Transcripts
1. Introduction: [NOISE] Here's another one. [MUSIC] Which of the following
is proven by science to be an effective study technique? A, taking notes with a laptop. B, studying one thing at a time. Or C, doing exactly the opposite of what you think you should do. One of the most
interesting things about science is how it constantly reminds us that
our intuitions are incorrect. [MUSIC] We used to think the
Earth was flat. It isn't. We used the think we were the center of the
universe. We aren't. We think the way we study
is effective. It isn't. [MUSIC] If you think about it, learning is probably
the one thing we do our entire lives in school, university, during work,
when we read a book. When we practice a new skill,
we're always learning. But the question is, do
we really know how to? It was Abraham Lincoln who once said that if you give
him a six hours to cut down a tree
he will spend the first one sharpening the ax. These means that preparing
to do the job is as important as doing
the job itself. That's the objective
of this class, for you to learn the art and science of how to
learn effectively. The goal is to show you what
200 years of research in neuroscience have
taught us about the way our brains function, learn, and memorize. It's not a matter of analyzing experiments for the sake of it, is to see which practical
and useful techniques are concealed behind them, waiting to be used. By the time we're
done, you'll have the methods and tools to study in the way your brain
has evolved to learn. You'll understand what it
means to study intelligently. You'll analyze how an evidence-based style
protocol looks like, and then you create
one for yourself. Imagine that working side to side with your brain
instead of against them. I am Santiago Acosta and
this is my new class, the science of
effective learning. Welcome. [MUSIC] Welcome to the class everyone. My name is Santiago Acosta. For those who don't know
me, I'm a medical doctor. I graduated from Universidad
de Rosario in Columbia. I'm also a content creator, owner of a couple of
YouTube channels, both in English and in Spanish. As I said in my trailer, my goal with this class is very simple. [NOISE] I want to
help you create the best learning
protocol for yourself. You see, most of us want to
learn all sorts of things. But we rarely take
the time to craft a system that actually
makes us reach those goals. Just as James Clear says, [NOISE] "You don't rise to
the level of your goals, you fall to the level
of your systems." Given that the learning
system for most people is pretty much non-existent, well, what kind of result
can we really expect? That's why the purpose
of this course is to help you craft a protocol, a system if you will, that gets you from what
do you know to what you want to know as
efficiently as possible. To do this, I'll
walk you through the 10 most important lessons that 200 years of research in neuroscience have produced, and I'll try to keep those
lessons simple and practical. I don't want to give
you esoteric techniques that only makes sense in the lab or in something very
special conditions. The total opposite. I really want you to
leave this class with some very clear and
practical advice that can be applied as
early as today. Now as you watch these videos, I want you to start thinking about the ways in which you can apply these techniques
to your own protocol. Because as you'll
see in a moment, more than rules,
these are guidelines. They point away but don't
delineate the pathway. As you watch these videos, start playing with the
ideas in your head. Imagine how they might be applied through the
specific scenario. In this way, once
the cause is over, the creative process will be
[NOISE] that much easier. After these videos, I
provide a summary of the 10 biggest take-home
messages from the class, which I have very
dramatically named the 10 commandments of
effective learning. I suggest using these videos
sort of a checklist of what a good learning protocol should have in order to work optimally. Finally, in the last
video of the class, I'll walk you
through how I apply these commandments into
my own learning protocol. The idea here's to show
you an example of how all these theory
can be applied to something practical
and easy to implement. You can obviously use my protocol as a base
to create your own. But as I've said,
the point really is for you to create
something personally, something that adapts
to what you want to learn and how you
want to learn it. Once you've created
something you're proud of, I invite you to
post that protocol in the project
section of the class. A simple screenshot
or a few paragraphs explaining it are
more than enough. But if you'd like to post
a more comprehensive video explaining your protocol, that would be awesome as well. Also, if along the class you have any questions, suggestions, or whatever, feel free to leave them in the discussion
section of the class, and I'll be happy to respond. I'll see you guys. [MUSIC]
2. The First Rule: Have you ever thought how
difficult it would be to convince someone that lived
hundreds of years ago, who has spent years believing
the earth to be flat, who each and every one of his senses confirmed
this to be true, and every person he knows of believe the same thing, that [NOISE] it's
actually round? How would they react? Would they change their mind
at the face of evidence? You see, one of the big problems of tackling misbeliefs and misconceptions is that some of them feel extremely intuitive. So much so that we don't even think we should
be doubting them. Of course, now we all know for a fact that the earth is round, but think about this. What if you are in this very same moment
holding a misbelief, maybe not as big, but as incorrect as the
earth being flat, and you don't even know it. How would you react if I
showed you the evidence? Would you change your
mind in the face of it? In this video, we'll
explore precisely that, at least with what it concerns
to effective learning. To do that, I wanted to hear the following three statements and decide if you believe
they're accurate or not. Try to be as honest
as you possibly can. [NOISE] Here they are. Learning, memorization, and performance are
maximized when? Number 1, when people receive information in their
preferred learning-style, and by that we mean visual, auditory, read,
write, or aesthetic. Number 2, when
people learn through strategies that
actively force them to process the information instead of just
passively review it. Number 3, when people
focus on learning single subjects very
comprehensively one at a time, instead of segments for multiple subjects at
a time in parallel. Take a couple of seconds and
think about your answer. You have it? Let's start
with the first one then. Learning, memorization, and performance are maximized
when people receive information in their
preferred learning-style. Seems very reasonable. Everyone is unique, everyone
has different preferences. So it should make
sense that if we match the way we prefer to study with the way we actually get to study, we'll see
some improvement. Such a statement should
be easy enough to prove. You just pick a
group of people that identify as, let's say, visual learners and
other that identify as, let's say, auditory learners. You mix them up, you
form a couple of groups, and then you expose each
group to a presentation. For one group, the
presentation will be delivered using an
auditory format, and for the other group, using a visual format. By doing so, one part
of the group has naturally their
learning-style match, and the other doesn't. Then you give everyone
the same test. If the premise we're
discussing is correct, those who had their
learning-style matched would demonstrate
better results. The good news is that
this study has been done. In fact, more than once. The bad news is, however, that it always shows
the same result. Matching the class with a
preferred learning-style of the student doesn't increase
his rate of learning, memorization, or performance. In fact, a review of studies on the topic by an expert panel in 2009 was so shocked by not
only the lack of evidence, but the evidence proving
that this isn't the case, that they concluded
the following. The contrast between
the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence
for its utility is, in our opinion, striking
and disturbing. If classification of
students' learning-styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated. This is totally wrong. In fact, every piece of
evidence we have says that although students do
have preferences, that doesn't mean that matching them will make for
better results. Believing that by
matching the world with our preferences will get better result is a
very intuitive notion, but it's usually incorrect. In fact, the study methods that demonstrate the best
results are hands down the ones that integrate multiple methodologies at once, not just the ones
the student prefers. One example of this is
the multimedia effect, which states that
instead of just showing texts or just showing images, showing both improves learning. Contrary to learning-style
hypothesis, this actually has evidence to
back it up, but I digress. The point I was trying
to get you to think is, why if this is so clearly wrong, why then up to 96 percent of teachers believe it to be right? As you think about that, let's move on to the next point, which states that people perform better when they learn
through strategies that actively make them process information instead of
just passively review it. This one's true. [NOISE] I had to
include some true ones among the mix to stop
people from thinking, everything is false, I already figured it out. No, you didn't. The last one, learning is maximized when one
subject is studied comprehensively at
a time instead of chunks from multiple
topics in parallel, and this one has to be true. We grew up being told that successful people focus
on one thing at a time, that you have to
finish what you start, that you can't be
all over the place studying 10 subjects
at the same time. This whole idea of
trying to study bits of five different topics in the same afternoon just
feels wrong, doesn't it? A few years ago,
world-renowned psychologist, Dr. Robert Bjork, performed a series of
studies that made him realize that it's
not that simple. We'll delve deeper
into these studies in the video called the
sum of all steps. But here's the basic idea you have to understand
about these studies. He basically made a group of
students learn a subject. Half of the concepts of that
subject were to be studied comprehensively
one after another in the usual way we all study. But the other half of
the subject would be studied in segments, in chunks. Instead of devoting a whole
session to a single concept, multiple concepts
would be studied in parts through
several sessions. Now before doing experiment, Professor Bjork
himself thought that learning one thing at a
time would be superior. After all, that's what
makes the most sense. But as you can see by
this graph, he was wrong. This graph basically shows that students were subjected to four different tests after
learning the material. The performance of the
content that was learned with the usual method is
represented by the black dots. The performance of the content
that is learned through the alternative method is
represented by the red dots. As you can clearly see, the counter-intuitive method
is the clear winner here, but that's actually not
the interesting part. The interesting part is that
after performing the test, the participants were
interviewed and were asked, which method do you
think helped you more? You know what they said? More than 70 percent stated
that they believed they learned more when
studying one thing at a time instead of
multiple segments, which as we know is the total opposite of
what actually happened. As if this wasn't enough, the researchers went one step ahead and told the participants, did you know that 90
percent of students actually performed better
with the other method? Does that make you
change your answer? But no, it did not. In fact, 80 percent of
them just responded, that must be because I belong to the 10 percent that doesn't
do better with the method. [NOISE] It's just amazing
how stubborn you can be. Why does this happen? Why do we believe with such a strong conviction in things that are
simply not true? According to psychologist
Daniel Kahneman, when we don't know the
answer to a question, we tend to substitute it with a question that we do
know the answer to. We swapped the questions, answered what we do know, and then believed that we
just solved the same issue. We do this subconsciously. We
don't even notice we do it, but we do it, and that
seems to be problem here. Instead of answering
the question which study methods
increase learning, memorization, and performance, we're answering
which methods feel easier and natural and
more intuitive to us, and then we just act as we'd
solved the same question. We will delve deeper in
the following videos into some of the
studies mentioned, like the ones from Bjork. We barely just
scratched the surface. But I wanted to start the
class with this message first. Why? Because as ancient Greek philosopher
Epictetus once said, "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks
he already knows." The prerequisite to take
advantage of this class and the 200 years of research
that gave life to it, lies in acknowledging
that we really don't know which techniques
are worth our time, which techniques are more
effective than others. We think we do, but that's simply not
the case as we just saw. If you don't open yourself
up to the possibility that maybe you don't know
how to study effectively, nothing I say in
this class will make a difference because you'll think you already
have the answer. What's the take home message? Be open to change
what you think. Allow yourself to update your misconceptions in
the face of evidence just as you would expect someone from hundreds of years ago
to do the same as well. Remember, that as the
world-renowned physicist, Richard Feynman once said, "The first rule is that you
must not fool yourself, and that you're the
easiest person to fool." See you in the next one.
