okay so when i was studying at high school and when i was studying at university
my studying at university was a good 50 more efficient than when i was studying at high school
meaning at university i only had to study half as much than when i was studying at high school but
i was retaining the same amount of information i was retaining a lot more information actually
and that's because i was studying smarter i was using some incredibly powerful memory
strategies to be able to memorize information in a fast shorter time and in this video i'm
going to go through those specific strategies so if you implement them into your studying
like it did with me they should be able to reduce your studying time by a considerable amount and
these memory hacks that i'm going to talk about in this video they were just one way that i was able
to study smarter and graduate with a 4.0 gpa if you want to learn in depth about the full strategy
from a to z on how i graduated in the top five percent of my university you can check out the
transform your grades in 30 days challenge there's a link below it's a 30 day challenge where every
day i go through with you step by step how to take your studying to the next level with video lessons
a workbook productivity planner quizzes a private community and even one-on-one coaching from me
and we're offering a 50 promotional offer you can check it out in the description below the method
of loki the method of loki memorization technique is a way of memorizing material using the
visualization of familiar environments in order to better recall the information so for example you
might imagine yourself placing items around the room such as the sofa next to your bed on top of
the tv and then in order to recall each item you visualize yourself walking back through the room
and then either picking up or passing each item that you placed there and that's what triggers
your recall for the material you're learning the method of loki is so effective it's been used
by thousands of years even the ancient greeks and romans were known to have used this strategy it's
a really well documented memory strategy so in 1966 british historian francis yates wrote in her
book the art of memory how she would use a street that she's familiar with like the street that she
lives at and she'd memorize each building then when she needed to remember a list of words or
a lot of faces or a series of numbers she would in her imagination walk through the street and place
each item that she needed to remember on each building so in order to retrieve that information
at a later date she would imagine walking through that street again and pick up the items that she
put on each building this strategy is so effective in fact that many of the winners of the world
memory championships use it as their main memory strategy but i mean they really take it to the
next level so for example the 2006 world memory champion clemens mayor used a 300 point long
journey through his house for his world record memorizing 10 040 random digits in 30 minutes and
world record holder gary shang has used the method of loki to memorize pi to over 65 000 digits so if
these guys are literally memorizing a list of 65 000 numbers using the method of loki to help them
with memorization then i'm sure it's good enough to help you memorize your study material
the chain method the chain method is basically where you have a list of things that you need
to remember and you link them all together in some way so let's say you have a shopping list that you
need to remember that is you need to buy dog food cereal milk and a newspaper so using the chain
method you could imagine a kind of cartoon-like story where you forget to buy the food so you
invite your dog up to the table where he eats his cereal and milk with a bowl and spoon just like a
human while reading a newspaper so now you're far less likely to forget anything on the list
because you've turned what was at the beginning just a boring static list to an interesting
story or event there is one main factor that makes this strategy really good for memorizing
revision material and that's to remember any new piece of information it must be associated
with a ridiculous story so the more ridiculous you make the story the easier it will be to remember
and there are four ways that you can make your story extremely ridiculous substitution you
imagine one item instead of the other so for example in the earlier example that we used
we were imagining a dog sitting at a table eating cereal with a bowl and spoon just like
a human would right so we're substituting a human with a dog a human eating at the dinner table is
normal right but a dog eating at the dinner table is weird so animals could be talking
inanimate objects could be moving by themselves the possibilities are only limited by your
imagination proportion try to see the items larger or smaller than reality so with our story with the
dog at the dinner table if it's a small dog you could imagine that same dog is the same size as a
human just to make it seem that a little bit more weirder and more memorable exaggeration this is
where you think of quantities larger than normal so you could imagine your whole kitchen flooded
two foot high with cereal and milk and that's a memorable thought right action so something
in your story needs to be doing something that he wouldn't normally do in real life so
in my story the dog was sitting at the dinner table eating cereal and reading the newspaper
actions are always easier to remember so applying one or more of these rules to any picture will
help you make that picture ridiculous after some practice you won't have to think about these rules
as you'll be able to do it automatically and in case you need more examples or you want to learn
more about this technique consider checking out the memory book by harry lorraine and jerry lucas
because they go into it in far more detail than i possibly could the dual thinking method so thomas
edison would sit upright in his chair with a handful of marbles and he'd think about a problem
and really concentrate hard on it and eventually he would get tired and start to fall asleep
and as soon as he started to fall asleep naturally he would let go of the marbles and they would fall
on the hard floor making a lot of noises before waking him up immediately and at that very moment
he would write down exactly what was on his mind just before he started to drift off so what edison
was taking advantage of was dual thinking so there are two ways in which we think focused thinking
which is pretty straightforward is when we're really concentrating on something maybe trying
to work out a maths equation or problem solving in some way and then there's diffuse thinking
and this is when you let your mind wander freely making connections at random and connecting the
dots across different things the idea here is that when your mind is more relaxed you're able to form
more creative solutions to a problem or finally link ideas that have been eluding you earlier of
course both of these ways of thinking have their own advantages and disadvantages but i think both
are equally important but focused thinking is good for when you want to pay attention to details and
get intensive work done whereas diffuse thinking is activated when you're relaxed and not really
focusing on anything particular so it's important to utilize both focused and diffuse thinking
when studying our brain needs to use diffused mode to connect the dots and focus mode to get
things done faster so for example i use diffuse thinking when i'm in the shower i've had so many
really good ideas pop up in the shower so then i have to reach out and grab my phone to write them
down before i forget another way of using defuse thinking is if you are sitting and studying for an
exam tomorrow with laser sharp focus and then you take a break for a minute or two you walk
