- Hey friends, welcome
back to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Ali,
I'm a doctor working in Cambridge.
And in this video I wanna share with you
the study method, study
framework, that one of my
closest friends used to rank
consistently in the top
three in medical school,
and sometimes even rank
one in certain subjects.
And he's a medical student
at Cambridge University,
which is one of the most competitive
medical schools in the world.
We're gonna split this
video up into three parts.
Firstly, I'll talk
about what the method is
and how it works.
Then we'll talk a little bit
about the evidence behind it,
like, why it works, the learning theory
behind why this method is amazing.
And finally, we'll go into the
method in much more detail.
And I'll be showing
you, using some examples
on different apps, about how
you can incorporate this method
into your own study life.
(soft music)
Okay so,
the method is as follows.
Basically, instead of
ever writing any notes,
instead of ever trying
to summarize content
from lectures or textbooks,
what my friend Aseyd did,
is that all he did was just
write a ton of questions
for himself and then when he was revising,
he would just go over those
questions over and over again.
And after a handful, maybe
like three or four repetitions
of these questions, he
pretty much knew everything
and every subject inside out.
So how does this work?
Let's hop into the laptop, as they say,
and I'll show you,
these were the documents
that he made for each of the subjects.
So we've got HOM, which is physiology.
We've got MIMS, which is biochemistry.
And we've got anatomy, which is anatomy.
So let's start with HOM,
which is physiology.
So essentially, he's gone
through the lecture notes
and through a textbook alongside,
and he's basically converted
everything into questions.
So the first lecture was about
cell membranes and stuff,
so his question is,
what are some roles of the cell membrane?
Then it was about control systems.
When is ballistic control
good and what's an example?
Let's scroll down a bit
to, what's another topic?
So we've got muscles as another topic.
What does the size of
a motor unit determine?
What is the kinetic
state diagram for this?
Why is there a constant isometric force
below 2.2 to 2.0 microns?
Basically, a ton of questions,
so 60 questions for muscles.
For cardiology, we've got,
how many questions is this?
Wow, this is a lot of questions, my god.
This is how you rank
first in medical school.
Whoa, 216 questions for cardiology,
he was a bit of a cardiology nerd.
So he kinda fleshed out the lecture notes
with some information from textbooks.
But again, never made any
notes from the textbooks,
all he did was just write
questions for himself.
More stuff, respiratory,
questions from the lecture notes,
100 plus, 158, quick
questions about the kidneys.
And as you can see, he's
basically got an entire,
like 37-page Google Doc/Word doc,
literally just filled with questions.
He hasn't wasted any time in making notes
and in summarizing, all he's done
is just write questions for himself.
And the idea is that he's
done this for every subject,
and then when he's sitting down to study,
he decides in advance or like on the day,
what subject he wants to study that day.
So let's say he's doing,
I don't know, anatomy,
and he wants to revise the upper limb.
Then what he's gonna
do, he's gonna open up
his upper limb document,
and all he's gonna do
is he's gonna go through
the questions one-by-one
and ask himself if he can feasibly answer
those questions in his head.
He doesn't really write
anything down, he just, sort of,
tries to answer them
out loud or in his head.
So how does the median cubital vein run?
Oh god, I can't remember that at all.
What do the lucidum cells contain
and where are they foreign found?
No idea, I don't even
know those are a thing.
Which two layers make up the dermis?
Ooh, I probably should know that,
but I really can't remember.
Anyway, this is essentially, like,
all of the stuff for anatomy.
Again, 34 pages of just questions.
And that's basically it.
The method is, going
through the lecture notes,
going through textbooks.
But like, what we all
like to do by default,
is we like to highlight
and like, make notes.
For some reason we think
it's useful to summarize
our lecture notes, or
summarize a textbook,
or summarize a revision guide.
And then, I don't know, I
think the theory is that
we all read over our summaries
and maybe highlight stuff,
and maybe ask ourselves questions.
But this is a purely
active recall-based method.
All he's literally doing
is just asking questions
and answering them.
So, let's move on to why
this method works.
(soft music)
And this whole method
is based around the principle
of active recall.
I have been preaching about active recall
for literally the last two years,
and actually, even longer than that,
since before I got this YouTube channel,
just like in talks and lectures
and stuff that I would give.
I'd be like, active recall is
literally the best thing ever.
It's the best thing ever
because active recall
is the single most
efficient study technique
that's ever been discovered,
there is a mountain of
evidence supporting it.
I've got a 25-minute long
video, that I'll link
in the video description and
in a card up there somewhere,
where I go through the
evidence in much more detail.