3. The Easier... The Better?: In the world we live
in, we tend to think that the easier, the better. In the case of education, this has manifested itself
as a chain from extensive, artery textbooks, to
easily digestible ones, from static images
with footnotes, to clear animation that
leave no room for confusion, from taking notes
with pen and paper to typing with incredibly
fast laptops. These change of strategies reflects not only a
shift of mindset, but also a deep
underlying desire to optimize
everything around us, even the way we learn. But there's a problem
because as appreciated as new technologies are when
it comes to learning, it seems like whenever
we make things easier, we also tend to learn less. Take this study, for example, where two groups of
students attended a lecture and were
instructed to either take notes by hand or with their laptops and then
present a couple of tests, to see how much they learned. One would expect
laptop note takers to perform miles ahead better, after all they have is speed on their side and with speed
you get not only to write more information
but also finish faster and have
the opportunity to focus better on the lecture. However, that's not
what happens, in fact, the results show
the total opposite. The old, outdated, slow and unoptimized method
comes up on top and this happens regardless of how you instruct
laptop note takers to annotate or the time you give students to
review their notes, or how many times you
run the experiment, it always comes up the same. But you see this is not
an isolated finding, every time we run
this experiment, every time we compare
one intervention that is supposed to
help us learn better, with one that just makes
everything more difficult, the one that should
be helping us, just ends up making
everything worse, this has been the
case for animations versus static images, clear, concise explanation
versus challenging and confusing ones, there are even experiment that gives students the same class, through a couple of
different strategies and ask the students which
class they prefer, and almost always, the class they prefer
is the one that gives them the worse results
in further testing. So what's going on? Is the secret of learning
effectively just to make things hard
for the sake of it? Well, not really. You see the problem
here is biology. Biology is, how can I put this? Lazy? And systems like ours, always tend to deploy
the bare minimum effort, to complete a task, after all, this is the
conservation of energy, and every living system tries to leave under
the principle. Take as an example
of your muscles, if you've ever gone to the gym, you've probably
experienced how it feels to push your body to its limits and so let's say
you can do ten pull-ups, by which pull up do
you think you'll start to feel pain and fatigue? One would think it should be
around the eighth or ninth, but in reality, it's around
the fifth one. That's right. Your body actively
sends you signals of pain and discomfort
for you to stop, when it still has 50
percent in a tank. If it were by him, you
would stop at that point, after all, why do more? He asks, but here's
the crucial point, as stress is for your muscles, it is as well for your brain
and if you don't believe me, just do the following tests
and you'll see what I mean. Alright, so let's
say you enter into a toy store and there's a
toy bat and a toy ball, together they cost a $1.10 and the bat costs a dollar
more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? If your answer was 10 cents, you my friend just
proved my point. You should take a couple of
seconds to think it through, you'll realize what
the ball simply cannot cost 10 cents, since that would make
the bat cost $1.10, and together they
would be $1.20. But I want to emphasize that
this is not a math test, both teenagers and ten years
professors perform equally bad in this challenge because this is not testing
your math skills, is testing your thinking skills, more specifically is testing whether your mind
does the effort to go that extra step and
check the solution to a problem that seems
rather obvious, and as you have just
probably realized, it usually does not and this is a problem because
whenever you pick up, let's say in animation
or a video to study, you think your mind is actively learning the content in the
video as she's watching it. But is she really? I mean, after all the only
thing she's required to do is to follow the sequence of events displayed
in front of her. As long as she does that, you will feel like
you're understanding, and thus will add the
task is completed, and given that the sequence
is easy to follow, because the video made it so. Well, she's not required to
do that much effort, is she? But now compared to that
with learning through a series of static pictures. When you see a sequence
of pictures of images, it's harder to follow along, the pictures constantly
make your mind go what? What change? What happened
between these and these? I don't quite get it. So just to the one I told
you that the answer was not $0.10 and I forced
your mind to think, here, your mind is forced to pause and make sense
of the sequence. In a very real way, your mind has to work harder to provide the sense
that the animation, previously provided for you and that increase
mental effort alone, is what makes you learn more. The same thing happens
when taking notes, when you attend a
lecture and you start typing away into your laptop, you can be so fast that you
can quite literally start transcribing what the
professor says, word by word. In that case, the mental effort required to complete the task, is that of hearing, holding, and typing. That's it. Now competitive with
taking notes by hand, given that you're
not as fast with your pen as you are
with your laptop, you simply cannot
transcribe the lecture, instead, you're forced to hear, discern what it's worth
keeping versus what is not, summarized the information
and then write it down and that tiny bit of
increased mental effort, that tiny bit of
extra processing, is enough to produce a testable and
repeatable difference. This effect happens
with images, videos, typing, listening, and
even when reading. In fact, German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer, made a famous comment about this when he said the following, "When we read another
person thinks for us, we merely repeat
his mental process. It is the same as the pupil,
in learning to write, following with his
pen the lines that have been penciled
by the teacher. Accordingly, in
reading the work of thinking is for the
greater part, done for us. This is why we're consciously
relieved when we turn to reading after being occupied
with our own thoughts. But, in reading, our
head is, however, only the arena of someone
else's thoughts". So throughout the years
we have developed all these techniques that
take the load of our minds, that simplify the
information, that in a way, into the thinking part for us, but we forgot that it was
precisely that mental effort, that thinking process, what made us learn
the first place. It is because of these, that the strategies which
require the more effort, often produced the
more learning. After all, those
are the ones that force us to think, the most. But our minds trick us into believing that
that's not the case, that when studying feels
easier, we're learning more, and when it feels harder, we're learning less,
but just remember, this is an illusion. In fact, scientists call
it the fluency illusion. So just as building
muscle takes effort, learning also takes effort, and just as you have force you body through several techniques, to complete those last few reps that trigger growth
and adaptation, you also have to find ways to make your mind
process the things, you're trying to learn, because it is that
extra mental effort, what makes the difference. Now, this doesn't mean
that to learn effectively, you have to go back
to the middle age and throw away your laptop. No. What it means is that
you have to remember that just because someone showed
you how to get there, it doesn't mean you yourself
know how to arrive, and so as long as you keep
that in mind and force your mind to actively
process the information, you'll be able to
take advantage of all these new technologies
in a way that actually makes sense and make
you learn more effectively. Now in the following videos, we will go through
several techniques , to help you with this, but honestly, if you
use more habits, can make a world of difference. A couple that I have
personally used in my own learning, are one, press on myself to pause
after I've read or listen to a few ideas and try to go
through them in my mind. So I pause and I asked myself, what are the main points? Why is that? How is that? I tried to process for a minute, what I've just read or listened to without the help of the book, with the help the pack,
with the help of my notes. Nothing, just by myself. So that's the first topic and the second one is
that I take notes and not while I'm reading or while I'm listening
to the class, but after I'm done. So I will explain this
a little bit better in my learning protocol in the
last video of the class. But the basic reasoning
behind doing this is that by having to
annotate after the class, I forced my mind to be the
producer of the content, not the transcriber
of the content, and you'd be amazed at
how much more the ideas stick around when your mind is the one that produced them, is the one that wrote them
by thinking for herself. So yeah, start applying these right now after
the video's over, take a couple of minutes and go to the main
ideas in your head, try to see if you
actually understood them or if you just thought
you understood them, and always remembering, that as Albert
Einstein once said, "Education is not the
learning of fact, but the training of
the mind to think". See you in the next one.
4. Study like a Chess Master : [MUSIC] Did you know that
chess masters can look for just five seconds at a board and memorize the positions
of all the pieces. We initially thought this
was an extraordinary memory, but then through a series of experiments like the
ones published by Chase and Simon we
realized it wasn't. You see, if memory was the key, it wouldn't matter how
you organize the board. The player should be equally
able to remember it. But that's not what
happens [MUSIC] when you take a player and show
him two different boards one being the initial result for game and another day
random arrangement of the pieces you will
notice how the player is only able to remember
the first one. In fact, both masters
and novices are equally bad at remembering the artificially
arranged boards. These types of experiments as unrelated as they might
initially seem to the topic of this class
actually demonstrate one of the most important
message we need to understand about
effective learning. They teach us that
the prerequisite for learning is meaning. It doesn't matter
how many chessboards you've looked at in July. If you really want
to learn a specific one rapidly and effectively you have to find a way to make it meaningful otherwise you'll
perform as bad as beginners. But how do things
become meaningful? After all, if I
look at chessboards all the arrangements
look just as random and meaningless to me. So how do I go from
total ignorance to being able to glance at a
board for just five seconds, decide that it makes sense? I'll learn all of the pieces. Or in other words, how
do we learn at all? Well, as always, it all seems
to build onto the brain more specifically to something
called neural pathways. You see out there
in your brain you have 86 billion neurons. But contrary to popular belief, neurons are not very smart. In fact, most of
what they do is just send and receive electrical
impulses. That's it. However, depending where
those impulses are core and with what other
neurons they connect to you're able to form neural
pathways or the connections between neurons and this is
where the magic happens. For instance, when
you stand up you might use this neural pathway. When you eat, you might
use this other one over here and when you learned
that E equals MC squared, you might use this
other one over here. All throughout your life
your brain has developed trillions and trillions
of these pathways and it is these
connections that give you everything you know and
everything you are. But the thing you have to
keep in mind is that making these pathways from
scratches hard. Like how long did it take you
to actually learn something from truly from scratch
like to stand up and walk? A year. Imagine if everything
took that long to learn. That's probably why we've developed a system
to rapidly learn new content without building neural pathways from scratch. Scientists often
called this process elaborative encoding
or elaboration. It is defined as the
learning of new facts and skills by connecting
new information to already created neural paths and in case it wasn't clear that is what makes the new
information have a meaning. A simple practical example
of this is learning through analogy and we've
all experienced this, for instance, as kids,
we were all told that the mitochondria is the
powerhouse of the cell. Why were we told this? Well, because
intracellular organelle that transports electrons
and produces ATP probably meant nothing to us but that point but powerhouse or
battery on the other hand, well, there's a
pretty good chance we have already a
neural pathway for that and so if we take this ADN connect to this
other one over here, hey, can I makes more sense now? Just like these many of the initial foundations of our knowledge are based
on analogy and metaphor. This is the first practical
advisor to the video. If you are starting to
learn something new, a new subject that
seems confusing, difficult to wrap your head around one of the
best things you can do is try to understand it through analogies
and metaphors. In fact, many of the
popular Internet teachers of the world like
Neil De Grasse Tyson, often use these tools to help people get started
in complex subjects. However, as great
as analogies and other simplification
techniques are to get that first approximation
to a topic through in-depth knowledge
require methods that go beyond just making
the content easier. Consider, for example,
the following statement and think about how
you would learning. It says the estimated
prevalence of gastroesophageal
reflux disease is between 15 and 20 percent. So how would you learn
something like this? When I ask this question
to students many respond. Well, I read it. That's
it? What else should I do? You see the problem with just reading a statement
like these is that they enter through one year and quite literally come
out of the other. You have to keep
in mind that you are constantly being bombarded with information in the
streets, social media, news, everything is
always showing you information and in
case you didn't notice most of that
you just read. But then again, how much of
that really stays with you? 10 percent,20 percent,
less than that? Is that the percentage you want staying with you with the stuff you're actually trying to learn? No. Well, then you have
to go an extra step on process a bit more the information you're
trying to learn, trying to make it
more meaningful. So it stays with you for longer. Here's where the more advanced elaboration techniques
actually come in. One of my favorites has to be
elaborative interrogation, which as the name
implies consisting asking yourself
questions to help you link new information to
already stored neural paths. For instance, while
they personally deed to learn the sentence we
showed a minute ago. Well, as a stop and think, okay. First of all, what
does it prevalence of 20 percent actually mean? It means that one in every
five individuals have it. Okay, can I think about a five people group to put
this into perspective? Well, yeah my close family
has five individuals. So how many of them have gird? Two. Okay, that means
that the prevalence of gird is literally double the one of the
general population and hey, do I happen to know by how the prevalence
of another disease? Oh yeah, you know that
the prevalence of diabetes is around 10 percent. This means that for every
diabetic patient that I've seen there are
two with the gird. Let me imagine though those
are a lot of patients. Let me really try to
let that sink in. I know that this can sound
like I'm just rambling with myself but is precisely
these types of questions, these types of thoughts
and connections, what provides meaning to the
fact I'm trying to learn because 15-20 percent mean
really nothing to me. I have no connection to that
fact but that my family has twice the prevalence of the general population
that means something. 15-20 percent mean nothing when isolated but when I
picture of that in diabetic patients I've seen and I realized that
there are literally twice as much with gird
that means something to me. What I'm about to
say will sound very counter-intuitive but
the fact that I knew the prevalence of diabetes makes learning the prevalence
of gird far easier because it gives me something to contrast and connect
this new idea with and that connection is what gives the
new idea meaning. This explains why
continuing to learn a subject of which you
know a few things is far easier than it
starting to learn a subject of which
you know nothing of. These also why the masters of a discipline seem to remember everything they read
about it because it is truly the case that
the more they learn, the easier it is
to keep learning. But okay, this is
just one example of how to do elaboration. There are hundreds of
other ways to do it. For instance, take these
paragraphs as an example and think about how you would
learn something like these, a paragraph such as this one. You probably realize that just
asking yourself questions about this paragraph is
probably not that effective. There are many ideas. The problem is not about
each idea specifically but about the some
of all of the ideas. What can you do? I know
I can make flashcards. Well, sure you can but that's a bit like trying
to become a chess master that can memorize chessboards in seconds but not by
playing the game and seeing the meaning but instead just by
taking the photos of the boards and
memorizing them through repetition, you see the problem? One elaboration strategy
that I would suggest instead is organization
which as the name implies, is trying to give meaning to new information by rearranging
it in a way that makes more sense that
connects to a framework that already is stored in
the brain of the student. For instance, what I did to
learn the paragraph with syncope that I just showed you
was take a step backwards. That I took a step back
and I thought, okay, so this information
is really a mess. How can I organize it in a way that makes sense to me?
