How To Train Yourself To Have An Exceptional Memory

I'm a learning coach and a doctor. But to be honest, I think I have a pretty bad memory. 10 years ago, I spent every hour of every day just studying, mostly just relearning stuff that I kept forgetting. But today, I can learn 100 pages of a dense textbook with over 90% retention. And the reason that I can do that today when I definitely couldn't before is because I spent thousands of hours learning about learning. I learned about how the memory works and I learned how to train my memory. I went from studying and constantly relearning to studying less than before while actually getting better results both in medical school and for my masters. And in this video, I'm going to share four of the most important learning science principles about memory and how you can apply that to your own learning so that you can train yourself to have an exceptional memory.

Now the first and most important thing we need to start with is what memory actually is. Because if you are like how I was, you are probably thinking about memory completely wrong. I used to think that some people just don't have a great memory. I feel like I spent so much time learning and studying when people around me didn't have to spend that long and they were getting better results. They were remembering more. Things clicked for them more easily. So clearly there was something going on inside their brain that was better than me. And what I realized after reading so much research and experimenting and reading, you know, books like this is that memory is not a fixed trait. It is not something that you have or don't have or is good or isn't good. It in fact it doesn't even make sense.

Memory is more like this box. So if you imagine this cube here is a piece of information, right? You might have uh read something, you know, someone said something to you, you heard it, it went into your ears, you saw it with your eyes, it went into your brain, and it became this information inside your brain. And after a while, after enough time passes, one of two things is going to happen if we make it simple. Number one, we're either going to remember it or number two, we will forget it. And depending on what happens, we say whether we have a good or bad memory. If we forgot it, then we say, "Oh, we have a bad memory." If we remembered it, we say, "We have a good memory." But this is not the case at all.

What's really happening here is that this piece of information is attributed with a level of memory. The memory is a characteristic. It's a quality. It's an attribute of the information. And the way we impart this information with the quality of good memory is through the way we construct it. We can't just read things or hear things and then just immediately know. It's passing into our brain and our brain is actively constructing its interpretation of what you read or heard. And so the way we construct this is incredibly important. If we construct it using a very flimsy quick process, you know, just using like paper and some tape and putting together this box and like boom, it's done. Then that is going to be very fragile. It's going to degrade very quickly. That's not strong. Whereas if we use a very robust method with more robust uh materials, it might be a little bit more costly and time consuming, take some more resources, take a bit more effort. But if we create this box with metal plates and weld the sides together and and seal it off perfectly, then that is going to last a lifetime. And the difference between someone with a great memory versus someone with a bad memory is that the person with a bad memory is used to constructing things in a very haphazard fast way. Whereas a person with a great memory is used to using a robust construction method which imparts a high stickiness of memory to this information which leads us to naturally hold on to and remember that memory over time.

And I think this concept is summarized really well by this American psychologist called Daniel Willingham who said that memory is the residue of thought. When we recall something, we are not retrieving a piece of information that's locked away in some archive in our brain somewhere. What we are doing is that we are remembering the thoughts and the processes that we experienced at the time when we engaged with that information. So if we construct haphazardly very quickly and we don't give it much thought, there's not much to remember. So a lot of my focus when I was going through the learning science as well as when I was coaching for the last you know 13 plus years was how do you construct memory to be more robust? What are the principles and the methods? And this is a huge topic, like really, really huge. And so there are so many different things that influence our memory, but I'm going to distill them down to what I think are the four most universal, most applicable that come up in the research time and time again. And also give you some tactics and examples within that to see how you can apply that to your own learning.

So the first major principle and method for improving your memory is the spacing effect. Now, even if you don't know a lot about learning or learning science, uh you may have heard about the spacing effect. This is a very very simple concept that basically just says that when you repeat something, you're going to remember it for longer. Anytime we have new information enter into enter our brain, our brain under goes something called knowledge decay. And that's this line here. It's decay. What this means is that over time, the amount of knowledge, so knowledge here on the y-axis, well, our ability to recall that knowledge goes down. So in the beginning, the first time we learn it, the time is basically at zero. We're going to remember everything hopefully because we we literally just learned it. And then after a period of time, we're going to forget. So some studies say that after about a week, we forget about 50% of everything that we've learned. So half of what you learn, you forget about a week later. Interestingly, people overestimate that. So most people think that they will remember about 70 or 80% a week later, but when you objectively test it, it usually tends to be about 30 to 50%. So we forget a lot of stuff very quickly.