But essentially, what active recall means
is testing yourself.
And the reason testing ourselves
is so amazingly valuable
is because, the way the brain works,
it's all based around
how many times and how,
how much you retrieve
information from your brain.
So we all have this misconception that,
in order to study, we have
to put stuff into our brains,
but actually it's flipped on its head
if you look at the
evidence, the actual way
to remember anything and
to make anything stick,
is by retrieving
information from our brains
rather than trying to put it back in.
So let's say we read something once
and we've understood
a topic, at that point
the most effective thing
we can do with our time
is ask ourselves questions
about that topic.
And they've done loads of
studies whereby they've taken
a group of college students,
or high school students,
or whatever, and they split
them up into different groups.
And they'll teach all the
groups exactly the same topic,
but for one of the groups
they'll get them to reread it,
for one of the groups they'll
get them to make a mind map,
for one of the groups they'll tell them
to read it four times, for
another group they'll tell them
to make notes, and for one of the groups
they'll just give them
a test on the subject.
And then if you look at
the results afterwards,
like when they get tested
maybe a week later,
you'll find that the
people that get tested,
the people who did the active recall,
who actively tried to
retrieve the information
rather than just reread
it or make notes on it,
those were the people that performed
significantly better in their exams.
And again, much more evidence in my, like,
legit evidence-based revision tips video,
this is just kind of an introduction.
So, I don't think this
can be stated enough.
I recently set up a Discord server,
I'll put a link down if
you wanna kinda hang out
with me in the evenings on Discord.
And we've got like, a little study,
tips, chat thing on there.
And it baffles me as to
just how many people
still ask the question,
how should I be studying for my exams?
It's just the only, like, it's such a good
revision technique to just
test yourself on stuff,
that it still baffles me
that despite even like,
watching some of my videos,
and maybe reading a book
called "Make it Stick,"
really good book to,
how to effectively learn, and
watching any of my friend's,
Thomas Frank's videos,
like, all of the evidence
around study tips is basically that
active recall is the way forward.
And I'm waxing on
about this for absolutely ages
because, you know, they say
that on average it takes
about seven repetitions,
like, seven times hearing
the same concept to really
fully internalize it.
And I think, like, the more
people in the world hear
about active recall and kind
of, hear about the good news
of active recall, the
better human productivity
as a whole would be and the
better our lives as students
would be because we'd have
to spend less time studying
and more time doing the things
that actually matter to us.
But, yeah, that's basically
how the method works.
I'll stop droning on about this now.
Let's now talk about the
method in a bit more detail,
and I'll show you how you can
use various different apps
to achieve the same effect.
Before we do so, I just wanna tell you
a little bit about this video's sponsor,
and that is Brilliant.
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problem solving community
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They've got a load of
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And we've also got
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And the nice thing about
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it's not just a passively
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What it does is that they
guides you through the concepts
and then it forces you
to use active recall
to apply those concepts
to certain problems.
And recently they've introduced this new
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And what they do is that
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they throw you into a problem,
and then you try and grapple
with the concepts in the topic,
and then you solve the problem.
And this is actually a similar format
to how the education system works
at universities like Oxford and Cambridge.
And as part of their interviews,
what the supervisor or the professor does,
is that they would give
you a little snippet
of information, sort of,
introduce you to a topic,
and then they'll ask
you a question about it,
and then you have to, kind of,
use your brain to figure out
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It's not the case that,
you just kind of get spoon-fed information
and then you have to
regurgitate it back out.
So, I really like Brilliant,
I've been going through
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fundamentals course 'cause I can
sort of code myself and I've been coding
since I was very young,
since I was about 11.
But I've never really taken the time
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how algorithms work,
or like, the real basics
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And this, there's a
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So, if any of that sounds up your street
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But yeah, Brilliant.org, thanks
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And let's move on.
(soft music)
All right, so let's talk about
this method in a bit more detail.
And one of the common
questions about this method is,
you know, what do you do if
you don't know the answer
to one of the questions
that you've written?
So, at the start, we've
gone through our lectures
and we've just converted
everything into just questions,
we've gone through our textbook
and we've just written
questions for ourselves.
But then when we're going
through the questions,
obviously, there's gonna be stuff that we
don't remember the answer to.
So, for example if I read,
what is the capacitance of biomembranes?
You know, I might not remember
that from the lecture notes.
But the key thing of
Aseyd's method is that,
he never writes down the
answer to these questions,
he trusts that he'll be
able to find the information
in the lecture notes, or in
the textbook, or on Google,
and therefore, he doesn't
have to waste the time
to actually write down the
answer for all of these.