Okay, let me think. Okay, so there are
these four causes. If I think about it oh, yes, each one of the four causes actually corresponds to
a layer of the heart. These ones belongs
to the outer layer. These ones belongs to the
vessels just beneath it. These ones correspond
to the muscular layer and then these ones correspond
to the most inner layer. Okay, so next time I need to remember the cause
of cardiac syncope instead of just
using brute force to make my mind remember. I just think about the anatomy I know but I heard about
the idea that is already stored in my memory and that will trace me back
to the content. Now of course, if you don't know by heart the heart anatomy, no pun intended,
you'll have to use a different
organizational system, something that
makes sense to use, something that is already
stored in your memory and if nothing is stored
in your memory you may need to create a
meaning from scratch, in which case analogies
or maybe retrieval cues or trying to go and
learn the first principles. It is maybe what you need to do. But the point I'm
trying to make here is that the secret to
effective learning lies in realizing that our
minds learn by seeing meaning and this is done
through connections. As crazy as it sounds it is truly easier to
learn and remember two well-connected ideas than one isolated fact. Try
to keep that in mind. Next time you are
going through a text instead of reading along try to pause and try to give your mind the time to make
the connections, to give meaning to the text. Once you start doing this you'll realize that not only
makes learning easier but it also gives you the
superpower of being able to play with the ideas
in your head at will, you'll be able to move
from one point to the other or as some
other say think laterally across subjects and make the connections
that some people just can't think of and so always remember that
world-renowned scientists, painter, and engineer
Leonardo DaVinci once said, "These are the principles for the development of
a complete mind. Study the science of art, study the art of science,
develop your senses, especially, learn how to see, realize that everything connects to everything else" See
you in the next one.
5. Fish is Fish, Brain is Brain: Have you ever heard the
story of Fish is Fish? Well, there was this
fish and this frog. They were friends,
they lived in a pond and one day the frog
goes out into the world, and they started seeing all of these interesting new animals. Though extremely excited, he
comes back into the pond, and they start telling
his friend about it. He says, Hey you
won't believe it I saw all of these
amazing new animals, like for example,
there were birds, and they had wings and two legs and very
color you can imagine. There were also cows
which have four legs, horns, they eat grass, and carry pink
bags full of milk, and they were also people and
proceeded to describe them. Now the interesting thing
about this story is that as the frog is
describing these animals, the fish can't help but it create a mental picture of
what they must be like. As you can clearly
see by the drawings, the fish imagines
these animals as basically fish with these
special characteristics. These, despite being
a children's story is extremely accurate, and it happens precisely because as we discussed in
the last video, when we learn something new, we tend to build on top of
the ideas we already have. As such, the fishes
who have never seen birds, humans, or cows, cannot help but imagine these animals as
versions of themselves. This is the exact same reason
for why when you try to imagine a new color
you've never seen before, you only seemed to
start thinking about combinations between
colors you already know. Why Aliens are
always imagined as people with these special
characteristics and why creating a new
language always starts out with words
you already know. This creates a problem
because after all, this is not how birds, humans are in cows actually
looked like and thus, the learning of this fish is
incorrect from the get-go. Believe it or not, the
same thing happens to you. To prove that I'm going to
walk you through one of the most interesting and
fascinating experiments I've ever come across. In 2008 there was a PhD thesis published
by Dr. Alexander Muller. What it basically did
was take a bunch of physics university students and subjected them to a
series of experiments. In one of the experiments,
the students began by taking a multiple option pre-test
with questions such as, consider a basketball player shooting from the
free-throw line. After leaving its hand, the force on the ball is A, upwards and constant, B, upwards and decreasing, C, downwards and constant, D, downwards and decreasing, E, tangent to the
path of the ball. Take a couple of
seconds to think about your answer. You have it? After the pre-tests, students were randomized to watch one of several 10-minute
explanatory videos such as the following one. Now consider a case where gravitational force
is the only force acting on an object. While juggling balls in the air, we'll ignore air resistance
because it's so small. Only one force acts on the
ball throughout its flying. This is the force of gravity, which is constant and downwards. Gravity accelerates the
ball in the downwards direction after being thrown up, a ball travels slower
and slower upwards. Its velocity goes through zero, and then it speeds up in
the downward direction. The whole time the ball is
accelerating downwards, then it meets the
juggler's hand. Immediately after
watching the videos, students read to
the same pre-test, to see if they learned, and also proceeded to an interview
with Dr. Mueller. The usual comments from
the students that watched these video were that
explanation were clear, concise, and easy to understand. But did they learn? Well in the pre-test, the
average correct response was 6.0 out of 26. After the video, the
average was 6.3. What went wrong? Well,
in the interviews, Dr. Mueller realized that
many students weren't actually learning
what the video said, and instead they were
changing it a bit. For instance, there was
a student that said in the video it said the ball is slowly decreasing in force, therefore it stops at one
point and then comes down. I wonder where else
have I seen this. What was worse was that
another student said, it wasn't that hard
to pay attention to because I already knew what
she was talking about, so I was listening, but I wasn't really
paying utmost attention. In light of this evidence, Fish is Fish becomes a
terrifyingly accurate story, and it shows just how flawed our learning process can be when the elaborations we make are
done with a faulty base. How can we fix this? I mean have you just saw just providing the correct
explanation is clear and concise as it
maybe is simply not enough. Well, Dr. Mueller
had a proposal, he made sure to include among
the educational videos, one that explicitly addressed the students' misconceptions
like this one. Can you tell me
what happens when a single ball goes around once? Well, Luke's hand
gives the ball a force that drives it upwards
against gravity. But as it goes up, this falls gradually dice away until at the very top it
perfectly balances gravity, and then gravity wins,
so the ball falls down. The teacher then proceeded
to explain topic through a dialogue
with the student. Now in interviews with
the students that had watched this
particular video, none of them said
the video was clear, [NOISE] concise, and
easy to understand. In fact, the most
common words to describe the video
was confusing. However, on the post-test, the students that
watched this video had their score nearly doubled. What does this tell us
about effective learning? Not that confusion is
our requirement of learning but that the most
confusing professors are actually the best ones
but at one of the keys of effective learning is to realize that we're prone to
have misconceptions, that many of our
previously held notions are incorrect in a
fundamental sense and that a mechanism to
explicitly correct them isn't only helpful
it is required. Just like Dr. Mueller
proved in his study, just showing the
correct information does not really
address a problem. It's like your mind will try to do absolutely everything in her power to make the information fit her
preconceived notions. As far as we can tell, the best way to learn
new information is not by starting to read
the topic and that's that, is by first explicitly showing your mind where
she's having problem, where she's having the issue, making her conscious of it, and then providing the
correct information. But there's an issue with
this, people hate it. You see our culture
tends to believe very deeply in these ideas
of errorless training, where you [NOISE]
gradually learn and gradually test yourself
under learning material in a way that minimizes the times you're
told you're wrong. In fact, their whole
educational system is based off on that premise. We first teach you something
as simple as possible, then we give you
exercises to practice, and then we test you. If by any point things
got confusing hard, or you made mistakes, either the teachers screwed up or
the test was too difficult, or you didn't pay attention or this career just isn't for you, but whatever the case, something happened
because mistakes are not supposed to occur. Science actually tells us
we've got these backwards. You see the process
that mediates learning is called
synaptic plasticity, the rewiring of neurons
to create new pathways. The thing is that neurons don't rewire themselves just because, they do it because
they're forced to. If you think about it,
that makes a lot of sense, as we said in a previous video, biology rarely changes
unless it's forced to. If your mind has
a certain so you could in place and tries
to learn something, but everything she comes across just agrees with what
she already has, or at least she thinks so, no change is going to be made. Why would it? But if you
might have a circuit in place and receive some
explicit mistakes signal, [NOISE] a signal that tells her, Hey this is not working, this is not like that, we have to adapt, and we have learned
something new. Yes, in case you were wondering, this has been tested. For instance, this
study by Kornell analyze whether adding
an open-ended question, that the purposely made students answered incorrectly
before showing the correct answer could improve student performance versus just showing the correct
information up front. Yes, as you can see by the graph approaching students who
make a mistake before learning the correct
information improved performance by about 30 percent. I'm going to repeat that, just adding that
little step before reading the correct information improves performance
by 30 percent. [NOISE] As cliche
as it may sound, you truly learn more
from your mistakes. In fact, one of the crucial
things that appears to explain why some
people learn faster than others is because
they seem to respond more actively that he's with higher brain activity
to mistakes. This was shown by this
study that analyze electrical brain responses to mistakes in high
versus low learners. Can you see the difference?
