The Most Powerful Way to Remember What You Study
Hey, what is going on, guys? So I think we can allagree that studying takes far, far too much time sowhat I wanna do in this video is show you guyshow you can remember more of what you learn, evenif you're spending fewer actual hours studying,and the way to do that is by spacing outthat study time.
This is a techniquecalled spaced repetition and to do it you addprogressively longer and longer timeintervals in between each of your study sessions.
So in this video I wannashow you exactly how you can do that, both withyour paper flash cards and with apps both forsmartphones and computers.
But first I wanted to getinto why this technique is so powerful and alsotalk to you a little bit about the history behindit and how it relates to our memories in general.
Spaced repetition leveragesa memory phenomenon known as the spacingeffect, which describes how our brains make betterconnections and overall remember things moreeffectively when we space out our learning over time.
How's how Pierce J.
Howard, the author of my least favorite book tohaul into coffee shops, puts it: "Work involvinghigher mental functions, "such as analysis andsynthesis, needs to be "spaced out in orderto allow new neural "connections to solidify.
"New learning drivesout old learning when "insufficient time intervenes.
" And we've actuallyknown about this effect for quite a long time.
Back in the late-1800sa psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghausbasically launched the field of memory scienceitself by embarking upon an intense study wherehe made himself memorize long, long lists ofnonsense syllables.
And through that researchhe eventually came to develop what's calledThe Forgetting Curve, which describes howmemories decay over time.
But what he also learnedwas that by spacing out his efforts tomemorize these lists, he could put in lessactual study time to get them memorized perfectly.
For example, for one listof 12 syllables he found out it took him 68 repetitionson one day and then seven repetitions thenext day to memorize it perfectly, but byspacing out his studying over the course of threedays he found he could achieve his same levelof perfection in only 38 repetitions.
Over the past 130 yearssince he published his findings, lots of otherstudies have been able to replicate this samepositive results, which leads us to the question, "Why doesthe spacing effect work?" Well to put it in simpleterms, it turns out that one of the most importantparts of learning process is actually forgetting.
Now what forgetting trulyis is a subject for another video that I'll publish inthe future, but the most important thing to notehere is that the more we've forgotten something, thatis the harder we have to work to retrieve itsince we last learned it or studied it, thegreater the increase in learning will be.
To make this a bit moreclear, here's how the author Benedict Carey, who wrotethe book "How We Learn," explains it: "Some amountof breakdown must occur "for us to strengthenlearning when we revisit the material.
"Without a little forgetting,you get no benefit "from further study.
"It is what allowslearning to build, "like an exercised muscle.
" And that's the mainreason why Carey calls spaced repetition one ofthe most powerful methods for remembering whatyou've learned in his book.
And I would add to thatthe fact that you can do this with basically anyother learning technique.
It's entirely complementarybecause it's all about just modifying the timeperiods in which you study.
You can do anythingwithin those time periods, you're just usingthe time periods as intelligently as possible.
With that being said, nowI wanna get into how you can put spaced repetitioninto action and implement it into your own study systems.
And we're gonna talk aboutapps and computer programs that you can use in aminute here but first I want to talk about a systemthat you can use with your paper flash cards, whichis called the Leitner System, and here's how it works.
The first step is todecide on the number of boxes that you're gonnause to hold the cards in your system.
Now I don't actually ownlittle boxes so I've just substituted rubber bandsand sticky notes that say "Box," but that actuallyworks just as well and actually makes thesystem more portable, so that's pretty cool,and from there each individual box is goingto represent a different study time interval.
So Box 1 might be studyingevery day, Box 2 might be studied everyother day, and so on.
And when you're studyingthe cards in the boxes, every time you get a cardright it's gonna graduate to the next box, soyou're gonna see it less and less often.
But if you get a cardwrong, it's gonna go all the way to box number 1,no matter where it was.
And by using this systemyou get two main benefits.
Number one, you're maximizingyour learning through the spacing effect, butnumber two, you're also studying more efficientlybecause you're spending more time on the cards thatneed the most attention and less time on theones you know really well rather than studyingevery single card equally.