And that's obviously a
benefit because it means
we save time and it's
a bit more efficient,
but obviously the drawback is that,
then when we're going through stuff,
it does take a little bit of time
to then find that information
in the right place.
But this isn't necessarily a bad thing,
it's not necessarily a
bad thing that in order
to get information we have to
go back to our lecture notes.
Because, at least for us in
Cambridge, the lecture notes
are usually quite well-structured
and quite well-organized.
And so, the act of finding
information in the lecture notes,
means that we'll be
able to see what section
the information's in, be like, oh okay,
that's the capacitance of biomembranes
and we'll see where it fits
into the bigger picture.
Equally if we're having
to go into a textbook,
textbooks are usually
very well written because,
you know, they've been around for years
and they're written by
clever people and stuff.
And so, if we're finding
information in the textbook,
again, we're gonna be getting
that information in context,
in the context of the rest of the subject.
And then maybe, instead of just reading
about the capacitance of biomembranes,
we'll read a little bit
more about biomembranes and,
kind of, understand the
subject a little bit better.
And so, what Aseyd's
doing is like, number one,
the first pass through the lecture,
he's just converting into questions.
And then the second time
he comes around to revise
the subject, he's gonna
go through the questions,
ask himself one-by-one.
And then what he does is
that he's color-coding
in red, for example over here,
the questions that he
didn't know the answer to.
So that the next time around
if he's short on time,
he won't go through every single question,
he'll just go through the
questions that he's marked red.
And then let's say the third time around,
if there are questions that he didn't get
in the second time,
he'll mark them as blue,
and then the third time
around he'll just go
with the blue questions.
So this becomes a very
efficient way of only doing
the questions that we know
we got wrong previously.
And obviously, before the
exam and at some point,
we wanna be going through
every single question
because one of the other
concepts in effective studying
is called spaced repetition.
And again,
I'll link my video about that down here
and in a card up there, and
you can check it out more.
But basically the idea is
that, cramming isn't effective,
it obviously works in the short-term,
we've all done cramming for exams.
But actually if we want
information to stick
over a very long-term
period, we wanna be repeating
that information at spaced
intervals to overcome
what's called the forgetting
effect or the forgetting curve,
that was discovered by
a guy called Ebbinghaus
in like, the 1800s, I think.
But yeah, more information in
my spaced repetition video.
Basically, it's all about active recall,
and spaced repetition,
and this method really
works in that sense.
And we can see here, he's even color-coded
some of them in purple,
and I suspect those are
the questions that he was a
little bit struggling with
on his fourth pass of doing
these, doing these questions.
This isn't the sort of method that you
can just kinda do once
and then forget about.
And then be like, oh, well I haven't done
any work for a year,
therefore I'm gonna cram this
in two days before the exam.
You probably could, but
it would be cramming,
it wouldn't be long-term
knowledge that would stick.
Whereas doing this and applying
spaced repetition to it
would really be magical.
And I'll just show you how I would
apply this method personally.
So, I've, you know, active recall
is the best thing ever so
I've been using variants
of this method for a few years now.
I just haven't used them
as well as Aseyd has
because I feel, you know, I
get lazy and I'm not great,
but he is really good at, kind
of, actually doing the work.
Anyway, the other day I was preparing for
a supervision where I'm
teaching physiology.
And so, I was going through
the heart and circulation
lecture notes and I was
basically doing Aseyd's method
of going through them and
writing out questions for myself.
So again, here I'm using
the app Notion, link below,
I'll link to a few of my
videos on that if you care.
But I think Notion is really good
because they've got this toggle feature.
Which means, what I can
do is I can, for example,
if I go into fetal circulation,
what I've done is I've
written questions for myself.
Why does the fetal circulation
need to be special,
what does the oxygen
dissociation curve look like?
Various adaptations, fetal shunts.
I've written these questions for myself,
but if I were Aseyd, I would just write
the questions and not the answer.
But because, like, at the
moment, I'm not really
in the market for just
memorizing information,
I've written the answer down
to some of these as well.
Again, through a toggle box.
So, actually, I haven't written down
the answer to that because--
This is kind of weird, but
like, what I do is that,
for questions that I know
I know the answer to,
or that I know I can
figure out the answer to,
or I know I can find the answer
easy in the lecture notes,
then I won't bother writing it down.
So, why does the fetal
circulation need to be special?
Clearly, that's because
we need to overcome
the problem that when you're
a fetus inside your mom,
you don't have any lungs that work.
Therefore, you need to get your oxygen
from the mother's placental
blood flow and all that stuff.