Impressive right? No. One is you have
to keep in mind before starting turning
your study sessions in mistakes sessions
is that mistakes tend to be very
emotionally upsetting. Several experiments in fact, have shown that when you friend
the mistakes incorrectly, they can produce
the opposite effect and be detrimental to learning. On famous online
experiment designed by Mark Robert showed
precisely this. You basically launch a challenge where his followers
would be able to move different
commands of a game as a way of learning
how to code. One group had points
that decreased during each incorrect attempt as
a way to penalize them, whereas the other just had
a pop-up window saying, Hey that didn't work, try again. Keep in mind these
points are worthless they literally mean
nothing in the real world, and yet they ended up making
quite a big difference. The final results showed that the group that got penalized for failed attempts had a
success rate of 52 percent, whereas the group that
didn't get penalized, had a success rate
of 68 percent. That's 16 percent difference was entirely due to framing
mistakes incorrectly. What I want you to do now is
to think about how you might apply mistakes in your
learning protocol. I found myself developed
a habit of starting my study sessions by not just reading about the
things I want to learn, but instead searching
for practice questions or challenges about
the topic at hand, trying to force myself
to generate a response or a hypothesis before
learning the material. If you think about
it, this is what Kornell did in his
study and in fact, these strategies
embedded they're in a general study technique
called the generation effect. [NOISE] Yes, it does feel
a bit weird at first and for sure there
are questions such as, what is fixed slot? That you simply can't answer until we read a bit
more about the topic. However, most questions
are answerable, or at least you're able to
make an educated guess. Once you do it, once you make your educated guess explicit, you're not only getting
priming your brain to more effectively absorb the
material you're about to read, but you also get to make
your mistakes explicit. As we have explained, this is what triggers synaptic plasticity
and improves learning. Now you know, the key to
learning is to scrap, or as Mortimer Adler
said more eloquently, The path of true learning is
strewn with rocks, not roses. See you in the next one.
6. What Just Ain't So: Let's do a little
experiment. Shall we? Make sure to watch this part
of the video in full screen. Close or cover your left eye
and look at the plus sign. Be aware of the circle
but don't focus on it. Keep looking at the plus,
keep looking at the plus, you may need to move your
head back and forth, maybe to get the screen
a little bit closer, a little bit farther,
but at some point, the circle is going
to disappear. Now close your right eye
and look at the circle. Repeat the same process
and eventually, the plus sign is going
to disappear as well. These are your eyes'
natural blind spots, and they are a reflection of a terrifying underlying truth. You don't see what
you actually see. You see the way we're able to observe the world around us, is through a series
of lights and some cells in the
back of our retina, light passes through the eye, is captured by the cells and it's then sent
back to the brain. But there are a
couple of problems. First, there's a huge
hole in the orbit where no retinal
cells are located. This is called the optic disc, and by having no
retina source here, you're literally blind to
a segment of the world. This is what explains
a blind spot you just found a few seconds ago. But the second issue is that
in front of your retina, you have a series of vessels blocking the light.
You see them? So if you were to see what
your retina actually detects, it will look
something like this, which is quite horrible. But then why does
everything look so clean? Well, simply put is because your brain fills up the spots. You see, your brain
is constantly receiving input from
your retinal cells. But as we explained, this
input is incomplete. What your brain does is use the available
information to fill up the missing pieces and present you with a
complete-looking image. That's why we stop seeing
the circle or the plus sign, you don't start seeing a
black hole all of a sudden, which is what you're
actually seeing, but instead just more
of the background. But you see, filling all gaps is not a feature
you need to decide, your brain does this
constantly with everything. That's why, for example, we were able to read
the following text, despite having no
grammatical sense at all. It is also why sometimes you are convinced you
understand the topic when you actually don't. I'm sure everyone has
experienced this. You come across a new idea maybe through a video or a book, and in your head, that idea
is just crystal clear. It makes so much sense. Then you go ahead and try
to explain to a friend or a colleague and you start
realizing, you know what? It made a lot more
sense in my head. Scientists called this
poor metacognition, which is the way we think
about our own thoughts. This poor metacognition happens because when you first
learned about the idea, you didn't really
understood all the points. You ended up just as with side sending a half-baked
signal to your brain, which then patched up to provide you with
a clear picture, in this case of the topic. You think you understand
what you think, but is just your brain making you think you
understand what you think. Now I'm pointing this
out. Many people will jump ahead until they do no, no. That they do know, they do understand, they
just can't explain it. However, as American philosopher Mortimer Adler once said, "The person who says
he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not
know what he thinks." These were minutes students
think they understand the topic until they
get tested on it. The funny thing is
that they always think is because
they understand it, but they didn't remember
it or they didn't happen to know that
specific detail. But in my experience, most of the times is because
they confuse understanding a topic with the feeling of
understanding a topic, and those two are very
different things. So how can we fix this? Well, the first thing
to recognize is that the problem is not that
there are blind spots. The problem is that you're
not conscious of them. What we'd really trying to fix is the poor metacognition, and the only way or the
best way to fix this is by getting the ideas out of our
heads. How can we do this? Easy. We put them to the test. We try to use them, we try to make an essay, we try to write about them, explain them to someone else. We start a debate,
start a discussion. Anything that makes the ideas come out of our heads will work. If you ask me the most
convenient and powerful of these methods is probably
speaking about the idea, trying to articulate them. Indeed several psychologists are tested to the power
of articulation. For instance, Jordan
Peterson, a famous professor, and psychologist is
known by saying that people don't think
and then speak, they think as they speak. Which is why therapy helped a lot of folks with
their problems. Not necessarily because
they receive advice, but because they finally
get the opportunity to get ideas out of their heads and analyze them as they truly are. One of the best things you can do to improve your
learning protocol is getting in the
habit of trying to articulate ideas you're
trying to learn. There are formal strategies
to do this such as the Feynman technique that
basically consists in trying to explain
what you study as if you were trying to make a
five-year-old understand. The idea being that by
imagining a five-year-old, you will try to simplify and distill the information
as much as possible. You will also imagine how
after finishing each sentence, the five-year-old will just say, well, but why is that? Which made you dig deeper
and deeper into what you know until you realize where it counts at the
start to break down. Now I personally use
a modified version of this technique where
instead of teaching to an imaginary five-year-old, I tried to teach the topic
to myself and I make the effort to write
my explanation as I go through with it, with the help of something
like a whiteboard or an iPad. I do this last step because
it forces my brain to be more thorough with the explanation and
explored corners, I wouldn't just exponent
a bit inside of my head. But again, that's
just what I do. Now it's your turn to take a few minutes and
think about how you can incorporate these into
your learning protocol. Always remember that as
Mark Twain once said, "It ain't what do you know
what gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure
that just ain't so that does." See you in the next one.
7. The Sum of All Steps: Let's say you have
seven topics to study and a week to learn
them. What do you do? Option Number 1, you
read one topic a day. Option Number 2, you read a bit about each topic
every single day. Most of us naturally gravitate
towards the first choice. It is the most natural, the most clean, and after all, society has told us since day 1 that successful
people concentrate on one thing at a time
instead of being all over the place in
10 different subjects. But is this truly optimal? Well, to take this out,
Professor Robert Bjork, performed these user studies in the most famous of these, participants had to
learn the painting style of 12 different artists. The first six will be
learned one at a time. To do this, participants took all of the available
paintings of each artist and spent a
few minutes to study them. Then they moved on
to the next painter, and the next painter until all six of them had been learned. This was called studying
in block or mass study. The remaining six,
on the other hand, will be learned a
bit differently. They would randomly look at just one picture from every
artist and they studied picture by picture
of different artists through several rounds until the same amount of pictures, as with the first
method, was achieved. This was named distributed, spaced or interleaved study. Now, in contrast to what
the researchers expected, the participants showed
better performance in each of the four tests when
the painters were studied using the
distributed method. However, what is more
interesting as you may remember, is that the participants weren't aware of this effect
as later when asked, what do you think helped
you more, massed or spaced? Most participants
answered that they thought they learn better
when studying in block. This experiment has
been replicated all across the board
from painting styles and mammal differentiation to advanced electrical geographical patterns and legal scenarios. One of these studies,
for instance, analyzed where they're
giving surgical residents lessons on microvascular
surgery would improve performance when they're
in an intensive day long format like it's usually done or through four
short periods of instruction distributed
over several weeks. The findings, as you
might have guessed, proved that the group that had received the distributed lessons outperformed the other group
in a later practical test. However, in most of these studies you see
the same effect popping up that despite being
clearly less effective, participants tend to
prefer studying in block. But why does this happen? Why do we consistently prefer
an ineffective method? Well, if you ask
me, it's because we hate a slow growth. We want everything
to happen now. We want to get that
topic learned today, not occur at the
span of the week. We're so desperate seeking fast results that
we end up choosing an overall less effective
method just to get them. Professor Bjork stated
precisely these when asked why people don't
distribute the learning. He said, "Instead of
making an appreciable leap forward with their abilities after a session or
focused practice, distributed learning
forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps
forward with many skills. However, over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of
these leaps you would have taken if you just spend
the same amount of time mastering each
skill in its turn.' If you ever want to
improve your study method, you have to switch your mindset
from the steps you make today to the steps you make
in a week, in a month, in a year, from intensity
to consistency, and you have to trust the
process because your matrix simply cannot be how
much I learned today. Simon Sinek puts these
beautifully during one of his interviews where
he says the following. If you would go to the
gym like exercise. If you go to the gym and you work out and you come back and you
look in the mirror, you will see nothing. If you go to the
gym the next day and you come back and
you look in the mirror, you will see nothing. [LAUGHTER] Clearly
there's no results, cannot be measured, it must not be effective, so we quit. Or if you fundamentally
believe that this is the right course of
action and you stick with it, like in a relationship, I bought her flowers
and I wished her a happy birthday and she doesn't love me,
clearly, I'll give up. That's not what happens. If you believe there's something there, you commit yourself
to an act of service. You commit yourself to
the regime, the exercise. You can screw it up. You can eat chocolate
cake one day. You can skip it a day or
two. It allows for that. But if you stick with
it consistently, I'm not exactly sure what day, but I know you'll start
getting into shape. I know it. The same
with the relationship. It's not about the events, it's not about intensity,
it's about consistency. You go to the dentist twice a year, your teeth
will fall out. You have to brush your teeth
every day for two minutes. What does brushing your teeth twice a day for two minutes do? Nothing. Unless you do it every day twice a
day for two minutes. It's the consistency.
Going to the gym for nine hours does not
get you into shape. Working out every day for 20
minutes gets you into shape. What I want you to do now is to start thinking about how you can implement this into
your learning protocol. Something I started
doing, for instance, is developed a habit of reading chunks of multiple
topics every single day instead of single topics comprehensively every
single afternoon. I explain a little
bit more how I do these in my video,
My Learning Protocol. But in a nutshell, I've tried
to distribute learning of every subject over several days instead of several
hours and go from a one topic a day to
several topics a week. But again, that's
just what I do. You have to try it
out for yourself. You have to be open
to the possibility to try different things to see
if they work for you or not. See you guys on the next one.
