problem that I find a lot of times with basically learning and researching things is that usually the lot of the information again with technology one of the difficulties is is that it gets updated so often so for instance if you're learning the r programming language the majority of the training available is the kind of stuff that was taught like 20 years ago but the more recent stuff there's a lot less of it right so maybe 90% of the information is twenty-year-old information and maybe 10% of the information is so that you were information which is going to help you do stuff faster right so that's that's probably one of the challenges and stuff as well well all the more reason for people to be subscribed to your channel and the work that you do and your website and so forth so that they have someone who cares about this information and who is keeping up-to-date and community is a big part of memory right we don't have to know it all there's a guy named Larry and I often refer to it who came to me want to be a doctor in this case you said how do you deal with this when there are zillions of facts yeah well come on now which individual on the planet has ever had to deal with zillions of facts and yet there are many many very very good doctors right so I did some research on this turns out that actually then people have done research on this so I was reading their research it's around a million data points that the average medical professionals is the doctor would have to deal with but never on their own because real doctors are part of communities of doctors and other professionals that support doctors in a hierarchy of you know quite a complex ecosystem and so then you really see that about each doctor is responsible for maybe a hundred dozen that one's right and they certainly don't have random access to even all of that at any given point they have reference manuals they have things like reflection further research and so forth and the really good doctor is the ones that you hear about that are in demand are the ones who actually take time with patients etc why might they take time with patients because they've got a larger field in their head in the first place so they craft their lives in such a way that they're able to have practices that are honest fo : outward directed and patient oriented etc etc and so people who are in a scarcity mindset and are scrambling around exaggerating with zillions of you know no this is this is a recipe for disaster what you need to do is find where you are right now be honest about it chart out a path to get one step better and if you base things on your existing competence and then you have a realistic path to the next step you can get there so fast it'll make your head spin in a good way of course and then you can you can accomplish so much more but you need to have a community around you you need to be able to know what resources you can rely on and we have to forgive the testing systems out there again it's like they know not what they do but at the same time people do pass them and they have a variety of ways that they do it some of those ways are better than others and you just need to ask yourself what am I willing to do and do I really want this have a vision for your life and then when you have your vision figure out the missions and just start where you are and go to the next thing and you can do it anybody can I don't I I just can't accept that there's anybody who is incapable to doing that another thing that I think that makes a lot of sense and I think that's really pretty concise actually because these days there is just so much information you know when you take an area like data science it's supposed to be the sort of melting pot between computer science and statistics and you know business analytics and all these different things and these are all specializations in themselves and so it's become uh it's become a topic which is very very very wide and I think the danger can be sometimes is that you try and learn every single thing there is and then a lot of those things are just not going to be the relevant to the specific type of thing that you're doing so it's I guess it's the same case like you mentioned with the doctors you know there's gonna be doctors that specialize in one thing and it's gonna be doctors that specialize in another thing and I think what we'll start to see over time is that a lot of these sort of data science certifications and and roles and stuff will start to split out into more specializations where people can actually focus on you know a few things that they can do that are going to make a difference and then sometimes I still think there's a huge value in being able to memorize certain things just because we are working with so many different types of people these days that it's useful just to be able to talk to them and talk to them in the early lingo and to be able to kind of keep up with some of the conversations like I said my background wasn't particularly statistics at all so I had to learn a lot from the statistic sometimes you just have to you almost have to go you know what I I don't know what that is I don't know what you're talking about could you please could you please tell me right because you know I'm sure that's common language in your in your sort of field of expertise but I have no idea what you're talking about and it's really about just I guess dropping the ego sometimes and going okay yeah I don't know could you please tell me exactly and just for the sake of time you know I should have asked you but I didn't you know what is this scatterplot you know display and that that would have been a good strategy but it just so happens that you because this is the whole point that I had before I don't know what those terms meant right and correlation and coefficient but because I memorize them and then you show me that drawing later right now it's it's making it make sense but if I if you had shown me that diagram and I didn't have those terms already more or less in my memory then I would have had to juggle new terms and a visual display at the same time right so had I asked you to explain it