around you don't touch your phone and just think about what you studied from a bird's eye view the
immersion technique the emerging technique is such an underutilized memory strategy that i think more
students should really take advantage of because it's used quite often when it comes to language
learning so if you're learning i don't know korean for example then you you'd watch korean
films right you'd watch korean dramas you'd listen to k-pop you'd read korean news you'd basically
immerse yourself into korean culture it's what i did just before university i studied economics and
finance and i knew that the economics part of my degree was going to be far more difficult than the
finance part of my degree so i immersed myself into the world of economics i watched youtube
videos and economics i watched all the economics related documentaries that i could watch i read
adam smith's the wealth of nations the communist manifesto by karl marx i consumed as much material
as i could from the founding fathers of economics back in the 18th century and this approach set me
up so well for when i started university because i already knew the fundamentals of economics and
i had a really strong foundation to then build on with the content of the lectures and the course
material it's a really powerful method because it's similar to how we learn languages right
a baby doesn't actively try to learn how to talk a baby doesn't try to learn the languages that his
parents speak it just happens naturally because they're surrounded with that language every day
so naturally they start to pick it up and there have been so many studies that show
just how using the immersion technique can be far more effective than using traditional
revision techniques so for example a 2011 study at the georgetown university medical center
tested two groups of students the first group were taught in the traditional classroom environment
whereas the second group used the immersion model and the results showed that the students that
were taught through immersion training processed information far better and were more engaged than
the traditional classroom training and as a bonus to using the immersion technique it's just easier
it's more interesting watching documentaries and reading books and listening to podcasts
than reading textbooks or reading lecture slides right it's a win-win the mind map another useful
strategy especially if you're a visual learner so mind mapping is where you use graphical ways to
represent ideas and concepts that help you think visually and they also help structure information
to better analyze and understand it now i'll be honest with you i didn't use mind maps much
at university because i'm not much of a visual learner and mind mapping presents information in
a visual way so it just didn't work that well for me but it's a great study method for people that
learn and memorize things visually and i have a friend that at university where in his bedroom
one of his walls was covered in mind maps he swore by mind maps and he graduated with 4.0 gpa
so they must have worked pretty well for him and they also make studying that bit more interesting
too i mean revision mostly consists of reading textbooks reading notes and writing out notes
but drawing out colorful mind maps is i don't know it's a bit more creative and more engaging
than just reading a textbook right so if you've not tried drawing out mind maps then give it a go
you might be surprised just how effective they can be the fineman technique this is another technique
that i used a lot at university and i'm not going to go into too much depth on this because i talked
about it quite a lot on this channel and i go into even more depth in the project elon course
alternatively you can check out the video i made one of my most watched videos actually on how
to study smarter not harder where i talk about the finding technique more you can click on the
pop-up banner above but in a nutshell it's where you teach your course content to someone else so
whatever you're learning for your exam whatever you're trying to memorize you should be able to
teach it using very simple vocabulary to someone that knows absolutely nothing about the topic that
you're teaching them so if you can explain the information in very simple terms it means that
you probably know the content pretty well however if you struggle to cheat someone else the content
in simple terminology then you might have to go back and continue learning
but this method of teaching is really effective for a couple of reasons firstly it's a form
of active recall so when you're teaching someone you're digging deep into your brain to find that
knowledge and you're strengthening those neural pathways but secondly you're essentially testing
yourself and finding the gaps in your knowledge which you can then go back and read up on later
so yeah super useful memory strategy that you can use that can save you a lot of time
the spacing effect i can't make this video of memory hacks and not talk about space repetition
it was by far the most used study method that i used throughout university i used it pretty much
every single day for the entirety of my university education saying that though i
used loads of study methods and i made a video and ranked them all on which study methods are
the most effective and worth implementing into your strategy and which are pretty useless you
can click on the pop-up banner above to watch that video so i'm one-on-one coaching right now a few
dozen students in the transform your grades in 30 days course and a lot of my students
when they first come to me when the semester first starts the number of hours studying they do
will be relatively low but as the semester progresses and their exams get closer and closer
the number of hours of studying will steadily increase and then one or two weeks before the
exam the studying will suddenly increase even more as the pressure from the exams motivates
them to start cramming in preparation but it's just not studying smart it's quite a stressful
way of approaching your exams and at least in my opinion there is a better and smarter
way of studying if your space you're studying out more you can take advantage of the spacing effect
and the space of repetition takes advantage of this is where you memorize some information
and then a period of time later maybe a couple of days or one week later you come back to it
and you re-read it to reinforce it in your memory so you're not learning the same material every day
or you're not studying the same material for 10 hours a day but instead you have shorter
study sessions that are spaced out over three or four day periods for example it's a really
stress-free way of memorizing information and i know it will help a lot of you because i know how
stressed a lot of you get especially just before exams because you're not spending hours getting
stressed out over why you're not able to memorize and retain your study material space repetition
takes advantage of what is called the spacing effect which was a phenomenon first identified
by herman ebbinghaus way back in 1885 in his book memory a contribution to experimental psychology
which suggests that active recall with increasing time intervals helps the brain process and retain
information the whole point of this video is to try and get you to study less while achieving
the same grades or even achieving higher grades i have a whole video series on these kinds of
videos my latest video is how i schedule my daily routine to allow me to study smarter rather than
harder you can click on the video on the screen to watch that it's actually one of my fastest growing
videos right now alternatively another video i made how to graduate in the top one percent
you can click on the card on the screen and whichever video you choose i'll see you over there