8. No, You Don't Have a Bad Memory: What do you see? Do you think you
have a bad memory, and if so, what do you
mean by that exactly? You see people
tend to think that memorization occurs
in two steps. You first learn
about a topic using your working memory and then
mostly through repetition, you store that information
into long-term storage. The analogy people used to
explain this is imagine that working memory is like
writing on a piece of paper. As long as you hold onto it, you will be able to use
the information on it. But life happens, right? You're forced to
write the papers, you get distracted,
your hands get full, and inevitably you
lose the paper, which means you forget, which is exactly what
happens with working memory, and so if you need
to use that piece of paper in the foreseeable future, you try to store it in
your long-term storage, which in this analogy
would be something like saving that paper inside of the bag pack you carry everywhere with you so
that whenever you need it, you have it always
[NOISE] ready to go. Now, in my experience, whenever someone says they
have a bad memory, they mean one of two things. Either they struggled to start the papers
inside of the bag, meaning they struggled to store the ideas inside of their heads. Or once inside, they
will lose them easily. Whatever the case we end
up with the same problem, the paper is not in the bag. But what if I told you that
whenever you forget it's not because the paper
is not in the bag, it's because you lost the access to the
paper. Let me explain. Have you ever tried to
remember something, maybe a song, a fact, a concept, the memory that
seems totally gone, you just can't seem to remember. But then maybe minutes
later or years later, someone tells you
a certain word, or you come across
a certain thing, a certain place, a certain
scent and then all of a sudden[NOISE] the
memory comes back up again as if it
was never gone. Yep. Well, everybody has. In fact, this explaining
is so common and has been documented through such
extreme periods of time, that we started to
consider very seriously a theory that seems
too crazy to be true. We'll start to think
that whenever we forget is not because we
lost the memory, but because we lost the
access to the memory. The fourth theory basically states that whenever
you learn something, you might associate this new idea you're
trying to learn to several pieces of information
called retrieval cues. Retrieval cues can be
literally anything, the room where you
learned the information, the walls that were
used to describe it, the analogy that was
used to explain it, the emotions you
felt while learning, the random of thoughts
you had when reading it. You're minding goats everything
she can to the idea. Some are strongly, some are loosely and some to
other ideas as well. The theory then states that whenever you want to
remember a specific idea, you are presented with a cue and if the
cue is appropriate, if it is strongly
tied to the idea, your mind uses it to unlock it and gain access
back to the memory. However, if on the other hand you try to remember the
idea through a cue that is not well-connected
or is connected much more externally to other ideas, you will not be able
to remember it, and instead you'd
be thinking about a bunch of other ideas, except the one
you're looking for. A simple demonstration
of this is illustrated by the famous
study of Dr. Marian. He basically interviewed a
group of people that had lived both in Russia
and the United States, and then asked them
questions both in Russian and in English. When the participants received
the questions in Russian, Russian memories came to mind. When the same questions
were asked in English, English memories came to mind. This effect was so
dramatic that by just changing the language
used to ask the question, the participants were
able to gain access to more than double the
amount of information, than they would've be
if they were to ask the question using the
opposite language. Just like these hundreds of experiments have proven
that many memories that were once thought as
forgotten are actually just inaccessible and if you just manage to provide the right key, the participant will
be able to remember. Now, ranted, sometimes
a memory has so few and so poorly
connected cues that you can try all day long
and you won't be able to make the
participant remember. But still the point remains, when you forget you normally
haven't lost the memory, you just lost the access to it. But why is this important? Why should I care
of the memories unaccessible instead
of just not present. In either case the
outcome is the same, I don't remember. Well, simply put is because, if we understand that
the step that determines recall is access [NOISE]
and not storage, we are able to deduce that
the key step to train is not storing information
is retrieving it. This is fairly logical, if you know that the piece of paper is in fact in the bag, but just can't seem to reach it, you don't go through
the process of re-reading and
re-understanding it, rewriting it, and restoring, just try harder to get it. Yes, in case you were
wondering there's factual evidence that proves that this is the
correct strategy. For instance, in this
experiment made by Roediger, three groups of students
set to memorize the same two-page document, but through different methods. The first group tried
learning the document by training the storage of it. For these, they tried to read
as many times as possible the document trying to put
the DNS out of their heads, they ended up with
an average total of 14 reviews across four
different study sessions. Given that they studied
in all of the sessions, they were called the SSSS group. The second group still
relied very heavily and rereading with 10 total reviews during the first three sessions, but introduced one session of retrieval through a test
where they basically were handed a blank piece
of paper and instructed to write down everything they
could remember about the text. Given that this study three
times and retrieved one, they were called the SSST group. Finally, the third group, just had one session where they would read the document
and then spent the following three
sessions trying to retrieve the information
they learned. Therefore, this group
was called the STTT. Now in the test, one week
later the results were clear. The groups that practice retrieving the information
which were these couple, were better able to recall
it so much so in fact that the students that just
read in the first session and then spent the few
remaining ones retrieving, performed almost
three times better than the ones who just read
the document 14 times. I mean, three times better. Just think about that for a
second. Let that sink in. You can improve your
performance by a factor of three by just changing
the way you study. That's pretty impressive, right? Now, these kind of
experiments make a lot of sense when
you understand that forgetting occurs not because
the memory isn't there, but because you
haven't properly teach your brain how to
regain access to it. It is precisely
because these are the interventions that
focus on reading and rereading and rereading
are fundamental inefficient because they
believe the problem is one of storage and so
they try so hard to push the ideas in without realizing that the
idea is already in. The problem is precisely
getting it out. Seriously think about
this for a second. Don't see this as just
another experiment, see this as a
reflection of reality. You in these very
same moment could be a student from the first
group working the same sessions as everyone
else trying very hard to learn by reading books, taking notes, going to lectures, reviewing your notes
multiple times, 14 times to be precise and yet the results are
just not there. What's the problem? Are you just not as smart
as the other groups? Do you need to reread your
notes 20 times instead of 14? Well, no, the problem is not of intelligence or of
lack of effort. The problem is that you're
studying incorrectly, you're putting your trust into techniques that
simply do not work. If you were to start
studying through retrieval rather than
through re-exposure, you'd start seeing
better results. Three times better to be exact. In case you're thinking, "Oh, I've already tried that,
but it didn't work. I didn't feel confident
with the system." Think again, because
in this study, the participants of each group
were interviewed and asked how good they think they
would do in the exam. As you can clearly see, the group that had
the lowest level of confidence was the group
that performed the best. So this goes back
to our first video, don't choose a study strategy just because it feels better. The best strategies are in fact, the one that produced the
worst level of confidence and that is clear
by the evidence. So overall, no, you
don't have a bad memory, you just haven't
trained it properly. Just like if I told you
that my muscles are stubborn and don't want to grow. But then I tell you that I
actually never go to the gym, I just rub my muscles. See the problem? Now, taking into account that
training retrieval, is a science in itself. So in the following videos, we'll focus on stuff like which retrieval cues work better
and you should be using, when you should be using them, with what frequency, what tools can help you with do
it this better and everything you have to know to train retrieval properly and get an amazing memory. I'll see you in the next one.
9. Remember Like a Memory Champion: Do you think you could win
a memory championship? Those events where people
memorize entire decks of cards, names of dozens and
dozens of strangers, and hundreds of random numbers, both forwards and backwards, and in just a matter of minutes. We tend to believe that
the people who win this tournament are
geniuses, prodigies, people who are born
with abilities just outside of the ordinary, but are they really? Well several times we've tried to see what's up
with these people. We run tests, scans, everything we can imagine, but we've never been
able to find higher IQs, bigger brains, gifted minds. Nothing. The only
thing we consistently find is the use of a series of techniques that
help them memorize. That's it. In fact most of these champions will
tell you themselves that they are just regular folks that train their memories, a lot. My memory is a trained memory, I didn't get on very
well at school. I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I believe I had attention
deficit disorder as well. Because people always assume, hey, you've held all
these memory records, you went up against a
home depot computer, you must have a natural gift. Now I don't think
I was a dumb guy, but I don't think I had any
special ability either. This guy taught me a
system that I learned, and I really believe anybody
can improve their memory. I wish I just had
this naturally, it would have been a
lot easier especially growing up, but actually, no, it's something I taught myself after my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer's, and I had memory
on my mind and I didn't want to end up like her. If the secret does lie
in the techniques, then anybody could technically win one of these tournaments. Well a few years ago an American journalist
decided to test this out. His name was Joshua Foer. He was a regular journalist
that one day just happened to be sent to a memory championship
in order to report it. Once he was over there
he started talking with the participants and
they all told him, "No, look, we're
not so advanced or anything, is all practice. In fact we can teach you." Intrigued by this he
went home and for the best part of
the following year he practiced these techniques, the in and the out he practiced. One year later he came
back to the tournament, but this time as a participant, and a few hours later he became the US Memory Champion of 2006. If Joshua Foer proved anything, was that, yes, in fact the key does
lie in the techniques, and that's precisely why in this video my goal is
to teach them to you. I'll let you decide if you
want to use them to win memory championships or
just to pass your exams, but I want to emphasize from the get-go that these
techniques are not just useful to memorize random numbers or
face of strangers, they can be adapted to learn
all sorts of materials, from medicine, to law, finances, whatever you want. But if we ever want to understand how to
use them properly we first have to
understand why they work. Fortunately enough the answer for most of them is the same, and it's quite simple, they all provide
easy-to-remember retrieval cues. As you might recall
from our last video, retrieval cues are just
little hints that you might associate or encode to memories, when your minds
receive the hint or the cue she unlocks the memory. What all of these
techniques do is create intentionally easy-to-remember
retrieval cues that when invoked give access
to a bigger set of ideas. The most basic example
of this to make you understand what I
mean are acronyms, where huge packs of information are concealed within
a little phrase. If you remember the phrase, you unlock the content. For example in medical
school we had to remember the function of the 12 nerves that are inside of the brain, which are called
the cranial nerves. Each nerve could be sensitive, motor, or both, and as you might imagine, it's a bit of a struggle to
remember which is which. So here is where the
acronym comes in, which is like this. Some say marry money, but my brother says big
brains matter most. Just like there are
12 cranial nerves, there are 12 words
in that sentence, and the first letter
of each word tells me if the nerve is
sensitive, motor, or both and so instead of overwhelming my brain with
a bunch of information, I just focus on
remember the cue, the phrase and that
phrase traces me back to the bunch of information
but that was just an example to show
you how they work. Acronyms are as good
as they are and as handy as they come in sometimes
they are very limited. They are the most limited
form of retrieval cues. After all the only
thing they do is organize the content and
conceal it. That's it. Yes, they are very
good in a pinch, but not memory
champion type of good, if that makes any sense. If we really want to use the techniques these guys
used to win championship, we need to create retrieval cues that take advantage of one of the best memorization
systems we have, our memory for images. To give you an
example, this is how Joshua Foer explains he remembers dozens and dozens of strangers' names in tournaments. Let's say he's given a
picture with a name attached, such as these one with Mike, what he does next
is try to focus on a special characteristic of
Mike, such as his beard. Then he tries to
imagine a ridiculous or a very impactful mental image that when invoked can trace
him back to the name. For instance he might
imagine Mike as having a beard full of mics. He takes a couple of
seconds to really imagine that ridiculous
picture in his head, and the next time he is
shown the picture without the name the beard full
of mics comes to mind. He thinks of Mike, yes, he is Mike. Now to use this
technique correctly the mental image has
to be impactful. Just imagining Mike with an M in his shirt probably
wouldn't make the cut, probably wouldn't make such
an impact and wouldn't come to mind when we just see
the picture of Mike. Indeed the research
supports that the best images tend to be the ones that are
the most scary, or crazy, or funny, or nasty, or
paranormal, or awful. Those types of images stay with our memories longer
because they activate areas of the brains
that have had a lengthier evolutionary
process such as the amygdala. The amygdala for those who don't know is the
part of the brain that is in charge of
everything that's curses. It is precisely the
