- This video is sponsored by Skill Share.
It's five days before your exam.
You're worried. You're nervous.
You're unprepared.
You spent the last few weeks procrastinating
and doing all the things you weren't meant
to be doing.
Now, here you are
mentally preparing yourself to cram.
That means 10 hours of study a day,
minimal sleep, and plenty of caffeine.
Fast forward a few days and you feel that all the studies
kind of paying off.
Questions are easier,
everything seems to make sense,
and you go to bed telling yourself,
"I've go this."
Now, it's exam day.
You open up that first page, read the question,
and think to yourself, "I have no idea."
It's a question you haven't seen before
and you don't know want to do with it.
You start getting frustrated.
The lecturer never went through this.
When did we ever get taught this?
This exam is just, it's just not fair.
This is just not a fair exam.
When did we get taught this?
You blame other people and other factors.
But really, the only person to blame is yourself.
Here's why cramming doesn't work.
Hey guys! Welcome back to the channel.
If you're new here, I'm Sebastian,
a medical student from Australia.
And this might be a situation where you found yourself in.
I certainly have,
and in many cases when I face difficulty
in an exam, I default to putting the blame
on other people or other factors,
but really, I had to take responsibility for my own study.
When it comes to learning, cramming isn't the answer.
But what is?
Before we get onto that question,
let's start with what cramming is
and where it fails.
It's the process of trying to absorb as much information
as you can in the shortest amount of time possible.
And for many students, the priority is to focus
on the most high-yield concepts and principles
and obtain enough superficial recall
to get them through.
But why is that problematic?
Professor Rober Bjork in his review
"Learning Versus Performance",
writes that performance is often an unreliable index
of where the long-term changes that constitute learning
have taken place.
And that the improvements in performance
can fail to yield significant learning.
Here's his thoughts on cramming.
- The truth is,
that cramming can work, but only on a test administered
right after cramming.
If there's something we really want to learn,
we should not cram, because it's followed
by dramatic forgetting.
So cramming is a very bad idea.
- We can see that the cramming process
only focuses on the short-term
and neglects any formation of good study habits
or deep internalization of the concepts and principles
in the subject that you're learning about.
While they may get you a pass or even a good score
for the exam, it comes at a cost.
And that cost is misleading you to what you really know,
because all that information is stored in the short-term,
and forgetting everything that you learn the second
you walk out of the exam.
Let me give you a few analogies.
If you think of cramming like working out in the gym,
cramming would be the equivalent of trying to do
a full body workout,
doing every single muscle group you can think of
from arms, chest, legs, and expecting you
to get bigger from that.
But when you go back and try to do another workout
the next day,
you're not going to be able to.
It's the same with studying.
You can't expect to learn everything and remember it.
You can't expect to go eight hours when you haven't
been studying.
It's just going to be too much effort
and you're going to lose focus.
Take another analogy.
Cramming is like going on a sugar high.
When you consume a lot of information,
it's the same as having a massive blood glucose spike
when you eat a lot of junk food.
Soon, the insulin is going to kick in and that sugar level
is going to come crashing down.
It's the same with your study,
you will overload with all this content, but you might
only remember 20% of it.
And the rest, you'll soon forget.
Cramming doesn't work for a few reasons.
First, it focuses on the short-term and neglects
the long-term memory retention
which is important in your career and with your job prospects
later on.
Two, it can lead to increased stress levels
and a lot of anxiety in the days leading up to the exam
which can result in burnout or it can affect
your performance in the exam day.
And three, it can affect your quality and amount
of sleep that you're getting per night.
For many students, they'll pull all-nighters
or they'll pull very short sleeping schedules
to make sure they can cram as much as possible.
And so, if cramming doesn't work,
what does?
What's the opposite of cramming?
And that's spacing your study over time.
And that's exactly what's been shown by research
to be highly effective for long-term memory retention.
In a study by Nate Kornell,
students were asked to study a bunch of flashcards.
There was a spacing group, where they studied
one large stack of flashcards,
and a massing group who studied four stacks of cards
with less spacing between study sessions.
Kornell found that spacing group performed better
than the massing group, even though 72% of participants
believed that massing had been more effective
than spacing, after the first study session.
The last point highlights that many students
often misled to what study methods work for them.
And just remember that if you're getting frustrated
or finding it difficult, that's good,
because it's meant to be difficult
and learning comes at a cost.
A lot of the times, students will just look over their notes
and remember it and recognize it,
but they haven't actually learned it.
And although it may feel more comfortable to reread
your notes over and over again,
it's not until you test yourself and space out the repetition
and constantly get exposed to it,
that's when you're properly learning.
Another study found that repeated retrieval
with long-term intervals between each test
produced a 200% improvement in longer-term retention
compared to repeated retrieval but without spacing
between tests.
And from my personal experience, I find the brain
reaches a saturation point to how much
you can learn per day.
If you're trying to revise 15 lectures
worth of content, a lot of it is not going to stick.
And I find that the sweet spot for me is usually
a maximum of five to six hours.
After that, my brain's pretty fried.
So I'd recommend finding out that sweet spot for you
and building up your mental stamina
to be able to study for long periods of time.
So how can you employ space repetition?
First thing is to create a study schedule
that outlines what specific topics you're going to learn
on what specific days.
If I was doing some anatomy revision,
I might schedule it to do it on Monday.
And then I'm going to have a look at it again
on the Thursday,
and then I'll have a look at it again
the next Thursday.
And so, I'm seeing it three times over two weeks.