Therefore, you need to be adapted,
and your hemoglobin needs to be adapted,
and your circulation needs to be adapted
to try and get oxygen out
of the mother's blood.
And I know this.
So, I've written the question for myself,
but I don't need to waste
the time writing the answer
'cause I know I know.
And if I ever get to the point
where I read that question
and think, oh, I don't
know what the answer is,
then I will go back to the lecture notes.
But I'm just trying to be
efficient in minimizing
the amount of information I'm
having to put into my notes,
because as we've said and
as all the evidence shows,
summarizing information,
taking notes with the book open
is just not a very
effective way of studying.
Anyway, this one, what does
the oxygen dissociation curve
for hemoglobin look like,
comparing maternal versus fetal.
I know what it looks like in my head,
and so when I see that question,
I'll be drawing it out in my head,
maybe I'll draw it out on
paper if I feel like it,
but crucially, I have actually included
the oxygen dissociation
curve in this toggle box.
And this is very easy to do.
So here is a screen cast of
myself making these notes
'cause I screen recorded
myself just in case
I was gonna make one of these videos.
And you can see that
on the left-hand side,
I've got the lecture notes open.
And on the right-hand side,
I'm creating this document in Notion.
And what I'm doing is that,
for a lot of this stuff,
I'm just screen grabbing
bits from the lecture notes.
I'm not copy and pasting, I'm
rarely writing it out myself,
I'm just, kind of, using the screenshot,
screen grab shortcut on the
Mac to select a particular area
of the screen, shoving it into Notion,
and then that makes it easier for me
to find this graph when I need to see it.
So yeah, I can immediately look
at this graph now and think,
okay, that's what I thought
this dissociation curve
for hemoglobin looked like.
And then I can untoggle this and move on.
What are the various adaptations
of the fetal circulation?
So, number one, two, and three.
So these are, stuff that I wrote down,
because in the lecture notes this was
in a few different sections
and so I just thought,
you know what, I'm gonna take 10 seconds
to just type out what these answers are.
But, for example, if I looked at,
fetal hemoglobin relinquishes
that oxygen at lower oxygen tensions.
If that sentence didn't make sense to me,
I wouldn't just take it at face value.
I would obviously go back
to the lecture notes,
or go back to my textbook,
and figure out what I'm struggling with,
why this sentence
doesn't make sense to me,
and work out, what, like, so,
try and understand what's going on.
And this all comes back to,
like, it's all very well
doing active recall, it's all very well
doing spaced repetition,
and doing all of this stuff.
But really, the thing that
trumps all of these things
is to understand the content.
There is literally no point
in just memorizing facts
if we don't understand
the broad principles
that underlie them.
And so, as I'm going
through these questions,
as any of my friends who
do effective studying,
as we're going through our questions,
we're trying to understand the topic.
And if we ever get to a
point where we're like,
ooh, I'm not quite sure what that means,
we will take the time to look it up.
Because, especially with
effective learning, like,
there's this, again,
there's this misconception
that learning should be easy.
That, you know, the best
way to learn is by finding
a really condensed set of
notes and just reading it,
and getting that
information into our heads.
But again, it's sort of
the other way around.
It's, the more effortful,
the more hard it feels
to be learning something,
the more we're actually
going to be learning it.
And there's, again, so
much evidence where people
have done studies on
students where they rate
how hard they found the subject,
and how hard it was to learn about it,
and you find that those
students perform better
on the exam, and learn more consistently,
and have that knowledge for
a longer period of time.
Because as we're grappling with stuff,
as we're putting effort into learning,
our brain is forming these connections.
And the way I think of it is
sort of like going to the gym.
And it's like, you know,
if I can bench press
80 kilograms, I can't, I wish,
I can probably bench
press about 70 kilograms.
But, you know, when I bench 70
kilograms that is effortful,
that is when my muscles are gonna grow.
Whereas when I bench 20
kilograms, then, you know,
basically nothing's gonna
happen because it's easy.
So it's kind of the same with studying.
Like, when it's difficult,
we are actively forming
connections in our
brain, and then we sleep,
and then those connections get solidified.
When it feels easy, when we're
just like, oh yeah, reading,
like, reading, and
highlighting, and making notes
is really easy, that's
why we love doing it
because it feels really productive.
We kind of go through, pretty colors,
and we write down stuff,
but we're not actually using our brains.
And the more we use our
brains, the more effortful
learning is, the more
information is gonna stick.
Anyway, next one.
What are fetal shunts and what do they do?
Again, I, kind of, wrote some
brief notes here, you know,
foramen ovale, RA to LA
'cause fetal lungs don't work.
And this information like,
makes, makes perfect sense to me.
