How To REMEMBER Everything You LEARN In School and Hack Your Memory

So if you think about the amount of time that you spend when you are studying and you think about the total duration of time that's spent before an exam or a test, then you'll find that a lot of the time is actually spent on just relearning and revising the stuff that you've forgotten before. So the obvious sort of solution to that, which we don't tend to really go to because it doesn't really seem possible, is to make it so that we fundamentally don't need to revise or relearn in the first place. So what we're talking about is maximizing your retention so that when you learn it once or maybe twice, you have such a high level of retention on it that when you go to revise it a week or two later, you've retained so much of it that you spend very very little time. And that actually saves more time than probably anything else to do with your studying. You can have really good active recall and really good spaced repetition, you can use flashcards however you want, but at the end of the day, if you're actually forgetting the things that you're learning and you're spending all that time trying to relearn it again and again, you will be investing so much time into relearning stuff that you forgot, that that consumes most of the exam preparation or your school year. So the low-hanging fruit, which if you think about it is pretty logical, is to make it so that when you learn it the first time, you just don't forget it. And I know that a lot of people think that this is not really possible because they're just not used to it, but actually it really is, and you probably are used to it. You just have to think about it not in terms of an academic context. So outside of school, you very rarely study stuff like you study in school. If you think about an instrument or a sport that you play, you don't write notes for that, you don't do flashcards, you don't do practice papers, you don't have some weird spaced repetition active recall flashcard system that you have set up for it, you're not writing and then rewriting notes and then going home and re-reading the notes. You experience it or you have it taught to you and you practice it and you use it and actually you learn it. But it's not just skills like instruments or sports, even a Netflix show if you just binged it or a favorite book series that you have. You know, you read it and you might read it once and after reading it once, you have a really great retention on it. Like you could binge an entire season of Netflix in one night and then months later you can have a full-on discussion about every character and the detail and the behaviors and the nuances behind it and your knowledge on that is actually very, very deep and the retention is extremely high. And I think most of you will agree that you're not really getting that level of retention when you're studying. So there is a way that we've been trained and conditioned by school and the education system to study that is incredibly artificial. And that goes back to the reason the education system was founded was it was an industrial worker supply chain. Basically, it was training people to enter into these factories and work. It wasn't trying to create scientists and doctors and engineers and lawyers. We weren't trying to create inquisitive, creative, independent thinkers. We were trying to get people that could just have a minimum level of education to do the job and follow orders. And that's how the education system was created. That's why formal education was a big thing. And then the printing press was invented during that time. And then learning became this thing like left to right down the page in this kind of very wordy format, which is completely not how your brain thinks about it. You know, if you think about your favorite hobby or your favorite book or whatever, you don't think about it in terms of like a definition and then a bunch of words next to it. It's not how your brain works. But for some reason, due to all of these factors, that's the way that we learn to study, which is totally artificial. Hopefully that makes sense. So when we're thinking about studying, we need to try to bring it back towards the way that our brain is meant to work. You know, our brain adapted along a very specific series of pressures to be very good at a few things. And one of those things was to learn. It was very good at learning because it's important for us to stay alive and, you know, not be able to be killed by certain problems. You know, we have that problem solving ability. So our brain got really, really good at that. And the human brain is better at problem solving than, you know, any other species. And that's what defines a human brain, is that capacity for advanced cognitive skill and problem solving. But there's actually another thing that the brain is really good at. And this is something that is, when it comes to studying, is even more important, is it's not your brain's ability to learn. It's actually your brain's ability to forget. So your brain is extremely good at forgetting things because holding on and retaining information is very, very calorie consuming. If you think of, you know, going for a walk around your house, you don't remember every single license plate of the car that you passed. You don't remember the color and the position of all those cars. You don't remember, you know, what color the shirt was of the person that you passed, you know, three and a half minutes into your walk. You don't remember all of these little details. So your brain is actually bombarded with billions of different stimuli every single day. And it retains a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that. And if it retained everything, you know, your brain would explode and you'd die. So it's very energy inefficient for your brain to retain everything. And so this is very good for us to stay alive, but it's not very good when we want to retain stuff. And this is when it comes back to studying. So let's map out this process a little bit more so that we can kind of visualize this. So if we have our brain reading a piece of text, okay, it goes in through our eye. Okay. And it goes to our brain and our brain is going to process this information somehow. And the way it processes it is going to determine whether it will be retained or whether it will be lost and forgotten like the majority of information. And