- Hey friends, welcome
back to the channel. In this video, we're gonna be combining some of my favorite things in life. So that's note taking,
studying, tech apps, and specifically one of my favorite apps of all time, and that is Notion. And I'll be showing you how I take notes in medical school using Notion, and we'll split the video
up into three parts. So firstly, understanding,
secondly, memorizing, and thirdly, organizing. And as usual, you'll find time
stamps to all of those things in the video description
and in a pinned comment so you can skip around the
video if you feel like it. And just before we get
started, just to let you know, the kind guys at Notion are
actually sponsoring this video and they've given 1,000
codes that you can use to get a free personal plan for Notion. And I'll be telling you
the details about that sometime in this video,
so please do make sure you watch the whole video. Then you can catch the special code. Then you can get Notion for free. Yeah, let's move on. Okay, so there's basically
two main components of learning anything
when we're at university, and that is number one, understanding, and then secondly, memorizing. And note taking itself,
like summarizing content with the book open or summarizing content from lecture notes, in general according to the evidence base is considered a fairly poor technique for retaining information. But there are a few things we can do to our note taking technique
to actually make it useful as a way of firstly understanding and secondly memorizing the content. So I will take you through my Notion setup for Human Physiology,
which is a lecture series that I am helping teach medical students at the University of Cambridge. And I'll show you how I use
Notion to help understand and memorize the stuff. So let's start with understanding. And essentially, we're
gonna take this topic, which is cardiology, and
let's open it as a page. And I will dive into all the various bits. So firstly, I think one of
the great things about Notion that actually makes it separate to every single other note taking system is the fact that it's got these simple toggle thingies associated with it. So basically like this. And you can hide a ton
of information in toggles and you can make the toggles
go as far as you want. So for example, learning
objectives, I've hidden that. And within that, we've got
these seven learning objectives for this particular lecture. Within, I don't know, fetal
circulation, what have we got? Well within fetal circulation, we've got a handful of other toggles. This one has nothing in
it, which is why it's gray. But this one, what does the
oxygen dissociation curve for hemoglobin look like,
comparing maternal versus fetal? That has the oxygen
dissociation curb, or curve, which I've screenshotted
from my lecture notes and just shoved into Notion because Notion is great and it can take almost any kind of
content, whether it's text, images, PDFs, et cetera, and it sort of makes it look quite pretty. Okay, so how does this sort of thing help with understanding? So essentially when we're
taking notes on anything, it's really important that we keep in mind what the big picture is,
whereas it's very easy, like especially when the
subjects are difficult, it's really easy to just
focus in on the details. So for example, when I was
going through medical school the first time around, I
made the mistake initially of always focusing on the details because the amount of
stuff we'd get tested on in our exams would be
so minute and so like almost pointless levels of detail that I would often sort of lose the forest from the trees, as it were. Like I would be so deep
down to the details that I would forget what
the kind of big picture is. But since discovering Notion,
I've actually worked out a really good way of doing that. And that is that I summarize basically all of the
subheadings of my lecture notes. So for example here, Lecture Number One is Overview plus Why we need circulation. Lecture Number Two is Cardiac Function. Lecture Three, Haemodynamics,
and Lecture Four, Integration of Reflex Control. But within this, I have essentially turned all of the subheadings
in the lecture notes into their own little toggles. So if I want to revisit the
lecture on cardiac function, I can at a glance know exactly
all the different topics that are in that lecture. And if I want to dive
into a specific topic, I can just, you know, sold
the toggle out for it. Who discovered the ECG? William Einthoven and
Augustus Waller 1909. I have no idea. Clearly I wrote it a few months ago when I was studying this
topic for the first time. But that's the great thing about Notion is it lets you hide all the
details within these toggles. If there was only one thing about Notion that I think makes it
fantastic for students, it is literally just that toggle feature. And it's such a simple
feature that like literally no other note taking app has. It's not in OneNote, it's not in Evernote, it's not in Notability,
it's not in GoodNotes, it's not in, like I don't even know what other note taking apps there are, but this is amazing stuff. So yeah, going back to understanding, having this sort of toggle thing lets us basically have kind of
