Hello old friend. Welcome back to the channel. Now, there are plenty of learning techniques
out there and I’m sure over the course of your life, you’ve experienced this.
When you’re trying to learn something, the odds are that the only thing you do is read
and re-read your textbook till you feel like you’ve memorized all of the information
that you need. Or you incessantly take notes because you think that when you write stuff
in your own language, you’re more likely to remember. And sure, this can work to a
certain extent but there’s only one study technique that I’ve used from high school
all the way to Grad school because I believe that it’s the most bulletproof way to absorb
information and store it into your brain and it’s called Active Recall.
Before we get into this extraordinary technique, don’t forget to leave me a Thumbs Up for
the YouTube Algorithm and subscribe if you’re new. I’d love to keep sharing cool stuff
like this with you every single week. Alright let’s get to it.
Active Recall takes advantage of the psychological testing effect and is extremely effective
in incorporating long-term memory into your learning. In fact there has been plenty of
research conducted that has shown this technique to be the most effective and efficient way
to study for any factual or problem solving test. (RESEARCH). [Study]
Neurologically, the Active Recall technique even takes advantage of our Neocortex’s
ability to use information to build new memories. The reason I love this so much is because
it doesn’t require any kind of training or skill. And all you have to do is slightly
adjust your study process. So if you’re anything like me and have gone
through the ringer with studying for higher degrees, entrance exams, or even a high school
test, I have so much confidence that this method will be the secret weapon that you
never knew you needed.
Simply put, Active Recall incorporates active learning where in order to truly learn a new
piece of information, you need to somehow trick your brain into working on it, activating
new neural pathways and building new connections.
So how does this whole thing work? Well, the first step is to Review your materials
You can’t recall what you don’t know. So take the time to learn and understand whatever
it is that you are studying.
The second step is...you guessed it… to recall the information you learned.
Now here’s where this is unique. You’re solely drawing on your memory to remember
the information. That means no referring notes or your textbook. Be mindful that this will
be a bit of a struggle because we don’t often practice how to actually commit information
to our memory. This is the point where many people tend to give in to the struggle and
refer back to your notes because your brain can’t handle it, but you need to remember
that this simply part of the process of training your brain how to tap into its own memory
stores.
Stick around to the end of the video because I’ll be telling you how to to access your
memory stores while studying by using a few practical approaches.
Active Recall takes the focus off of ingesting the information and instead emphasizes revision
and constant testing at every stage of your study process.
This works so much better than something like rereading a textbook or notes because constantly
glancing at a study material gives you the illusion that you know the information because
it’s all laid out there for you. It’s this false sense of confidence that ends up
getting you in trouble when you don’t remember anything during a test. That’s why this
is called Passive Learning. But if you aren’t actively asking your brain to recall this
information and test yourself, then you don’t actually know it at all.
Active Recall also helps us hack what’s known as the Forgetting Curve, which is essentially
a curve that shows us how information in our brain is lost over time when we aren’t actively
seeking to retrieve it.
Now there are a few key ways to tap into your brain’s memory reserves when you’re learning
and revising and these are some of my favorites:
The first is through Repeated Testing. This is when you repeatedly ask yourself questions
about material that you’ve studied and challenge your brain to retrieve information that it
has stored. This practice essentially helps you move that information from your short-term
memory because you just learned it and store it as long-term memory which you will remember.
The second is one that I’ve also previously advocated for and that’s The Feynman Technique,
which has an emphasis on simplifying information and recalling it by explaining it in the simplest
way possible. If you haven’t seen my video for that, I’ll leave a card up top and leave
a link down below the like button.
The third and one of the more popular recall approaches is the use of Flashcards. This
is a great way to quiz yourself by memorizing facts or entire paragraphs of information.
It utilizes both the principles of active recall as well as spaced repetition which
I’ll discuss in a future video, so don’t forget to subscribe to make sure you catch
that one.
Even though you might feel like this is a fairly obvious and straightforward way to
approach study, a majority of people don’t approach learning in this way and prefer to
read and re-read their stuff and that’s because testing yourself and recalling information
can be exhausting, but that’s the whole point. During a revision, you’re supposed
to be asking your brain to repurpose that information even if it’s demanding because
it’ll be trained to do so by the time you have an exam or test.
So even though, you might often feel like you’re well-versed with a subject because
you’ve read it a hundred times, underlined stuff and made notes in your own language,
make no mistake that unless you’re consciously seeking to retrieve that information and test
yourself, you may not be approaching learning and study in the most effective way possible.
That’s it. Hope this was helpful. Let me know in the comments below if you’d like
me to make similar videos to this in the future. Feel free to check out another great video
on learning right here or this playlist as well. Thanks for watching. Catch you next
time. Peace.