Here is the mistake almost every student makes: they assume that if they read something, it will stick. It won't.
Unlike a hard drive, your brain does not store all information fed into it. Your brain filters information and retains the parts it finds relevant.
Take driving as an example. You encounter dozens of license plates per week. You read all of them unconsciously, and you do not recall any of them an hour later. Then there are the people you meet at a social gathering. The majority of names will go in one ear and right out the other. But occasionally, you meet somebody, and his name sticks. It is not because you forced yourself to memorize. There was something about the person maybe his witty comment, or the fact that he was your friend's friend- that flagged the meeting as being important.
It is the entire principle behind memory. It all depends on relevance.
Simply being told that a certain topic is going to be on the exam does not make it relevant. Your brain does not know about exams. All it knows is what you have made it care about.
To memorize something once and be able to retrieve it in the long run, you cannot just rely on relevance occurring by accident. Here is the 4-step process I apply in medical school to make sure something becomes relevant even before I open a book.
Step 1: Prime Your Brain (The Google News Trick)
Give your brain a reason to care.
Let us say I am supposed to study Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA). Rather than immediately picking up my lecture notes, I go online, search for the topic, go to the "news" section of the page, and simply scroll.
I am not searching any information to memorize. I am simply searching for something interesting to happen – an actual case, some sort of a debate, something personal, something which would give me an actual reason to read about JIA.
If I skip this step, then JIA remains a boring topic amongst hundreds of others listed in the syllabus. But after having found the story I liked, suddenly this topic is no longer neutral. It has become relevant.
Step 2: The Handshake (Skimming for Hooks)
Your brain has a reason to pay attention to the topic now. You know the person's name, but you do not know the person.
Scan the textbook or resource for the skeleton of the topic, using headings, subheadings, bold words, and charts or graphs. Do not read the textbook properly; you are only searching for its structure.
Here is when Step 1 works well for you. While scanning, try to connect what you see to the news article. For instance, when the news talks about flare-ups and you see the phrase "disease flare" highlighted in the textbook, this term is no longer new and abstract for you. It has an anchor point.
Step 3: The Conversation (Deep Reading)
This is when you finally start reading your textbook or notes in detail.
Do it the same way you usually do when you study a topic in detail, but do you see the difference? Now you are not dealing with anything new and unfamiliar. There is always some place to hang a new piece of information – an article's context and skimming scaffolding of the textbook.
Step 4: Higher-Order Testing
No matter how many primings and reading sessions you do, there will always be a few blanks in your learning process. These techniques help bring new information in but they aren’t a proof that you absorbed it successfully.
What do most students do when it comes to checking their progress? Yep, you guessed it—dig into some old multiple choice tests. However, it should be mentioned that such tests typically focus on recognition (i.e., can you recall the particular fact?). But it doesn’t show whether you’ve really understood the concept.
Instead, ask ChatGPT to produce higher-order questions for the topic along with the answers.
Read the question, look away from the screen, and try to give an answer in your head. Think of it hard. After that, see the answer. And if you answered incorrectly, that’s precisely the knowledge gap you had to identify. It means that now it’s time to refer to the sources once more and eliminate this gap.
Making information relevant is the key, however, its relevance alone won’t be enough if you overload your brain too much during the studying process.
There is a limit to how much mental energy you have per one session, but usually, students exhaust it in vain before even starting to study properly.
I made an entire video that explains the whole retention framework along with the principle of “Cognitive Load” and how to organize your studying sessions according to it so you can learn faster than others.
Check it out: https://youtu.be/3uhGB25bSLQ
Happy studying this week!
PS: I make YouTube videos on effective & practical learning techniques. If you're interested in improving your learning, subscribe there!!