the big picture understanding of what's, of what our content is just based on these toggles. And the second way in which I think Notion helps with understanding content is that basically, whenever
there's some extra information, it's super easy to put it in the notes, but again, not lose
track of the big picture. So a problem I used to have
when I was using OneNote and when I was using Evernote is if there was a specific topic
that I didn't quite understand and I wanted to kind
of dive in more detail into that topic, it
would end up clogging up my notes quite a lot. So back when I was using OneNote, I would sort of have a side thing and end up having sort of enormous horizontal scrolling canvas just trying to get extra
information into it. But Notion makes this really easy. And I'll show you in the
Nerves lecture series like a point where this
illustrates this nicely. So let's open it as a page. We'll talk about these
essays a little bit. Over here, so this was
Lecture Number Five, Bioelectricity and Membrane Potentials. And you know, I was a little bit lazy. I summarized a few of
the main points here, here, and over here. And then there was some extra
stuff about membrane structure and about the Nernst Equation and the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz
constant field equation that I knew I wanted to
kind of make a note of. But I didn't want it like
clogging up my actual notes. So with membrane structure, for example, I remember that while I
was taking these notes, I was doing it sort of in line. Because as we're kind of
going through the lectures, we don't necessarily know
exactly what our sort of end note state is gonna look like. But that's another thing
Notion really helps with. So if I just kind of
paste some of this stuff that I wrote about this, you know, and I was talking about the
history of membrane structure. You know, in 1774, Benjamin
Franklin, blah blah blah. And then 1890, Lord Rayleigh. And then a few decades
later, blah blah blah. So I was writing all this sort of stuff. And then as we got to
around about this bit, this Frye and Edidin Johns Hopkins bit, I realized that actually,
this whole lecture is about bioelectricity
and membrane potentials. And the structure of cell membranes is a fairly, it's an important part, but it's not like a key structural part. And I realized that I
was actually, you know, losing the forest from the trees. Like I was so deep into the
detail of membrane structure that it was clogging up the notes. So the absolutely amazing
thing you can do in Notion is you can just make a new
page wherever you want and you can just put stuff in it. So if I want a new page, I can just write Membrane Structure, for example. And what I can do is I can
click this little thing. Turn Into Page. Now Membrane Structure is a page. It's a blank page at the moment. Let's add an icon to it. Let's make it pretty. Cell, no, battery. Let's do a battery, because a cell is sort of like a battery. That's kind of funny. But now I've got this
blank page, where are we, called Membrane Structure. But the absolutely
game-changing thing for Notion is what I can do is I can
select all of this stuff, all of this stuff that's
totally irrelevant to sort of my main lecture stuff, and I can just drag and drop
it straight into that page. And so now if I click on
Membrane Structure, there we go. We have retained the
structure and the integrity of all of our notes, but we've put it in a place where it sort
of makes a bit more sense. So those were just some of
the ways in which Notion, by the way that it's designed,
actually helps me personally understand stuff a little bit better in a way that no other note
taking app that I've seen does. So that was understanding. Let's move on now to memorizing and how Notion helps with that. Okay, so having understood the topic, how do we then commit it to memory? And there's loads of effective revision techniques for doing that. Note taking is not one of them. Note taking is generally considered middle to bottom of the pile when
it comes to efficiently trying to get stuff into our brains. The stuff that does work is a
technique called active recall which involves testing ourselves on stuff, and a technique called spaced repetition which involves, you know,
spacing our repetition of the topic over time. And I've done lots of
videos tackling those in specific detail. But in this video, I want
to show you how I use Notion to accomplish active recall
and spaced repetition within the context of taking notes. Because just to reiterate,
taking notes by itself, you know, if you're just
copying notes out of a textbook or typing up notes from
a lecture, that itself, according to the evidence,
is a very poor way of actually retaining the stuff. But if you add these super chargey bits to your note taking, I think it becomes a fairly effective way of retaining stuff. And that's what I'm gonna
go over in this video. So firstly, one of the
techniques that I use to help memorize stuff using Notion is something called the