remember it is the majority of information is going to be lost. So what is it that determines whether it is retained or lost? Well, simply put, your brain is going to get rid of anything that doesn't seem relevant to holding. You know, you don't hold onto that license plate because it has no relevance to you. But let's say that when you were three years old, you saw some of it, maybe not three years. Okay. Maybe when you were nine years old, you saw someone getting kidnapped. And while they were getting kidnapped, you looked at the license plate of the van and you're going for a walk and you see that license plate. That's going to stick out to you because that's relevant to a certain memory. And in this case, a very emotional, probably quite a traumatic memory. So if the information is related to other pieces of information that's in your brain, then it's more likely to be retained. And the more meaningful and the more numerous those relationships are, the more likely it is to be retained. So if there's one connection between one thing that you know, and that thing is a very trivial, not very important connection, it's more likely to be lost. If it's a really important connection, it's more likely to be retained. So we need to train our brain to be able to process information so that instead of sending information this way, where it gets lost. And what this feels like is spending all that time studying. And then two weeks later, you don't remember any of it. You know, you spend that time studying and you revise it and it's gone. You've just forgotten most of it. You know, that's what happens when you are going down a lost pathway. You're going down a lost pathway. And instead, we need to train our brain so that it travels down the retained pathway. And so if information is highly related, and there are a lot of relationships, then your brain will hold on to it. It will retain it because it's very, very good at holding on to information that's relevant to solving problems and overcoming challenges and helping you survive and thrive. And it's very good at removing and forgetting information that it seems as irrelevant. So isolation, when it comes to memory, isolation equals forgetting. And relationships equals retention. And when you're studying, you always want to have a maximum level of retention, right? Because the more you're able to retain, the less you have to revise, right? That's kind of the point. The reason that you study is to retain the information. It's not so that you can tell your mom, hey, look, I studied this many hours a day. It's so that you can actually keep the information in your brain. So any time that's spent studying that doesn't really focus on developing the relationships is time that is spent on creating a form of retention that is not very effective. And different people's brains work differently. However, this is the principle that is basically universal across all human beings, is that the human brain is very good at holding onto information if there are a lot of relationships, and it's very good at forgetting if it exists in isolation. The personal preference comes from how exactly do you create that high level of retention? And what technique do you use to create a very high number of meaningful relationships? That's where it starts to differ a little bit. But even then, there are certain foundations and guidelines that tend to produce better results for basically all students. And there are not a lot of situations that is the opposite, where it just for whatever reason doesn't work for someone because of their own special kind of way of thinking. So how do we actually do this? Well, one of the ways that we need to remember is that when you take information in, the order of processes that go on in your brain is quite important. So if you take information in, and let's just represent that information with this red dot. So if you take this information into your brain, if the first thing that you're doing is focusing on trying to understand the information, then that means that your first priority is information. And so I call this an information priority. And in that case, at that point, what is your brain trying to do? Your brain is simply trying to understand the information and process the information. And from your brain's point of view, that information exists in isolation. So straight away, you're traveling down the pathway for it to be forgotten. Unless you just happen to accidentally or because you have a certain cognitive habit that allows you to create a relationship, you might create that relationship, but it's certainly not going to be systematic, it's not going to be as consistent, and it's not going to be as quick because we're not completely aware of the process and fully exploiting it. It may happen here and there or accidentally or at a slower rate, but most of the time, what ends up happening for most students is that the information comes in, we look at the information, and we almost are just trying to memorize that, and we store it in our brain. And then later on, we might look at it and think, okay, what are the different relationships that we can form from this? And this is not a bad thing to do. It's better than not asking what are the relationships between that and other pieces of information at all. But actually, a better way to do this is saying, okay, we've got a piece of information that's coming in. When it enters into your brain, we want to think about how it is related and the relationships first. And that means that the first thing that we're trying to do is understand relationships, which I call a relational priority or relationship priority. So when we learn through a relational priority, your brain actually does something that's very interesting, which is that the information gets processed much faster. It makes sense of the information and all the stuff that you would normally spend time doing, like memorizing or trying to understand it deeply, your brain will still do that. We're not skipping the information step, but it's that your brain can do it much faster than if you were to try to focus on it. So what I'm saying is that trying to focus on memorizing it actually makes it harder for your brain to memorize it because your brain doesn't care about your intention. It simply cares about the relationships that it forms. So by creating more relationships, it actually becomes easier to