Now this paper systemworks really well for both of those goals but ifyou wanna take advantage of more advanced schedulingalgorithms and other features, you're gonnaneed to find yourself a space repetition appand there are a lot of contenders in thisarea but I wanna focus first on what is probablythe most popular one right now and thatis called Anki.
Anki has a huge community,it's insanely customizable, and best of all, it hasapps for almost every platform out there andalmost all of them are free with the exception of theiPhone app, which oddly costs a whopping $25.
Now I think the price isthat high because it's their way of basically lettingpeople support the app since it's free everywhere elsebut if you're on an iPhone and you don't wanna paythat much, fear not because Anki also has a companionweb app called AnkiWeb, which is accessiblefrom mobile Safari.
So you can use thatfree if you want.
Now with Anki, creatingcards is really, really easy and I really likethe fact that you can add basically any kind of mediayou want to your cards, including pictures, whichis awesome because adding pictures to your flashcards can really help increase retention.
However, the killer featureof Anki is the ability to rate cards based ondifficulty when you're studying them.
So essentially, when youturn a card over, you can tell the program how hardit was for you to dredge the answer up from thedepths of your memory and it will use that datato decide how long it's gonna be before yousee that card again.
And that's really themain strength of space repetition appsversus a paper system.
Each individual cardcan be tracked, can have a difficulty rating,and can be adjusted in the algorithm soyou're getting the most benefit of the spacing effect.
Anki is definitely notthe only space repetition app out there, though,so if you're looking for alternatives, I've gota few things in mind for you to take a look at,number one being an app called TinyCards, which Ishowed off in my previous video on how to makebetter flash cards.
Now TinyCards is only forthe iPhone, unfortunately, but there should be anAndroid version coming soon, and honestly, when comparedto Anki I think it's a lot more simple, a lotprettier, and the process of making cards is morefun and faster because they have an excellentsystem for adding images to your cards.
Aside from TinyCardsthere are also apps like Flashcards Deluxe, Memrise,SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, Eidetic, Quizlet, andprobably a bunch of others that I don't even knowabout right now but I'm sure you will let me knowabout down in the Comments.
So before I wrap thisvideo up I have a couple more things I wannamention, number one being the script I wrote forthis video is actually about half the lengthof the blog post I wrote so if you want a lotmore detail, especially pertaining to the memorybits and how the spacing effect works, you canclick the blog post link in the description downbelow or on the card on screen right now and readto your heart's content.
Also, and I have beenreally excited to announce this for quite a longtime now, there's now an official CollegeInfo Geek t-shirt on DFTBA.
Com and I'm super,super stoked about this.
I've already orderedmine and there's gonna be a link down in thedescription, also a card so if you would like toget your very own shirt, which may or may notgrant superpowers, you can click either of thoselinks and order one.
Now one cool thing aboutthese shirts' design is it was actually createdby the College Info Geek community.
My good friend Ashley didthe hand-lettered design itself but the mantra orsaying on the shirt was actually decided upon bypeople in the College Info Geek community over onReddit, which I think is really, really cool, andI would love to continue to play up this communityaspect so if you get a shirt I would love tosee you tweeting awesome pictures of you wearingit to send to me over on @TomFrankly and I willprobably retweet them.
You can also put themin the Reddit as well if you like and other thanthat, that's all I have for this video, guys, sothanks so much for watching.
And if you found ituseful, give it a Like to support this channeland you can also Subscribe with that button rightdown there if you wanna get new videos on beinga more effective student every single week.
You can also get a copyof my book on earning better grades by going tothe picture of the book right there and clickingyour mouse button.
You can find the previousvideo right over there which was about how touse flash cards more effectively and if youwanna find that awesome article which is waymore detailed than this video was, go to the FullArticle thing right there.
If you'd like to connectwith me you can use the social media linksdown below but there's also a non-zero probabilitythat you can connect with me by yellinginto a conch shell, so maybe give that a try too.
Source: Youtube
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