and you were very kind to offer it but if I'd had it in my toolbox at that moment of an interview and had said hey could you just you know explain to me what that is and I'd memorized those two terms well then it's exactly the principle that we talked about is that I now have space upon which that diagram can rest that expands my understanding of what those terms are even though I had done no reading on them or any like this and so everybody should learn that the value here is that there are things worth memorizing you don't have to understand them first because they can become the basis the platform that allows you to have space for understanding to rest right yeah yeah because it takes it takes time to understand stuff right and there's a I guess there's a there's a lot more that goes behind it and yeah I guess you just need to like you said build up the kind of about vocabulary over time and yeah I guess by memorizing the different bits you have I guess more material to work with friend absolutely more you learn the more you can after a main conversation Anthony I went back to revisit the breakdown of the population correlation coefficient formula and it shares a few more cues to memorize the meaning of different symbols and this sequence within a formula statistic formulas use a number of letters and Creek symbols to represent key elements such as the number of observations mean or standard deviation of a population there are lots of little nuances as such as the standard deviation of a population has a different symbol than the standard deviation of a sample so it's these kind of things which I think these techniques could be well adapted to remembering but if it was that you symbol it went by fast what did you call it that's the mean mean like any n yeah MEA and which is the statistical way of saying average right right okay so yeah I just would come up with like an umbrella or something that has a very mean demeanor something and I Oh maybe colm meaney would be in there to make it more concrete right right and the reason why I think of a number is that you see as I see it on the screen there it looks a little bit like it's got two sort of stands or something that's right it's a it's like a you with an extra with an extra leg on it so it's a anyone there but yeah I mean that's uh that's one of things I kind of wonder about because you know when you look at something like this it does have all these additional symbols and everything like that so you've got the the funny shape to you which is the which is the mean and then you've got that funny thing at the bottom which is the standard deviation so with anything at the bottom there Oh or yeah mines sticking out the side yeah yeah okay standard deviation right yeah so that that thing there that's the that's the standard deviation right so it's just uh it's got all these kind of funny symbols and everything like that which I guess if you already familiar with statistics then maybe that's not too bad but if you're learning that from scratch I kind of thought hmm that might be a little bit that might be a little bit a little bit difficult to do monix standard it is so standard deviation right what's the most obvious thing to do use for something that has this is a snowman right now here's the thing that your people should understand is that why I'm choosing snowman for standard deviation and that symbol is because it's round but also standard and snowman's start with the same letter and then this can be a carrot stick coming out of its nose right and then you know why I'm choosing an umbrella for the mean was it is because it just sort of looks that way but also because it starts with you yep right and so now mean colm meaney then you know to to reassert that I might want to me and you said mean means the average yes yeah so then I might want to think about him you know having the umbrella average Avenue or something like this right and he's like swinging or something like this and then maybe he's again it's that Donkey Kong platform and then maybe what I would have is as he's swinging he's going to like knock over the snowman in the the of the standard deviation and the line the carrot nose is going to fly out to hit the next thing that I need to memorize so and it's good that it's good that this is there and if you punch this in that's a great idea because you sometimes do need to go back and correct things because you will miss see certain things or miss read certain things or miss hear certain things don't chew up all your time with like endless stories of little Corrections I've made or helped people make over the years but I am quite deaf in this year and I will sometimes hear names like graham as william and so i'll then have to change the image of William Shakespeare to William Shakespeare with a graham cracker and then figure out how I'm going to remember that it's great I'm not willing because now William has this this premise e effect they call it a memory so anything that is done can be undone and improved but this just happens and it's not about perfectionism it's about progression towards getting better if you'd like to find out more about the work that Anthony does there's a free memory improvement course that you can sign up for I've also provided a link to some interesting information on these science of memory improvement both links will be available in the description below if you like this video please leave a thumbs up thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Jonathan Ng

Views: 2,963

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: data science, learn data science, data science for beginners, memory techniques, memory palace, how to remember, data science tutorial for beginners, anthony metivier, magnetic memory method, magnetic memory, magnetic memory method review, memorize formulas, memorize math formulas, magneticmemorymethod.com, learning techniques, how to remember things easily, memory palace technique, learn data science smartly, super data science, super data science podcast, kirill eremenko

Id: 2QZOIoI20yg

Length: 61min 8sec (3668 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019