memorize it. And you'll find that when you do it this way, you end up memorizing information without even trying to. Not only that, your understanding of it is deeper because truly deep understanding is not just about how that information exists by itself. It's about how that information relates to and influences and affects other pieces of information. So if you learn about the fact that photosynthesis occurs in a leaf, and then you learn about how root systems work, you'll understand the relationship between the two of them. And by doing so, you understand photosynthesis and root system individually more deeply. And this goes back to the idea of Bloom's taxonomy, which we cover in another video more deeply. So make sure to check that out as well to show how you can activate higher order level learning by completely skipping the lower level learning and activating that kind of brain autopilot that is just so powerful and to save so much time. So information priority learning is not very effective because it trains you to look at things from a memorization point of view first, and then the relationships come after. But you're sort of already fighting on an uphill because it was stored in isolation and now you're trying to arrange it. Whereas when you look at it in terms of relationships first, fundamentally you're creating a good connection and a web of knowledge where information is very highly related and influencing each other, which means that naturally it becomes more memorable and better understood. So that later when you start to try to apply this information for practice tests or questions or exams, you can score much better because the information is more accessible, your active recall is actually stronger, you need less memorization and you're a lot more fluent with the information because it just is known to a deeper level and much more interconnected. So it's a fundamental shift in the way of thinking going from an information priority learning to a relationship priority learning. And it's one of the shifts that probably makes the biggest difference. So if I were to see a thousand students at a senior high school level, I would say that of the thousand students, 999.5 of those students will have the greatest increase in their studying efficiency by changing the way they study from an information priority to a relationships priority. So there's a couple checks that you can do, right? Have a look at the way that you're studying and ask yourself the question, is this focusing on trying to just get the information down or is this focusing on trying to get the relationships? So asking questions like, why is it important? Okay, why is it important? Okay, how, I'm sorry about my writing, how does it relate? Okay, asking these questions or thinking how does it, how does it like influence, okay, influence other areas or how can I apply this? Okay, these questions force you to look at the information in relation to other pieces of information, right? You can't say, you know, that this, this pen is important. You can't answer that question without referring to the fact that it helped me write, which is contributing value because I'm trying to teach you. So, you know, that's why it's important. So it's impossible to answer the question of why is it important without referring to relationships. So if you're asking lots of these questions and you're spending a lot of your time studying, thinking about this, then it means that that aspect of your studying is likely to be more relationships focused. Not everything in your studying, but that aspect at least. If you're writing notes, are you writing notes that are left to write down the page? When you write notes like that, how much focus is there on the relationships? Often, very little. Often, these notes are written purely to just get that information down, which is giving you information for later revision, which is definitely an information priority. What's happening is that we are getting information down. That's the priority. And so later we can think about the relationships. But actually, that's an unnecessary step. We may as well think about the relationships straight away and then represent that in a different way of doing it. And the way that I would recommend is using a mind map. And, you know, we've got another video talking about mind maps and the reason why most people are doing mind maps incorrectly. They'll do it once the wrong way and they'll give up when actually the mind map technique is surprisingly quite technical and there are some very subtle and important things that you need to get right. So there's another video on that which you should definitely check out. So, you know, when you look at your note taking, when you look at how you listen, how you write, how you read, when you're studying, what are you thinking about? What is the techniques that you're using for studying? Think, is this purely trying to just get the information down? Am I focusing on the information or am I focusing on the relationships? And there's a really good analogy that I've often used with my students to explain this kind of conceptually. To wrap this up is think about learning like a room that you're trying to fill. And when you have an empty room, most people study by taking one item. So for example, this pen, let's say this pen needs to go into the room. They'll look at this and they'll think, okay, this is a pen. They'll close their eyes and it's a white pen. It's 12, 13 centimeters long. It's however thick. It's got an apple pencil mark on it. And I'm memorizing this. I close my eyes and think, okay, what color is the pen? It's white. Okay, good. It's white. And then what they do is they kind of just throw it into the room and it just falls on the ground somewhere. And then they'll take another item and they'll do the same thing. And they'll memorize it and they'll throw it into the room. And then later they turn to the room and they think, okay, now let's try to answer some questions. Let's try to do some active recall. And they say, where is the pen? And they're hunting inside this extremely cluttered and disorganized room to find the pen. But you don't know where it is because you don't know that behind you there's your mom who really loves having a clean and organized room. And anything that's on the floor, she will say this is not relevant and she'll throw it out. And that's the metaphor obviously for