But, for example, if you were
a first year medical student,
studying this for the first time,
and looking at my notes, you'd see,
RA to LA because fetal lungs don't work.
Like, what the hell does that mean?
You know, it's the sort of information
that requires more context.
And note taking, okay,
and I'm gonna make a video
about this, is sort of a balance
of compression versus context.
Textbooks and lecture notes
have a lot of context,
they're very long, very
broad, but they give you
the context, they help
you understand the topic.
Whereas when we take notes,
we have compressed all
that information down.
And so, when I see RA to LA
'cause fetal lungs don't work,
I know immediately
exactly what that means,
I could explain it to a
five-year-old if I wanted to.
But, if a first year medic,
who had never done the subject before,
were to see that, they
wouldn't understand it.
And so, that would be a case
of going into the textbook
and actually understanding
what's going on,
going back to this idea of understanding.
And then I've just kind of done this for
all of the stuff within cardiology so far.
So, cardiac cycle, I've
written about the phases,
intrinsic regulation.
What were Frank and
Starling's famous experiments?
So at this point, I'd read
the question, I'd think,
huh, okay, something about
a dog heart preparation,
and then, yeah, experiment
one, increased preload,
experiment two, there is, there
should be something there.
But yeah, I've just literally
screen grabbed stuff
from the lecture notes and a diagram,
just to save me a little bit of time.
But I think if I were
actually studying the subject,
if I were actually taking exams,
I probably wouldn't even
write down the answer.
I'd force myself to go
into the lecture notes,
or go into the textbook,
and find the answer.
So, long story short, basically,
this is Aseyd's magical
method for active recall.
And the reason he actually
came about this method
was that in 2015, I gave
a talk at the university
about how to study for exams.
'Cause in 2015, I was studying
psychology for my third year,
and I'd been actively
looking into all of this
evidence-based study
tips and all that stuff.
And initially, I was
supposed to be giving a talk
at the Islamic Society Prayer Room
for like five people
because no one turns up.
But we made a Facebook event of it
and suddenly, like,
people starting sharing it
amongst other members of the university.
And then I think at the end
of it, like 20,000 people
had viewed that event
according to the analytics,
instead of like seven.
And like, 100 and something
people turned up to the event.
And so, we had to kind of,
like, expand the venue,
and just kind of do it
in one of the colleges.
But in this talk, I basically
talked about the magic
of active recall, the magic
with spaced repetition.
And when my friend Aseyd heard that,
he was like, all right, we're done.
And from that point onwards,
like, for the next two months,
all he did was create these
questions for himself.
And the cool thing is that
he didn't do that much,
like, that much anal work
for the rest of the year,
that sounds weird.
He, kind of, kept up with his essays,
and he kinda understood the subject,
and read a few textbooks
and the lecture notes
just to keep on top of things.
But it was only two
months before the exam,
in the Easter term,
that he discovered this,
this magic of active
recall and spent the rest
of the two months making these
questions and answering them.
And so, if he were to have
started that method from day one,
I suspect, you know, and
wanted to put in the effort
over a very long-term period
of time for the whole year,
I suspect that would've
been even more efficient
and he would've even spent
even less time studying.
Anyway, yeah, this has been a
very long, very rambly video,
basically, explaining
this concept of, you know,
if you wanna do really well on your exams,
it's really all about testing yourself.
And this is, sort of, testing yourself,
this is the concept of active recall
taken to its logical extreme,
where you're not spending any
time at all writing notes,
'cause that's a waste of
time, you're spending 100%
of your time writing
questions for yourself
and then answering those questions,
dredging up the information
from our brains,
and then, sort of,
solidifying those connections.
So thank you so much for watching.
If you liked the video,
please give it a thumbs up.
If you haven't subscribed to the channel,
please consider doing so.
Links over here to some other
of my evidence-based study tips videos.
If you like this stuff,
please leave any questions
in the comments, and I'll ask Aseyd,
and he'll kinda get back
to you on that front.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you
in the next video, buh-bye.
My mom always tells me,
when I'm drinking coffee,
I shouldn't slurp.
(slurping)
She says that is really
audible if you slurp.
So this is me slurping.
(slurping)
And this is me actively
trying not to slurp.
I don't know, let me know in the comments
if you're this far.
And then maybe instead
of just reading about
the capacitance of biomembranes,
we'll read a little bit
more about (tripping over words).
(beeping)
I'd been actively looking into
all of this evidence-based,
like, (tripping over words).
(beeping)
And the weird thing was
that he didn't actually do
that much work, kind of,
throughout the year beyond.
(phone dinging) Whoops.
