7 Years of Building a Learning System in 12 minutes

I spent 7 years building a learning system that boosted my efficiency by over 60% and saved me at least 10 hours of studying per week. And although every learner's brain is different, the best thing about this system is that anyone can use it and personalize it. And I call it the PERIO system. It stands for Priming, Encoding, Reference, Retrieval and Overlearning. I'll explain all of it in a sec. One of the most common questions that people ask me is, And if someone asks me this, I immediately know something crucial about this person's studying ability. It is that this person does not know how learning truly works because they are thinking about techniques rather than systems. And unless that changes, you can never really be an efficient learner. Most people think of learning like this. This is how I used to look at it. Information comes in, we then do something that allows us to learn it, and we enter through this cycle of repetition to strengthen our memory. But this is just not how learning works. Learning is not just something that happens. It is an entire series of processes and the quality of those processes affects how good your memory and your depth of understanding is going to be. If the processes involved in this learning step are bad, it means we have to have more repetition to make up for it. On the other hand, if our processes here are good, that means that we need less repetition. So instead, the right way to think about learning is a little bit more like this. Information comes into our brain and then that information is filtered out. It's filtered based on whether we think it is relevant to what we already know. And that's based on what we already have existing in our memory. So if it's related and if we can see how it is something that we need to hold on to, we will then go and process it a little bit more, organizing the information, making sense of it. And this is really where the understanding and the depth comes from. Once we do the processing, part of that also helps to organize the information into our memory in a structure and a model that makes sense for us, that is easy for our memory to hold on to and is relevant for our brain. If it didn't meet that filtration criteria, we are just going to forget it. Which means if information comes in and we think it's not relevant, we don't see how it connects to anything else, we don't see how it connects to anything we already know, then no matter how many times you try to put the information in, we are just going to forget it and usually very quickly. On the other hand, once the information is in our memory, we can then retrieve that knowledge. And the retrieval process also helps to process and organize it again in a way that makes even more sense. So this is constantly refining our memory. We're then using our existing knowledge and our existing memory to help us filter any new information that comes in. Learning is a lot more complicated than this, by the way. But if we use this model, then we can start seeing where our own weaknesses might be. So for example, let's take me back when I was trying to enter into medical school, studying 20 hours a day because I sucked at learning. What I was doing, I would just sit there and I'd just read through my notes. I'd go to these lectures and sit there listening, trying to understand whatever I could. And then I'd spend all the rest of the day just writing more notes, studying things again and then eventually doing flashcards on past papers. That was like my entire life. So for me, if we look at this, information was definitely coming in and very, very quickly. But I wasn't aware that my brain was filtering it based on relevance. So I wasn't trying to make it more relevant. As a result, a lot of what I learned felt pretty random and arbitrary. And I would forget a lot of it. And so I'd have to shove it back in again. So I was trapped inside this loop. And even though occasionally bits of it did make its way in, so I was able to process it a little bit more. Eventually, again, it would end up being forgotten because of the fact that it still wasn't that relevant for my brain. And I just wasn't aware that this is the process I need to try to optimize. And once I nailed that, that is what made the big difference for me. That is what flipped my learning into a mode that was much more efficient. And so this is where the PERIO system comes in. The P in PERIO stands for priming. Priming is any technique that you use before a main learning event. That could be a class. It could be a lecture. It could just be a single long study session. But it's talking about an activity that you do before you encounter a topic for the first time. It is priming your brain to learn that information more effectively. Essentially, what it's helping us do is it's helping our brain filter the information and say, hey, this new information is relevant. Let's move it along into the processing. Priming is one of the most effective things that you can implement into a learning system because it's so early on in this learning flow. And if you don't get this part right, everything after this starts suffering. You will get easily overloaded and overwhelmed. You will find that your memory is very leaky. You will find that you're not able to use and retrieve that knowledge very effectively because the information was not primed. You were thrown a ball and you were not ready to catch it. The E stands for encoding. And in this diagram, it stands for this processing part here. It's talking about the part of learning that allows your brain to make sense of the information and then put it into your memory. But encoding in the learning system means that you have to have techniques that allow your brain to organize and process the information effectively. That means grouping things together, simplifying things, looking for analogies, finding connections and relationships, looking for ways to make the information more intuitive, simpler, easier to understand. This is also the part that most people struggle with because it requires a lot of mental effort and thinking to do this, which actually puts some people off. That is the active part of active learning. When you don't do the encoding part correctly, even though the information came in through the door, it's not able to be moved into your memory very effectively. And so even though you study a lot and a lot, you will still continuously forget a large portion of what you spent your time