your brain forgetting stuff that's isolated and not relevant. So you're throwing stuff into the room and your mom is clearing stuff out as you're throwing stuff in. So when it comes to you trying to think about what you know, only the things that just accidentally didn't happen to be forgotten. Those are the things that you're able to retain and it's still quite disorganized. So when you're trying to solve problems and I'm saying, hey, quickly use your tablet to write down these notes. You're like, okay, I need to get my pen. Oh, but where's my tablet? And you have to hunt around to find your tablet and it's slow and cumbersome and you feel that the knowledge is very memorization focused. You've got like an idea of a definition and a word associated with it and you just repeat it again and again and again. And you think, okay, the tablet is in that corner of the room. My pen is in this corner of the room. Okay, I got it. I memorized that. Okay, and then I've got my sweater on that side of the room and I've got my socks on this side of the room and you memorize that. And then over time, you're like, okay, time to get changed. Okay, I know where my sweater is because I memorized it after heaps and heaps of repetition. And then sometimes you do a past paper and then when you do the past paper, you realize, oh man, this thing and this thing, they're actually related to each other. And actually, I can, you know, it actually makes sense for them to be considered, you know, in the same category of information. And I can arrange that in the room together so that when I need to write stuff down, I can collect both of them at the same time. And then things start to click and this is what we call a light bulb moment is when you suddenly see the same thing. You see the same pen and the same tablet but suddenly it seems very different because now you know where it fits in. So what's happening is that they're throwing this huge pile of stuff into the room and they're going in to reorganize it and then restructure everything. And often they're pulling stuff out and putting it back in and their mom is throwing stuff away so they have to grab it again and memorize it again and throw it in again and reorganize it. That's why there's so much repetition that's necessary when you learn that way. But when you learn through relationships, it's more like this. It's like you look at the room and you think, where should I put different things in the room? Okay, I want my bed on that side, my wardrobe here, my desk over here. And you think, okay, let's put my bed in first. So you go find your bed, you put it in and you know where the bed is because that's where you intended it to be. And you know the bed is there because you need it to be next to the wardrobe but far away from your desk because you don't want to study next to your bed. And then you put your desk in and then you know where your pens are because you put your pens in the first drawer because that's your pen drawer. And you know where your tablet is because it's on the desk because that's where you use it the most. So everything has a purpose. It fits into a wider picture. There is a sense of organization that occurs as you are storing the information. And this is a step that most people don't do. So relationships priority learning is about taking control of the information that you learn, not just randomly learning it in the order that's given to you by your teacher or the textbook and memorizing that and throwing it in and expecting to learn it. It's about evaluating what is there to learn. Thinking, how can that fit into my room, into my memory? How is that position? How are these different items related to each other? And how can I organize and arrange this in a way that really makes a lot of sense for me? That's the process of learning. And asking questions like this, why is it important? How does it relate? Asking these questions allows you to think about the information, not in terms of memorization, but allows you to think about it in relationship with other things. So I look at this and instead of trying to memorize the pen, I think, how is this pen related to my mouse or my mug or my tablet? And I'll think, hmm, it's not really related this way, but ah, this and this are related. So maybe I should put it together. And as you learn more and more, your groups and categories and all of this sort of stuff grows. And that's the process called chunking. Again, another concept that I talk about a lot in various other videos as well. So this is the way that learning happens organically. This is the way that you actually tend to learn in other areas of your life. And that's the reason why you don't even need to write notes most of the time. And if you do write notes in an effective way, it can really facilitate this process, but only if you're using the right technique. So information priority learning is about just getting the information down. Relationships priority is about arranging, organizing information, making sense of it and doing it in the first instance, not doing it later, packing it on at the end. It's looking at information and before you even memorize it, thinking where can it fit and all the learning that occurs and trying to figure out where it fits and how to organize it. That becomes really high quality learning. And that stuff inevitably becomes memorized and understood without even trying. And if you give this a go, I guarantee that you're going to see some great results. It's a fundamental aspect of learning that opens the door to basically every other effective type of learning that there is. Most of the techniques that we teach in our course build on developing this skill step by step, taking you from not being able to do this to slowly getting more and more proficient at it, building note taking techniques and other techniques to support that and memorization techniques to fill in the gaps. That's the way that most effective study systems are designed. So definitely give this a go. If you learn something new, if you disagree or want clarification or anything that I've said, make sure to leave a comment below. Let me know your thoughts. If you liked it, leave a thumbs up. It really helps with the algorithm and helping our message spread to more people. If you like what we're talking about, make sure to subscribe. And until next time, I'll see you on the next one. I kind of screwed up that outro.