Cornell Note Taking System. Now the fantastic thing about the Cornell Note Taking System is that it's got active recall built into it. So the problem with taking notes is that it's a very passive thing. And usually when we reread our notes, we're just passively rereading them or highlighting them or
writing them out again, which is totally pointless
and completely passive. But the way that we can
actually make our notes useful is by asking ourselves questions and essentially testing
ourselves on the content. So the way the Cornell
Method usually works is that on one side of the
page, you would have your notes. And on the other side of the page, you would write questions
about those notes. And so when you're going over your notes, rather than just reading
them, you would cover up the side of the page that has the answers and just look at the questions. And then you'd be like okay, cool, what are the four chambers of the heart? And then that would be kind
of the bit in your answer, as a simple example. And the way I use Notion for this is again using the toggle feature, which as I said, is like the single best
thing about Notion. So for example, let's go into Lecture One, which is Overview and
Why we need circulation. And within, for example, this topic of Gross structure of the heart, I've got a question for myself. How much blood does the
heart pump over a lifetime? And at the moment, I can't
remember the answer to this. And so click on my
toggle, and it's like oh, 200 million liters, which
is 500 swimming pools. 240 million joules of work. That's quite a lot of work. But normally, what I'd be tempted to do, and I think what we're all tempted to do, is we would have this information sort of like as bullet points in a way. So for example, we could
turn this into bullet points. And so for most of us,
when we'd see our notes, would be gross structure of the heart, oh, 200 million liters, 500 swimming pools. But we wouldn't bother
actively testing ourselves on that information. And so the fact that it can
go straight into a toggle, and actually, we can just
drag and drop this in there, means that when I look at these notes now, I'm actually forced to test myself on it. So you know, really I don't actually care about how much work the heart does. But something like this
is a lot more interesting. So the gross structure of blood vessels. I've got a toggle saying Diagram of blood vessel structure with labels. So you know, at this
point, if I'm actually going through this properly, I would get a piece of paper out,
I would draw a diagram of blood vessel structure
with the labels on it, and then I would click on the toggle and it would give me the answer. But the point is I'm
engaging brain beforehand. I'm not just including
the diagram in the notes. Equally, what is the
tunica intima made up of? Mostly endothelial cells, isn't it? Oh, endothelial cells and
elastic connective tissue. So I missed out that bit,
so that bit, you know. But the point is, you know,
I've tried to dredge up this information from my brain. So the very fact that
I've tried to recall it will strengthen the memory in my mind. What is a tunica media made up of? I think this is mostly smooth muscle, I want to say smooth muscle. Smooth muscle cells with
bands/fibers of elastic tissue. Fine. And what is the tunica
adventitia made out of? I would say mostly connective tissue like collagen and stuff. Collagenous extracellular
matrix with fibroblasts, blood vessels, and nerves. It adds rigidity and
form to the blood vessel. Great, but again, the
point is I'm asking myself the questions first, and then
I'm trying to answer them in my head or out loud
or on paper or whatever. And only then am I looking at the answers. And this is basically the
Cornell Note Taking Method in action in Notion. And that turns our notes
from a passively rereading pointless waste of time,
which is what it would be by default, into something
that genuinely helps our brain develop because it's, there's just so much research that shows that getting information out of our brain, like active recall, testing
ourselves on the information, is by far a better way of
retaining that information than just rereading it and trying to put the information in again. So yeah, that's all I'm gonna say about active recall for now. And I'll link a video up there
and in the video description which is much like, 25 minutes long about why active recall
is the best thing ever. And it talks about evidence and shows you animated graphs and all this stuff to really help drive home the message that active recall is a way of life and active recall is the
single most valuable thing that any of us can do to
get better in our exams. There's actually a really good
book called "Make it Stick" which is about the science
of effective learning. And they, and the authors of that book, having studied hundreds
of thousands of students, say that you know, if you're struggling, if you're not getting the results that you want to get in school, chances are you're just not
testing yourself enough. Testing ourselves is the
way to get better results in a very efficient fashion.