Instead of just trying to spend one big day
doing all my anatomy, I split it into three smaller sessions
doing my anatomy.
And in the meantime, I could also be arranging
other topics or other subjects to study about.
I might chuck in biochemistry or molecular biology.
And that way, I'm being continually exposed
to different information over a spaced amount of time.
I wholeheartedly believe that it's better to study
one hour a day rather than to try to do a 10-hour study day.
Even though it's less amount of time,
you're going to retain a lot more.
And we'll get to the reason for that shortly.
But what's integral to making the study plan stick
is building good habits.
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act,
but a habit.
Most successful people have a set of habits and principles
that keep them focused in their daily lives.
Building good habits is the first step
to prevent procrastination and stop you
from needing to cram at the end of the semester.
Charles Duhigg in his book "The Power of Habit"
explores how the core of every habit.
There is a loop that consists of three parts—
A cue, a routine, and a reward.
So the first step is the cue.
And to execute your habits, you want to isolate your cue.
So figure out what that is.
That could be laying down your notes in an obvious location
so that when you sit by your desk,
you're ready to learn.
That could be organizing your applications on your phone
or your computer,
so that the learning-based applications
are shown to you first.
Next is the routine.
And in another video, I talked about finding out
when you're most productive, when you're most active.
For me, that's in the morning.
So I'll set aside time every morning
to organize my study.
So that might be from 9:00 to 12:00.
And so my study routine before an exam now becomes
that I'm going to study from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
And the final part is the reward.
So when I finish starting at 11:30, what's my reward
going to be?
That could be a lunchtime snack,
that could be an episode of your favorite anime
or your favorite Netflix show.
Whatever it is, if you can follow this loop
and if you can develop cues and ways to self-automate
the process of studying or working,
that's really going to help you stay focused
in the long-term.
And the final tip is to start small
and then allow yourself to work up.
So if you're someone who's hasn't really been studying,
you're coming out of holidays and you're still
on that holiday mindset,
then it's going to take a while for you to build up
the mental stamina to do long study sessions.
So it's pointless trying to do three hours
with one go.
What's better is to start small.
That might be setting yourself a goal to do 30 minutes
of study a day.
But allow yourself to go further.
So you'll find that you'll do the 30 minutes,
but you're kind of in the zone at this point.
So you might actually do an hour or you might
do two hours.
But by starting off small, you're not going to feel bad
if you don't get to your crazy goal of four hours a day.
But build up slowly over time,
so by the end of the semester, you've improved
your mental stamina and you can focus
for longer periods of time.
Before we move on, here's a word from today's sponsor,
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I recently finished Thomas Frank's course
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Now, back to the video.
Practice does not make perfect.
It is practice, followed by a night of sleep,
that leads to perfection.
We all know that sleep is good for us,
but for some reason when it comes to finals,
we seem to neglect it.
And it may sound counterintuitive,
but sometimes, it's better to nap for one hour
rather than to try keep cramming for another hour.
That is exactly what was found
in a study of 90 young adults.
They were asked to learn detailed factual knowledge,
and then given either a one hour afternoon nap
between learning material
or one hour to cram and revise the material.
What the study found is that after a week,
napping maintained a significant advantage
in term of memory
compared to cramming, which did not.
Studies have also shown that sleep improves declarative
and procedural learning.
Results from three labs ask volunteers
to perform three different tasks—
a visual texture discrimination test,
as motor sequence test, and a motor adaptation test.
These studies demonstrated that there was
a post-training improvement
after a nigh sleep,
compared to an equivalent time being awake.
Sleep also helps with declarative learning,
which is the knowledge that we're able to recall
and verbalize.
In one study,
40 healthy students from 10 to 14 years old
were given a paired associate test
where they repeated related and unrelated pairs
of words.
Related words could be like tree and leaf.
Unrelated could be like rock and car.
Two groups were formed—
those who slept for 12 hours,
and those who didn't sleep for 12 hours.
Those who slept had a 20% increase in memory recall
compared to the group that didn't sleep for 12 hours.
But why does sleep help with memory consolidation?
The evidence is still not full understood,
but here's what Matthew Walker,
author of "Why We Sleep" and professor of neuroscience
has to say about it.
- What we've discovered
is that there are big powerful brain waves that happen
during the very deepest stages of sleep.
But having riding on top of them,
these spectacular bursts of electrical activity
that we call "sleep spindles".
And it's the combined quality of these deep sleep brain waves
that acts like a file transfer mechanism at night.
- So now you're probably thinking how can we improve
our sleep if it's so good for us?
Some quick tips that I recommend
is to make sure that you're going to bed
at the same time every night.
Turn off any blue light
in the hours before you sleep.
And ways I do that is to put a night light
on my phone or to use the application lux on my computer
which adds a warm light.
And finally, to make sure that you're actually
getting enough sleep.
And for most people, this is generally around
seven or eight hours.
So next time you're thinking of pulling an all-nighter,
think again,
because sleep has profound impacts
on your memory consolidation
and long-term memory retention.
All right guys. I hope I've shown you
some of the downsides to cramming.
And, even though in some cases it can work.
sometimes the performance on that exam
can highly mislead you to what you actually know
and to where the long-term learning even took place.
Space repetition,
building good study habits,
and getting a good night sleep are all important ways
that you can ensure long-term learning.
If you enjoyed the video, remember to hit
that like button, subscribe if you want to see
more content like this.
And until next time.
This was Sebastian.
Stay sharp!
(chill music)