- 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.
Brilliant is an amazing, active learning,
problem solving community with online courses
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science, physics, computer science, that sort of stuff.
They've got a load of courses that you can take
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so that's in the computer science segment.
And we've also got things like probability,
how casinos work, the fundamentals of statistics,
and just like, a load of really, really
well-produced courses.
And the nice thing about these courses is that,
it's not just a passively educational video like this one.
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
daily challenges feature where,
it only takes about five or 10 minutes,
but everyday there's a new challenge,
based on maths, or physics, or computer science.
And what they do is that teach you a little bit
about the topic, and then 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
and, sort of, kind of actively go from step A to B.
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
their computer science 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
to actually understand how algorithms work,
or like, the real basics of how computers work.
And this, there's a lot of stuff these days
about like, neural networks and machine learning, and AI,
and Brilliant gives a really good, accessible introduction
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So, if any of that sounds up your street
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And the first 200 people to visit that link
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A few of the courses are free, you can check 'em out,
you can see what you like.
But yeah, Brilliant.org, thanks for sponsoring this video.
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.