So that's all I'm gonna say about my active recall preaching. I've been doing that a lot
over the last three years, and you know, hadn't done it for awhile. So you know, that was a preach mode. Let's now talk about the second thing that I love to preach about all the time, and that is spaced repetition. Now spaced repetition,
it basically helps us counteract the forgetting curve. Now the forgetting curve is something that was discovered by
a chap called Ebbinghaus in the 1800s, and he discovered
that if you learn anything, the memory for that thing will just decay exponentially over time, which
is why we get the phenomenon that when we learn something, and we come back to it a week later, we realize we've forgotten all of it. And sometimes we think
that oh damn, you know, I must be stupid because all my friends can retain the stuff, but why can't I? But actually, all of our friends
have that problem as well. It's an innate part of how memory works that you will just forget
stuff that you don't revisit. So the idea behind spaced repetition is that you want to repeat the topic at spaced intervals over time to interrupt the forgetting curve. So let's say you would
do a topic on day one. And then you would do
it again the next day. Great, now you've interrupted
the forgetting curve. But because you've interrupted it, it actually takes longer to forget it. So then you review the topic a week later. And again, you've interrupted
the forgetting curve. And then let's just say
you do it a month later. And by spacing the repetitions
of that topic over time, we end up basically getting the topic into our long term memory. Now I've got a video that
basically talks about the method that I use for doing this. I think I released this video in 2019 before I discovered Notion. And prior to that point, I was using Google Sheets for this method. So I had a spreadsheet. How it works is that
I've got a list of topics down one bit of the spreadsheet. And then I'm writing down the dates for whenever I'm repeating the topic. And now, I basically do this on Notion because it lets me have
everything in one place. So for example, the topic of Nerves, I call this the retrospective
revision time table. So the topic of Nerves, I first did repetition one on the 1st of January. And then I repeated it
again on the 7th of January, and then again on the 20th of February. So it was one week in
between these repetitions, and then like a whole month and a bit between these two repetitions. But the point is I'm keeping track of when I'm repeating the topic. Equally Muscles, I did
first on the 1st of January, then on the 8th of January
and the 21st of Feb. 3rd of Jan, 10th of Jan, 24th Feb. I'm keeping track of how
often I've repeated this. And the ideas is that
when, let's say today it's the 25th of February. Let's say today I know I want
to study Human Physiology. I would look at my retrospective
revision time table and I will think okay, what is the topic that makes sense for me to do today? So for example, Renal I've
only done once in total. That's all about the kidneys. And I did that on the 18th of February. So I'd probably be doing
that today, 25th of Feb. And maybe if I had time, I'd
possibly repeat Respiratory. Another important thing with
this is that in brackets, I'm rating how difficult
I found the topic, or rather how well I knew the topic after kind of going over it. So for example, the
first time I did Nerves on the 1st of January, I
rated it a two out of five, which means I wasn't very good at it. But then the next time
I did it a week later, I rated it a four out of five. And then when I did it a month later, I rated it a five out of five, which means I know the
topic almost back to front. And if I'm like fully 100% confident, I might rate it a six out of five just to let myself know
how well I know the topic. And that means let's say
there's a topic here, you know, let's say actually Respiratory
was a one, let's say I don't know anything
about respiratory medicine. Now, this is really useful
information for me to have. Because now it's the 25th of February and I can decide that actually maybe, my time is better spent
repeating Respiratory Medicine, because it was only a one
out of five a week ago. So why don't I do that
today, maybe on top of Renal, or maybe instead of Renal. And the idea is that over time, we're keeping track of how
difficult we found these topics so we can build our spaced
repetition intervals from that. There are lots of people that prefer to create their own like study time table. And you can absolutely do that on Notion. Notion is amazing, it's
got like tables and graphs and you know, canban boards. So you can make a revision
time table that looks forward, a prospective revision time table. As I said in another video, which I'll link up there somewhere, I'm just not a fan of this method because it involves
way too much guesswork. You know, how will I
know two months from now what my day's gonna
look like, and therefore which three topics I should study? Instead, I prefer to do it this way where on any given day,
I can just take a glance at my revision time table and I can decide okay, what is the topic