structure that helped us survive in the jungle
for thousands of years, and so it has had a very
lengthy evolutionary process, which is precisely
what makes her a great structure for
our retrieval cues, and something similar happens with the other
parts of the brain. But anyways, getting
back to the point, how could you use
images to learn something more complex,
something like medicine? Can it really be done? Well not only can, it actually has been done. In fact there is one company
called Sketchy Medical, that uses images to
teach everything from pharmacology to pathology
and everything in between. For example in this image there is everything
you need to know about a fungal infection called
paracoccidioidomycosis. For instance, you are locating a pirate ship with a
South-American map, because the infection
occurs predominantly to people that leave or
travel to South America. The pirate is coughing to
help you remember that the symptoms are
mainly respiratory, and even the steering wheel is portrayed like that
to help you remember how the fungus is
supposed to look like when it's observed
under a microscope. So remembering this crazy image is easier than remembering
two pages of a text. The cool thing is
that by thinking about this, you unlock this. Now a similar but
more advanced method also uses mental images but tries to link
them through a story. According to research, this is the most effective method
of the bunch to memorize. It is easy to see
why, after all, think about the thousands and
thousands of details that you have memorized
without even trying. All that content is stored and easily accessible in
your brain because there was a story that gave meaning to each and every one of
those little details. At a pro-level several
memory champions like Jonas Von Essen, are known to have used these methods of stories to remember 13,208 decimals of Pi. Yes, you heard that right. What Jonas basically does is first translate groups of
three digits into words, and then you uses those
words to create a story. In reckon that the first
step sounds complicated, but it's actually fairly simple, and it's done with something called the major memory system, where each number has
an associated letter. For example, 0 is said because
zeros starts with a Z, and 4 is R because it ends
with a very strong R in four. If I need to remember 04, instead of trying to
remember actually 0 and 4, I think about a word
with Z and R, like Zar. For instance I imagine a
Russian zar that is doing something with the next pair of digits that I need to remember. Jonas does this
very same process, but instead of groups of two, he does it with groups of
three digits at a time. The first thing that
happens is that I just see a gigantic cake
outside of my door. Then the next thing is 592, and that's a ghost, so there's a ghost
coming out of this cake, and then 6553, it's a helmet, so this ghost is
wearing a helmet, and that's the first 9
digits in one scene. Pretty cool. The nice
thing is that if you want to remember something that
doesn't involve numbers, you can start creating the story without translating anything. If you want a simple demonstration
of how these might be done you can watch this
TED Talk by Ricardo Liu, where through a crazy
story he teaches you the 10 last presidents
of the United States. Now finally, there is one
last method that not only uses stories and images
but also places. Close your eyes and let
Joshua Foer himself walk you through how this technique might work to remember
a shopping list. To do this I want everybody
to close your eyes and picture yourself
standing outside the front door of your home. Outside the front door of
your home the first word on our shopping list is milk. I want you to picture
yourself pouring a gallon of milk over your head outside
the front door of your house. I want you to picture the
dairy dripping down your body, what it would smell like,
what it would feel like. Then I want you to open
the door of your house. The second word we're
going to remember is eggs. I want you to picture a
chicken juggling eggs. A chicken juggling eggs inside the front
door of your house. Because if you saw a chicken juggling eggs in your real life, you would never
ever forget that. Then I want you to
go to the right, whatever the next room is
to the right of your house. I'm now entering the kitchen, I want you to picture spaghetti.
Remember Chef Boyardee? The guy with the big
hat on TV commercials. I want you to picture
Chef Boyardee breaking some spaghetti in two, and hear the crunching sound of the spaghetti breaking in two, and he drops it
into a boiling pot of water and the
water boils over. Now we're going into the
next room of your house. I'm entering the dining room. The word is cottage cheese. I want you to picture
the most attractive, sexiest person you can imagine, hopefully it's your spouse, bathing naked in a tub
of cottage cheese. Really take a minute
to imagine that in full 3D virtual reality,
augmented reality color. The next word is bananas. Go into the next
room in your house, and I want you to picture the person that you most despise in the world slipping on a banana in this
room of your house. The next word is olive oil. I am now in the living room. I want you to picture olive
oil from the Popeye cartoons. Taking a bottle of olive oil and sprinkling it on the floor, and then Popeye comes and just does a big slip and
slide across the floor. That's olive oil. Then the last word we're
going to remember, I'm now walking up the
stairs, is red wine. I want you to picture
somebody stumbling around drunk with a bottle of wine, so remember that it's red
wine and not white wine, make it a famous communist, make it Fidel Castro, stumbling around drunk
with a bottle of wine. Open your eyes. We're now going to return to the
front door of your house, what was the first
word on the list? You walk inside and you see? Then the next room? Then after that? Then? After bananas? Then? Pretty amazing. This is
called a mental palace, or the method of loci, and it is probably the
most famous technique of the bunch to memorize. The magic behind it
lies in the use of spaces to link concepts. You see we have a great
memory for spaces, we've literally evolved to move around and remember
where is stuff, like where is food,
where is shelter, where is in general things
that we might care. But on the other hand we have a horrible memory for concepts. After all how much of
the past 2,000 years have we spent trying to learn stuff like the periodic table? The answer is very little. So by using our great memory for places as a
retrieval cue itself, we're able to unlock a very powerful memory
for concepts as well. That's the magic. Those
are the techniques. But I want to
emphasize something before wrapping up this video, which is that although
we can explain why these techniques
work in theory, to really take advantage of them they have to be practiced. Keep in mind, Joshua had
to train for a whole year with these techniques
to win a contest, and so just using
them the night before the exam will not give you the results
you're looking for. What I want you to do
now is to grab a topic, that topic that you've always
struggled to remember, that topic that is difficult that you always seem to forget, and try to apply one
of these techniques. Try to come up with
either a mental image, or a story, or a mental palace. Really give yourself the
opportunity to use one of the tools at least once
and see what happens. Hey, if you want to show us your images or mental palaces, do share them in the Projects
section of the class, because it would be really
great to see how you're applying all of these techniques
in your own protocol. As always, I'll see you
guys in the next one.
10. Measuring Makes You... Taller?: I want you to think for a
second and examine that, you know that last big
exam that you presented, that you took, that
you studied for, and I want you to remember how
you studied for that exam, what percentage of your time
you dedicated to reading, to taking notes, to
reviewing those notes. I want you to take
that study method and compare it with the one
I'm about to explain. This is my proposal, I
propose that instead of doing everything you did,
you just go to the class, if you have to go or you read
the text you have to read and then to actually
study for the test, you come home, you grab a
blank piece of paper and you write everything you can remember about a
class or the text. Once you're done, you throw away the paper you grab another one, and repeat the same process a couple of more times
and that's it. You don't take notes, you don't read those notes, you don't reread the document, you don't review
the class, nothing. Just three out evaluations
and that's it. Sounds weird, and
be honest with me, would you really study
for a test like this? I can imagine how the
reserve response of most of you is, no. After all, there are several
problems with this strategy. For instance, this
strategy doesn't guarantee the complete
revision of the subject. I mean, the probability
that you manage to remember everything about the
texts or the class when writing it down is minimal, and if you're not
going to review the text or the
class afterwards, you'll be strengthening only
a portion of the content. The portion you're
actually able to remember. Additionally, what if you remember something
incorrectly. I mean, what if you understood something backwards by mistake, given that there won't be any feedback or
re-study opportunities, you won't notice you've made a mistake and so how
we say in Colombia, [FOREIGN], so yeah, several issues with
this strategy. But you see, that's precisely
the interesting thing. That despite having
these huge issues, this study method is still superior to how most
students study, which is by reading,
taking notes, rereading those notes, and
reviewing the classes. This despite being
counter-intuitive, shouldn't really be
a surprise for you. After all, you've already seen the study of Roediger of 2006, where a three groups of
participants set out to learn the same document
by either taking three out [NOISE] evaluations exactly as I described them at the beginning of the video or by just doing multiple
bouts of rereading. As you may remember, the
group that studied like this, [NOISE] outperformed
by a factor of three the group that restudied
the document a lot of time. These dramatic effects
[BACKGROUND] were seen here is called the
testing effect, [NOISE] defining that evaluating knowledge by itself and without any additional re-study or
feedback improves learning. At firsthand, this
sounds rather odd. After all, we tend to
think about there is these neutral events where we'd realize if we
learned or not, not as learning moments per se. I mean, the testing effect is like if I told you
that measuring your height will make
you taller or that measuring your weight
will make you heavier. It doesn't make sense, but
when it comes to learning, that's exactly what happens. Yes, in case you were
wondering the study of Roediger is just
one of the bunch. There are several other studies that prove the same thing. For instance, there
is one study that compares the Top 4
learning strategies that students use to prepare for
test: reading, taking notes, reviewing those
notes, and testing, and to be more realistic,
they mix them up, meaning every group would
do a mix of strategies, not just one of them. As you can clearly see here, the group that got
the worst results was a group that studied by
just reading the text, taking notes, and
reviewing those notes. Which is, if you think about
it how most people study. On the other hand, the couple
of groups that perform the best were the ones that included testing
into their strategy. Yes, although you can
see a slight improvement in the group that
on top of testing, took notes and read them. The same authors of the
study disclosed that this difference is not a
statistic significant. Which means that
according to this study, reading and testing is
just as good as reading, taking notes, reviewing
those notes, and testing, which is exactly what
we mean when we talk about studying smart, not hard. That by doing just
half of the work, you get pretty much
the same results. You just have to learn which techniques are
worth your time. Again, this really
shouldn't be a surprise. If you really think about it, tests are one of those tools that automatically apply many of the things we've discussed so far about
effective learning. Therefore, one form of active
learning by definition, because they force you to
both produce the content, which is the second point. They force you to
generate a response to use the generation effect. They also make you
commit mistakes very often which triggers
synaptic plasticity. They make you realize what
you know and what you don't know and therefore they
help with meta-cognition. They also and more importantly, explicitly train the
retrieval of information, which as we've said, is the limiting step in memory. If you wanted a technique that
by itself applied half of the stuff we've discussed
so far. This one is it. Now I want to be clear, this doesn't mean that test should be the only strategy you
use in your protocol. In fact, the evidence shows that tests are not good
for everything. For instance, one of the
things that evidence proves repeatedly is that tests are not good to optimize
immediate performance. In fact, one of the
things that I didn't mention about the
study of Roediger is that the participants were evaluated in two occasions, one immediately after learning the material and another
one, one week later. As you can clearly see
by the complete graph, the best technique when knowledge is
evaluated immediately is hands down rereading as
many times as possible. Now sure, as good as
those improvements come is also as fast as they go. By the way, these are the
reasons why many students feel like they forget
in a week's time everything they learn
because they study mostly through
rereading the content. But still, the point
I was trying to make is that sometimes testing is not the right choice for you or for a specific scenario. For instance, let's say you are expected to perform a test right after going to class or
right after reading a text. In that case, taking as much notes as you
possibly can and rereading them as many times as possible is definitely
your best bet. So yes, it is through this reasoning that
techniques that are often tagged as a bad or
inefficient could actually have a place granted in some
very specific conditions, but could have a place in an evidence-based
learning protocol. Which goes back to what we said in the introductory video, that science shows
us the direction, but it doesn't
delineate the pathway. It gives us the fact, but it's our job to
use those facts and create a system that
deploys them accordingly. But anyway, the point of this
video was that in general, you should try to
include test in your learning protocol and it doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't even have to
be a very complicated. It can be as easy as just
grabbing a blank piece of paper and writing down
what you remember. Now, granted, that's
not the only option. For instance, as you'll see
in my learning protocol, I tend to rely more heavily on multiple option questions
as my form of testing. The nice thing about doing this is that multiple
option questions force you to think about multiple options, about
multiple subjects. They force you to think about chunks from several
topics at the same time, which might sound similar to what we said in
the sum of all steps, distributed an
interleaved study. That's one extra benefit
on top of everything else. But again, that's
just what I do. Now it's your turn to think
about how you might apply the testing effect in
your learning protocol and I'll see you
in the next one.