learning. Now, encoding is not a binary process. It's not about whether you are doing it or not. It's more of a spectrum and about creating efficiency in your processes so that you're moving information into your memory as quickly as possible. The first R in Perio stands for reference. And this is actually just about note-taking. It's not really on this pathway, but it's about understanding that if you're trying to consume all the information all at once and you're trying to do all of the processing all at once, you're going to get overloaded very quickly if you let yourself get bogged down in details that don't help you to organize the information. In a way, you want your brain power to be focused on moving the information through here into your memory. And there are certain things that are going to be so specific and so fine and so detailed that it's not going to help do that. It's just a distraction. And that's where referencing comes in, which is taking those pieces of information and just putting them somewhere else so that you can come back to it later. This could be in the form of flashcards, a second brain app, using something like Obsidian, whatever you want to do. It's a parking lot, a dump for all the very, very fine details that you don't want to bother with while you are encoding and processing. A second R is retrieval. And retrieval is the part where you're taking information from your memory and then you are testing yourself and challenging your ability to use and apply that knowledge. Retrieval is a necessary component of every learning system. Number one, because that's what actually tests your ability to use your knowledge. But number two, because the act of retrieving knowledge actually helps you to reprocess and repackage that knowledge, which strengthens your memory and deepens your understanding, which is where I, Imperio, comes in, which stands for interleaving. Interleaving is hitting a topic from multiple perspectives and multiple angles. I've actually got another video about interleaving here because it's a big topic and actually one of the most important things that you can do to upgrade your learning system. But in summary, it's about making sure that you are testing yourself in multiple perspectives rather than just the one way you learned it and just testing yourself in that one way. When you don't do interleaving, your knowledge becomes very narrow, which means, yes, you may be able to answer questions if they are asked in the same way that your flashcard has it written down. But if there's a curveball question, if there's a combination of concepts that you never really thought about before, or it's just something that feels a little bit out of scope, you're going to struggle. Usually, these are the questions that separate the top learners from the rest. And the final O, Imperio, is for overlearning. Overlearning is when you're learning more than you need to, a little bit more out of scope and a little bit deeper and to a higher standard. It often involves a lot of repetition, for example, doing lots of practice questions or lots of flashcards or just going over things again and again. This is the part of learning that is repetitive by nature. It's what creates that faster recall and that enhanced fluency with your knowledge. It is also optional. A lot of people don't need to do overlearning because overlearning is really only effective once you're sitting really competitive assessments where the standard for excellence is very, very high. Most people in most day-to-day studying don't need to have overlearning at all. Unfortunately, most people also use overlearning strategies as their first strategy in the learning process. And that takes time and attention away from doing the priming and coding and retrieval parts properly. It's basically this cycle that I talked about before, where you're basically just compensating for ineffective encoding through lots of repetition. So to help you evaluate your own learning system, I've actually gone ahead and created a quiz that you can go through and it will score your learning system based on each part of Perio. It's free to do. I'll chuck a link in the description below. Don't say I never do anything for you. So I'm going to go ahead and answer these questions based on how I used to study and I'll see what the score says. And 35%. That's about what I expected. It's pretty bad. If you do this yourself, you can see you can scroll down and learn a little bit more about it. Yeah, it looks pretty tragic for me. They'll give you a bunch of recommendations based on your scores in terms of what you need to improve on and what priority. So feel free to go through that yourself. Okay, so I was gonna end the video right there, but I wanted to make sure that this quiz was as helpful for as many people as possible. So I actually went ahead and gave early access to a bunch of people to see how they found it. And they had a diverse range of results. Some of them scored pretty average and some of them scored surprisingly well. And after seeing the results, I learned two things. Number one, people who weren't very confident in how they learn also had lower scores and an explanation for why they were not so confident. And number two, everyone found the quiz helpful. Hello, my name is Julian. Nisha. Ed. And I've just taken. I can study. Learning system diagnostic and results were very helpful because previously I've never had something that would actually quantify and measure how effective my learning system was. I definitely think that this is a tool that I could use in the classroom, particularly for subjects where we're teaching kids how to learn at a really young age, like year nine, year 10. I found the test pretty easy to use. It's sort of good to pinpoint what exactly am I doing wrong. So I did find it insightful in that regard. And it's been so helpful just with like, not just learning the content, but actually understanding it and seeing the significance of like a learning approach. I'm just super grateful that like I could give this a go. I'm going to really try and incorporate some of the suggestions and see how they go. So I'm super glad I do the quiz and I highly recommend it for you as well. It's only a few minutes, but the insights that you'll get from that will save you hours down the line. So I'm really excited for you to give the quiz a go yourself. The link is in the description. Make sure to check it out. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. And yes, by the way, I am in a new office.