that I need to most do keeping in mind the principal
of spaced repetition and keeping in mind the
idea that I should probably be tackling the subjects that
I'm least comfortable with. Because what's the point
of revising Nerves again that I'm a five out of five on? I should really spend my
time studying something that I'm a two out of
five on, for example. And one of the nice things about Notion that I always go on about is it's just kind of a pleasure to use. So let's say, you know, you
want to be a little bit fancy. You don't want to do two out of five. You can actually just use emojis. So if I, you know, I
could just do two stars. So we could do a star and
just copy and paste it. And that could be two stars. You know, this could be four stars, and this could be five stars. And then when I'm looking at this, it's just like oh, it's just kinda nice. Alternatively, you can use like a traffic light system of emojis. So let's say that was a one and I can use a red little dot thing. That was a three, so let's call it yellow. I'm finding a yellow emoji. And that was a four, so let's
call it, I don't know, green. And I'm finding a green emoji. You can just kind of use
whatever emojis you want. And that's one of the
sort of pleasurable parts of using Notion, that
the emojis just added a little bit of spice to it and make it more interesting to use. So yeah, you can kinda do what you want. But the idea is that with this method, you are encouraging yourself
to use spaced repetition and tracking how difficult
you found each topic so that over time and on a given day, you can decide what topic
you want to focus on. And finally, I just want to talk a little bit about organizing. Like Notion is really helpful for just like organizing everything. I'm not really a student anymore, so I teach Physiology and I use Notion to help kind of organize
my lectures around that. But I don't really have classes to go to or assignments to do, as such. So I don't really find
use of it in that sense. But I've seen loads of
people's Notion setups over the last few months. Like almost any time someone meets me like on the streets or
you know, at a conference, or I was at VidCon over the weekend. And like three different people came up to and said oh, I started using
Notion because of your videos. And I was like great, can
you show me your setup? And you know, they were
like showing me their setups and like here's how I'm
tracking my homework assignments and here's how I'm tracking my essays. Here's how I'm using Notion
to track my dissertation. There's all sorts of
organizational techniques you can use in that. And the nice thing about Notion
is that there is this whole library of templates
that the Notion staff, but also that members of
the community, have made that you can just copy. And I'll put a link in
the video description. You can just kind of have a look through the sorts of ways in which
other people are using Notion. And you can basically
duplicate those templates and do your own thing. But I'll show you the
way that I use Notion is that I use it to
keep track of students. So here are some of the students
that I've been teaching. I've got 10 students that I teach usually on a Thursday night. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna, Seamus, Dean, Parvati, and Cho. And occasionally, I'll set
them certain essays to do. So I've actually got
a whole bank of essays that I've taken from previous past papers. For example, describe the
roles of sodium channels and the sodium pump in the electrical activity of nerve fibers. And I've linked that
to the topic of Nerves. And that is like an actual
link within the database. And that's another really
cool thing about Notion is that you can have these
links between the databases. So for example, if I
were to click on Nerves, it would take me to this Nerves topic. And the really cool
thing about this is that when I'm on the Nerves topic, it shows me all of the related essays
because the Essays database and the Subjects database is linked. So it shows me at a glance what
all the different essays are within Nerves, that have
been tagged with Nerves. So you know, all-or-nothing behavior, initiation, form, and
propagation of action potentials, all of this sort of stuff. And so I've got some nerve essays. Some of the essays fit
both Nerves and Muscles so I've tagged them with
both so they appear in both. So if I click on Muscles, for example, you'll see all of the essays. There's nine of them in total
associated with Muscles. Equally, Cardio, Respiratory, Renal, Endocrine, et cetera et cetera. But crucially, I can also
see which of the students I've assigned these essays to. So let's say it gets
to the end of the term and I need to write an end of term report for one of my students. And let's say I'll go on Ron. I can click on Ron and
then Notion has created like Ron's own profile. And within that, it tells me all of the different
essays that Ron has done. How is the strength of contraction regulated in different types of muscles? To what extent are homeostatic
mechanisms anticipatory? How does the body respond to