11. Repetition is NOT The Key: Have you seen Avengers
Infinity War? You remember that
moment with Thanos said something
along the lines of. Dread it, Run from it, Destiny arrives all the same. Well, in cognitive psychology we call the destiny forgetting. Just as Thanos implied, forgetting tends to
arrive all the same. You see as powerful as the techniques we've
reviewed so far are, none of them are time proof.
You're not supposed to. After all, forgetting is precisely the mechanism
that allows you to keep important information
at hand and irrelevant information
out of the way. But the downside is that if
you let enough time pass, you'll inevitably lose access to the idea you once understood, and even the queue
that is supposed to give you access
back to that idea. World-renowned scientists,
Herman Ebbinghaus, dedicated his life to
study this process. It is precisely through him that we got to know
the forgetting curve which describes the rate at which we lose access
to information. But, and here comes
the hopeful part, he also studied how to beat it, and his conclusion is
often summarized in one word, repetition. However, repetition
is a nuanced world. After all, there are
several ways to do it that carry totally
different outcomes. That's why we say that
repetition is not what matters, is how you do it. The point of this video is
to explore those nuances, to explain the science
of effective repetition. What better place to
start that with one of the earliest discoveries
of Ebbinghaus, that quantity isn't everything. You see, one of the
first things that Ebbinghaus noticed was
that the amount of repetitions performed
don't know that actually correlated with the long-term
retention of the subject. The key factor is the spreading of those
repetitions over time. For instance, if someone
were to repeat a subject 1,703 times over
a 24-hour period, and someone else
the same subject once a month for 12 months. Without a doubt, the one
who repeated 12 times would remember better than a one
who did it more than 1,000. This is often called
a spaced repetition, and it's the first
practical advice that you should get
away from this video. Don't think about the
total repetitions, but about the spreading of
those repetitions over time. The second factor you have
to take into account about repetitions is that there's
a couple of ways to do that. You can do them through
retrieval which as we know of is the effortful act of trying
to remember a topic, or by re-exposure which you're
just passively reviewing the topic through methods like rereading, rewatching
and listening. As we've explained
in previous videos, it is the retrieval and not the exposure what truly improves
long-term retention. This is most likely why
some students never see the results they're
hoping for when starting a space
repetition protocol. Because they set
up these systems that have them rereading their notes or relistening
to lectures and in general, reviewing passive read
content and will as we've shown through experiments like the ones from Roediger, this simply doesn't work. The next thing you should
keep in mind about repetition is that the
degree of effort you invest in trying to retrieve determines the amount of time
the concept stays with you. For example, if you
learn a new concept now and you repeat it
in thirty-seconds, you don't have to do that
much effort to retrieve it, it's very fresh and thus
it's very easy to recall. Thus in this scenario, there is what scientists call retrieval success which is
being able to recall it, but not retrieval effort, and that's why these
retrieval practice doesn't produce great results. However, the complete opposite
is also not desirable. If, for example, you
let a whole year pass by before
retrieving a concept, the difficulty to
retrieve it will be so hard that the content
is basically gone. As such, the retrieval
effort is extreme, but the retrieval success is no. This in turn forces you
to restudy the topic, and as we just said, that's
really not the point. What we're really trying to
do is to have some balance between retrieval success
and retrieval effort, and the way to do
this properly is by getting the timing right. Indeed, Professor Robert works says that you should
try to space out your study sessions so that the information you'll learn in the first one remains barely
retrievable in the second. Then the more you have to work to pull it from
the soup of your mind, the more the second study session we will
reinforce learning. If you study in too soon, it's too easy and
not much is gained, delayed and it's gone, so you have to find
that middle ground. This is a nice segue into the
next point we want to make, which is that you should
try to avoid dropping the learning material upon
further retrieval sessions. There is actually a
remarkable study that shows why this is important. This is hands down one
of my favorite studies, but it's also a bit complicated, so try to pay close attention because it's easy to get lost. The basic idea of experiment
was that four groups of participants were trying to
memorize 40 words in Swahili. Every group had eight
sessions to do these. Four of those eight
sessions would be dedicated to study
the content where they just read the way words with the English
translation attached, and four of them
would be dedicated to testing the counting
where they were shown just the Swahili
word and they had to retrieve what was the
corresponding English translation. The first group is
studied and tested the complete set of four
rewards in each session, this amounted to a total
of 320 repetitions. The second group also had four testing sessions with
the complete set of 40, but they started to drop
from further study, the words that
participants were able to recall correctly at least once. As you can see, these
group ended up studying just a couple of words in
the last study session. In the final analysis, this amounted to a grand
total of 236 repetitions. The third group, on the other
hand, did the opposite, with four study sessions where the entire set of
40 was reviewed, but they started to drop the
words that were correctly recalled at least once
from further testing. As you can clearly see,
they ended up with just three words tested
in the last session, and this group ended up with
a total of 243 repetitions. Finally, the last
group dropped to learn words both wrong
for this study and for the testing which
led to a total amount of just 154 repetitions. These were the results. Several things to notice. First, I want to emphasize
that despite having four groups with four totally
different approaches, we did not obtain four
different results, we obtained two
groups of results, good ones and bad ones. Whenever we see this pattern, we think that there's
probably something that these high-performance did
that the others didn't. You guys to take a
guess into what could be the differentiating factor? Well, the answer is that these
groups were the ones that continuously tested the
complete set of 40, and these were the ones that
didn't. Interesting right? Keep in mind the number
of repetitions between these two groups that performed well was drastically different. These were the second
group that started to drop the learn force from
farthest study sessions, and yet they still got
the same results like the first group that
never dropped any words. This right here confirms that what we've been
saying all along, that it is not the repetitions
per say what matters, it's how you do them. Just as you see here, doing them passively by just
rereading them, doesn't make a
single difference. If you needed to prove that
studying more is simply not the answer, this is it. Also bear in mind that
this third group did pretty much the same
repetitions as the second one, and yet they obtained
a much worse result, and really let that sink in. Because in these
very same moment, you could be studying
the third group, putting as much effort
as the others as the second group and yet not
seeing the same results. It's not because you're dumb or because you're not doing
enough repetitions, it's because you're doing
the wrong repetitions. But I digress upon who were initially trying to make
with these studies, is that you shouldn't
drop all learned items far from for the testing. If you ever find yourself repeating a subject
and thinking, "Oh, this is too easy,
I already learned it. I'm going drop it," think twice. Instead of just dropping it, try pushing it farther
and farther ahead. Let it be that
forgetting happened, and then keep this in
yourself on the count. Some of you may be
thinking by this point, "I get everything you're saying, but how do I actually do it? How do I actually create a
system that makes me repeat?" Well, there are several options. The first one is by simply
just distributing your study. Instead of learning one subject
per day and that's that, never again or reading about it, you distribute your learning
over several weeks. By doing these, each
study session can itself become a
retrieval opportunity, very simple, very easy,
quite straightforward. It just requires you
to study very slowly. That is, for example, how I studied the topic that
most interests me, like history or psychology. I just studied them very slowly, and I continuously go back and retrieve the information
I learned years back. But, yes, although
easy is not very accessible to everyone and
to every single topic. Another option you
can try is using a formal space repetition
algorithm within an app. You see there are several
apps that have built-in algorithms that make you revisit concepts
throughout time. Most of these are based on flashcards like Anki or Quizlet. They basically work like this. You create a flashcard
today about a given topic. The algorithm then shows
you the flashcard tomorrow, then in a week, then in a month, then in three months, six months, and so
on and so forth. You just need to
open the app and go through the process of
retrieving the concept, the upsets you should
practice at that point. There is also these one
app called RemNote that automatically converts your
notes into flashcards, so that might be
also a good option if you want to kill two
birds with one stone. But as I said, there are
several more ways to incorporate this
space repetition into your study protocol. In fact, as you'll see
in my learning protocol, I use a space repetition
system that is unlike anything else we've mentioned
so far. Get creative. Try to think outside of the box, and if you need some
inspiration or you want to look at what other
people are doing, try jumping into the project
section of the class, and hopefully you'll see some interesting ways in
which people pulled this off. As always, I'll see you
guys in the next one.