an ascent to high altitude? All interesting things. So I can see what essays Ron has done. And you know, if I've still
got the physical copies or if I've got the Word
documents or whatever, I can drag them up just to remind myself. And I can also add kind
of extra elements to this. So for example, in sort of
the middle of Michaelmas term, the first term of university, Ron's score in the exam was
80% in the multiple choice and a first class essay,
which is very good. And let's say we were doing
a second term mock exam. I can just make a property for that. And then Ron's score
might be 95%, or whatever. So essentially with Notion, I can just add whatever I need to to organize my life. And I use that to help
organize my students and keep track of what
essays they're doing. But if you're an actual student, then obviously you can
use it to keep track of your assignments,
your notes, or whatever. And so that's basically how I use Notion to take notes in medical school. I've seen so many people
now who use Notion for the same thing, and
everyone says oh my God, Notion changed my life since I started using it for note taking. So if you've gotten to
this point in the video, then you're in luck because
the kind people at Notion who are very kindly sponsoring this video, they have given us 1,000 codes to upgrade your free Notion account
into a free personal account. Now the free Notion account
is easy to get started with because it gives you 1,000 free blocks. And blocks are like, you know, each of these lines is a block and each of these pages is a block. And within a page, every
block of content is a block. 1,000 blocks is pretty
good to get started with and kind of play around with Notion. But really if you're using it for any kind of thing long term, you will need to upgrade to the personal plan. And the personal plan
is four dollars a month or five dollars a month depending on whether you pay annually or monthly. But if you watched this video
and you're at this point, please do hit the thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm, as they say. But also you can use a special code and that'll be on the screen. And there's gonna be
instructions on the screen here somewhere and maybe
also in the video description about how you can upgrade
your Notion account into a free personal account for life, or at least for a year. I don't know how long it's
for, but it's for a long time so that you don't have to pay for Notion. So actually if you're a student and you've got a .ac or a
.edu email address anyway, you can just get a free
personal account just anyway because Notion is free
for students to use. So if you use the right email address, you can just upgrade your account to a personal account for free. But let's say you're a student
from a different country where you don't have edu
or .ac emails or you know, you're not a student and you
just want Notion for free and don't want to pay the four
dollars a month, whatever. You know, even though
they sponsor my videos, I still pay for Notion. I'm not yet on a free personal package. But because they're very kind,
we've got 1,000 of those. So the first 1,000 people to visit that and put in that coupon code
will get Notion for free with the personal plan. It's great, definitely check it out. Before stopping this,
I just want to show you one other thing, and that
is, this is something that I sort of always tell my students and tell them at the start of the term. These are sort of the priorities as far as I'm concerned in teaching them. Like priority number one is stay healthy, 'cause you know, there's
no other higher priority than kind of managing
physical and mental health, especially when we're in university and this kind of like
really intense environment. Priority number two, as
far as I'm concerned, they should preferably pass the exam 'cause failing an exam, if there's no extenuating circumstances,
is usually a recipe for a lot of misery further down the line. And if you can just pass the exam, then life just becomes a lot easier. And then point number three,
understand physiology. Enjoy physiology, enjoy
the university experience, enjoy the degree, and the final priority is sort of right at the bottom of the list is to get a first class. And so the thing that I tell my students is as far as I'm concerned,
all of these six things rank way higher than
getting a first class degree or doing really well in the
exams, as long as they pass. And then at that point, I'd much rather they enjoy the subject
and enjoy the degree and enjoy the university experience than they kind of kill themselves trying to compete against the
rest of the people in the year to try and get amazing exam results. So just a little snippet of life advice that I sometimes offer to
students for whatever it's worth. So yeah, that's it. Thanks for watching. That was how to take notes
in Notion at medical school. Links here to more of
my Notion themed videos. I think like in 2017
or 2018, I became known as like the iPad Pro guy. But now when people stop me on the street, I seem to have become
known as the Notion guy. Great, because I love Notion and use it absolutely every day. Thanks for watching, see you
in the next video, bye bye. (funky music)