12. The 10 Commandments of Effective Learning: In this video, I'll summarize
what I like to call the 10 commandments of
effective learning, which is just a very
dramatic name for the most important
take-home messages provided throughout
the previous lessons. Keep them in mind and
try to incorporate as many as you can into
your study protocol. Number 1, beware of
your intuitions. Don't choose a study
strategy because it feels easier or more
natural or more intuitive. Remember that oftentimes these
strategies which require the more effort also
produce the more learning. But our minds often
trick us into believing that when
studying feels easier, we're learning more,
and when it feels harder, we're learning less. But remember, this
is just an illusion. Number 2, the key behind all effective
learning techniques lies in forcing your mind to actively process
the information. This is often harder and
requires more effort, but it is precisely that effort which produces the
improvement in learning. Also remember that
your brain is lazy and only does the bare minimum
effort to complete a task. That's why these techniques and these desirable difficulties
shouldn't be left as a goal that you
hopefully will do one day, but as a system that
forces you and that guarantees that you apply them every day in your
learning process. Number 3, the most
effective learning methods are the ones that give
meaning to the content, that attempt to connect
the new information to previously established
neural pathways. Although this takes
a bit more time than just reading along, it also produces a greater long-term
retention of the subject. Number 4, if you want
to learn something new, don't start by just reading it. First look for a challenge, something that makes
you commit a mistake, that forces you to try to
solve a puzzle or come up with a solution before
being shown the answer. By doing this, you will not only prime your brain to more effectively absorb the
material you're about to read, but you also trigger synaptic plasticity by making
mistakes in the process. Remember, that that mediates
all forms of learning. Number 5, your mind is
constantly making you think you understand subjects
when in fact you don't. To fix this you have to get
the ideas out of your head. The easiest way to do this is by either trying
to apply what you learned or by trying to explaining it to someone else, for instance, the
refinement meant technique. By doing this you will become conscious of your
learning blind spots, and then you will be able
to address them directly. Number 6, effective learning is consistent not intensive. Most of us study single
topics at a time because we make appreciable strides
in the short-term, and that leaves us feeling
that we're making progress. However, if we were to compare the long-term progress we
made by studying like this, one thing at a time, versus distributing our
study without a doubt, the latter one, the
distributed method would be far superior. Number 7, the
bottleneck of memory is not as storing the
information in your brain, is re-accessing
that information. The best thing you
can do to develop a great memory and a great ability to
recall information, is not to restudy the
information several times or to endlessly
reread your notes, is to teach your
brain how to recover the information you
have already learned. Number 8, you can greatly help you remind you
retrieve a vast amount of information by practicing
the use of retrieval cues. Acronyms, images, stories,
and places are all great retrieval cues
that can help you memorize literally
whatever you want. Just keep in mind, these techniques
require practice. Number 9, one of the best tools that can automatically apply many of the previously reviewed
strategies is testing. The act of testing, by itself
and without any feedback, produces large
effects on learning. Finally, number 10, they secret of long-term memory is not really repetition, is how you do those repetitions. First, they have to be
distributed over time. Second, they have to be actual retrievals,
not merely exposures. Third, they have to balance retrieval success with
retrieval effort, and finally, they should avoid dropping the learned information
from further retrieval. [MUSIC]
13. The Learning Protocol: The idea with this
video is to show you how I turned all
the theory we've seen during the last 10 lessons
into a learning system. Something I can apply
from this point forward to learn the subject
that I studied the most, which in my particular case
happens to be medicine. Now, my learning protocol has seven steps which you
can see right over here. If you want, you
can pause the video for a few seconds, but for now, I'm going to move forward
and explain step-by-step. We'll start off with the
first one, setting up goals. The point here is to
decide one week in advance which topics
I want to study. The reason I set my
goals like this, one week in advance, is because it gives
me a big picture of my learning process. I'm a firm believer
that people tend to overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate
what they can do in a week. By scheduling my
goals like this, I tend to be little
bit more productive. Now importantly,
the key here is to put myself realistic goals. In fact, this is the
part of the protocol where self-regulation is made. For instance, if I knew that the following week
is pretty chilled, I might aim to study 6-7 topics. But if on the other hand, I know I'm going
to be quite busy, I might just schedule
a couple of topics. By getting this step right, no matter how my life is going, either a mess or a
complete heaven, I'm still able to stay
on top of my learning. Once the goal is clear, I move on to the next step. Here the goal is to
leave everything I'll be using to learn the
topics downloaded, organized, and ready to go. Now the reason I do
this upfront is because I found through the
time that a lot of the time I used to spend to studying wasn't actually
spent learning, but instead just searching for the stuff I needed to learn. Yes, I know that in theory they should only take a
few minutes or so, but the problem was that those few minutes
made me lose space. When you study, try to
enter into a flow state, that state when you are
completely focused on into your work and this
quick searches here and there ruined it for me. In fact, I often
found that a few times I started to
procrastinate amidst a session happened
precisely because a quick search made me
lose my concentration, made me look at my phone, and one thing led to
another and then boom, two hours have been lost. To prevent that from
happening, I try to leave all of my studied
resources downloaded, organized, and ready
to go up front. Now, which resources
do I look for? Well, most of the times I limit myself to just a couple, review articles and tests. Review articles,
on the first hand, I think it's a very
specific thing to medicine, but I think the
principle behind them can be applied to
other areas as well. What these articles
do in a nutshell, is summarize the most relevant and up-to-date
evidence regarding a topic. They deliver it in a way
that is both comprehensive, yet not too extensive. They deliver like 80 percent
of what you need to know in just a few pages.
They're awesome. But as I just said, I
also look for a series of tests about the
topics I want to learn. Because as you'll
see in a second, tests are quite literally the compass of my
study protocol. They not only start all
my studies sessions, but they also determine what I'm going to be
studying, and when. Now, given that I
study medicine, finding test is not that hard. There are question
banks, clinical cases, case reporting track to medical
challenges, you name it. What I do on Sundays is just
search for them and compile a wide and diverse
set that equally represent every topic
I intend to learn. To recap, I select the topics, I prepare the resources, I leave everything ready to go, and then I proceed to enjoy my weekend.
After all, its Sunday. Well, not everything study. But then, Monday comes. The first thing I need
to start studying is not just to open up an
article and start reading. No. Instead, I
start with a test. Now, given that I pick subjects that I don't
know very well, I tend to make a lot of mistakes during those test. But
it doesn't matter. In fact, that's the whole point because as we've
said previously, mistakes are precisely the thing that triggers
synaptic plasticity. So I welcomed it. Now obviously the point is
not to make a mistake in every single test,
that's not ideal. In fact, it's
actually decremental. I explain a bit better
in my YouTube channel in a video called Why Your
Study Method is Not Working. But to sum up that video, there's a rule called
the 85 percent rule of optimal learning, which states that the maximum
rate of learning happens when your mistake rate
is around 15-20 percent. That is typically the
mistake rate I try to aim at when doing my tests. That's regarding mistakes. But what, for
example, happens if a question pops up
about a new topic, something I have
never learned before, something that I don't
know anything of. What do I do then? Well, in that case I do
the generation effect. I try to generate a hypothesis
and try to work out how this problem might be solved before being
shown the solution. Doing this, as we said
in a previous lesson, primes your brain
to more effectively learn when you're about to read. Up until this point,
just by solving a test we've already
applied a ton of the techniques
we've discussed so far in the class,
which is awesome. But now let's move
on to the next step, which is the deep processing
of the information. What I typically
do is that after solving the first
question of my test, I minimize the
window with my test, and I open up the folder with my review articles and I start reading the first article of the topic I just
got tested on. Now an important thing to
keep in mind is that I don't try to finish the
article the day I start. In fact, I never finish an
article in a single sitting. Instead, I limit
myself to read just 1, 2, 3 chunks of the
text, and that's it. That might be, for
instance, the definition, the epidemiology and the pathophysiology
for a given disease, and I leave the other segments
for the following days. By doing this, I get to distribute my study
of the subject over the whole week instead
of just the whole day, which as we've said, is a better way to
study and to learn. Now regarding the
actual reading process, what I think is
important to keep in mind is that as I'm reading, I'm not just mindlessly
going through the motions, just mindlessly transcribing
what am reading. No. In fact, I don't take a single
note while I read. Instead, I I on trying to
process the information, trying to elaborate and connect the concepts
I'm trying to learn. The specific technique
I use for this step will vary depending
on the content. But the important thing is
that I don't just read along. Now once I'm done reading the few chunks I
set myself to read, I close the text and I start doing the next step
of the protocol, which is the modified
Feynman Technique. This is a metacognitive strategy that basically
consists an explaining myself a topic while annotating my mental
process in the iPad. As I've said previously, I do these modified version
of the Feynman Technique because annotating
forces my mind to be more thorough
with the explanations, and the upside is
that I end up with some really nice
notes as a bonus. Now I should probably
clarify that I don't typically review
those notes as much. In fact, reading those notes is not a schedule in any
part of the protocol. In a way, my learning system prioritizes the
benefits that come from taking the notes and not
from reading the notes. By the way, in case
you're interested, I explain a bit
better the signs of effective note-taking
in my YouTube channel. But anyway, as I explain
myself the topic, I make sure to do a
couple of things. First, if I find a blind spot or something I didn't really
understand that well, I try to address it explicitly
and right off the bat. A quick Google search tends
to be enough for this. But if I need more
pro resources, they're always medical
platforms such AMBOSS or UpToDate that are great
to solve these issues. Second is that if I find
a very difficult topic, very lengthy, very complex, or just hard for some
particular reason, I try to come up with a
retrieval cue for it. Depending on the
subject, that may be a mental palace or a
story or an image. It really depends on the topic, but this is the moment
where I give myself the time to create
the retrieval cues. Now, once I'm done with
this couple of things, I continue to pre-selected
set of tests, right where I left off. If I stumble upon more questions about a topic I just read, I do solve the questions, but I don't continue
reading the material, reading the article
because as we said, the point is to distribute the reading over the whole week. But if on the other hand, I find a question on a
new topic I haven't read, then I solve the
question and proceed to read a few chunks of the
article about that new topic, and then proceed with the
whole reading elaboration, Feynman, retrieval cue, etc. I try to keep both
learning sessions between one and five hours. Again, this goes back to
the self-regulation idea. If I don't have
anything else to do and I'm very motivated
to keep studying, I might spend the whole
afternoon doing so. But if on the other
hand, I'm really busy or just not there mentally
for some reason, I might easily cut the session early and try again tomorrow. This is the nice thing
about the brain. If you know how to use it, it feels like you're
working alongside with your brain rather
than against him. When he's at 200 percent,
you push it harder. When he's at 10 percent,
you give him a break. Now the following
days of the week, the protocol works
exactly the same. I first start with questions, do decide which topics
I should read then, and then I define them, then retrieval cues, etc. Now just to be clear, if
the topic I started reading yesterday pops up again
today, that's great. I continue reading the
article, but if it doesn't, that's also fine because
it will eventually do so. In case you were wondering, there's no need to read
every single topic, every single day as long as you have a system that
works and that makes you finish every subject
by the end of the week or by the
end of whatever time period you choose. Now by Saturday I have
usually finished reading most of the articles and half
solved most of the cases, most of the tests, and so what I typically do is
just make sure to finish whatever is missing,
and I call it a week. The following Sunday,
I start thinking about which topics I want to learn
for the upcoming week, and that's how the cycle continues and continues
and continues. By this point, you've
probably noticed that the only thing really missing in the protocol is a spaced
repetition system. I'll be honest. I thought about just using flashcards and
leaving it like that, but I had a better idea. I thought I could
take advantage of the unique conditions
that I currently find myself in and use them to set
a spaced repetition assist. You see I have a
YouTube channel in Spanish where I teach medicine. It has grown far bigger
than I have ever expected, and I'm currently
getting paid to quite literally teach what I learn. One thing I figured
I could do is use my YouTube channel as an excuse
to do a space repetition. What I ended up doing is that on Sundays just before
getting ready to select the new topics and resources for the upcoming week, I take a few minutes and think about the topics I just learned. I start thinking about
what type of video project would be interesting to make
for each subject I learned. Maybe for this specific subject, it would be cool to
create a full review. For these other one, maybe
it would be better to create a medical challenge or
maybe a small video. I pretty much think
about the ways in which I can
transform the topics I just learned into projects and then I
schedule them in notion. I schedule one project per week. Which means that for
instance, if I learned six topics per week in a month, I'll have projects
to schedule for the following six months. This only guarantees
that never ending supplies of ideas and
projects to grow my channel, but also an excuse to keep retrieving them,
practicing the topics. On top of everything,
I'm getting paid, so what else could I ask? But anyways, that was
my learning protocol. Now is your time to
create your own. Remember to post
it in the project section of the class once you're done to inspire others with
your work and creativity. Without nothing else to say, I am Santiago Acosta
and you just watched the science of
effective learning. See you in the next one.
Santiago Acosta, Medical Doctor, Teacher, Content Creator