And the idea with the spacing effect is that if we hit that same knowledge again a few days later and then, you know, maybe a week later and then some time again after that, each time we hit it, this decay curve starts flattening out. So instead of being so steep, it looks like this and then it looks like this. And then eventually it's it's so flat that we're we're basically never going to forget this. And so the spacing effect is a really important foundational principle to understand because it first of all sets up the expectation that you're not going to be able to remember everything that you learn just by learning it one time. And so you should expect to need some level of repetition. Now sometimes you get this repetition very naturally. So if you're learning something for work on the job, you might naturally need to recall and test yourself on this during the you know during your work. But if not you need to make sure that there is that time carved out to allow yourself the repetition that you need.

Now the issue here is that when you only rely on the spacing effect or if this is the major effect that you're using to try to boost your memory, you're going to run into a lot of problems. The way you review that information makes a big difference to how much it flattens that curve. There are some methods that are very passive that don't involve much thinking. And so it doesn't contribute much benefit. It doesn't make that memory any stickier. And so you'll need five or six or seven or even more repetitions for it to be in your long-term memory. And then usually after that, like 2 3 months later, you'll forget it anyway. Whereas there are other methods that involve a bit more deeper thinking where when you use this method you only need like one or two more repetitions for it to be in your long-term memory. And so in the modern day if you are learning a lot of stuff and you don't have much time to learn you're going to run into the problem of being completely overwhelmed by the need for repetition. And this is basically what happened to me. I had thousands of flash cards that I had built up and I was spending hours and hours every single day just getting through these flash cards and I was forgetting faster than my ability to review it. And so if your entire studying methodology revolves around the idea that you need to repeat something, you know, five plus times to remember it, that's not mathematically scalable. And so while you do need to use spacing as part of a robust learning system, you should never only use spacing. So even though this is the first one that I'm covering, it's probably, I would say, the least impactful. The second one makes this much more effective.

The second principle I'm going to introduce you to is the generation effect. The generation effect is this finding that's been found across decades of learning science research. which says that when you produce your own knowledge, you will remember it better than if you just read it or hear it. So actively generating knowledge is more memorable than passively receiving it. So that's the technical definition, but in practice that's actually really confusing because what does that even mean? What does it mean to actively generate knowledge? Some people think that it means you have to create, you know, synthesize this new novel piece of information, you know, some some brand new idea or you have to write some kind of research dissertation about it. But that's not the case at all. The easiest way to understand what the generation effect really means is that your brain will remember things better if it needs to do more work to get to the answer. So I'll give you some examples of what this actually means. So first of all just summarize that. So your brain if it does more work equals good.

So here's an example of some passive learning methods and then I'll give you the more generative alternatives. So one example of a passive learning strategy might be just rereading your notes. So this is very passive because it doesn't involve much thinking. The generative version of that might be rewriting your notes from memory from recall. So you can see that this is going to involve a little bit more work. Your brain is going to have to do more thinking. It takes more mental effort to recall it and then also write it out again. Another example might be listening to a recording or a lecture or a course or something. So instead of just listening, a more generative thing might be pausing every two or three minutes and then summarizing the main points of what you just heard. A common passive one here, uh, highlighting highlighting the the technique that I love to hate, very very passive. Instead of doing passive highlighting, a generative version of that might be turning those things you'd normally highlight, turning them into practice questions or challenges. Or another passive example might be like copying someone's notes or copying explanations or or writing down what the lecturer or the instructor says. So a generative version might be to paraphrase, right? write it down in your own words or maybe even think of asking really good critical questions about what you are writing notes on.

So you can see there's a really clear trend here and you can do this for basically any technique. You just take one that's fairly passive and unfortunately also usually very common and you can turn that into something that's more generative just by thinking how do I insert my brain in there more? How do I involve my brain in thinking, figuring things out, having to recall things, piece things together to actually form this knowledge? So, all of that thinking is construction and that involves more thoughts, usually more complex and deeper thoughts and those thoughts are usually more connected to each other. So, they form a stronger network and all of those things leave a longer and stronger residue of thought, aka stronger memory.

Now, if you are trying to train yourself to be more generative in your learning, which you should be, one thing that you might run into, is knowing when it's enough. Because you could technically just keep iterating on this. So for example, instead of just writing something from recall, uh maybe you test yourself first before you do the recall and then maybe you then instead of just recalling it linearly, maybe you teach it to someone and then maybe after you teach it to someone, you also map it out in a mind map. Uh and then maybe you teach off of the mind map. And then maybe you use the mind map to generate even more questions for yourself. And then when you answer the questions, maybe you answer each question in its own little mini mind map. You know, it goes on forever. you can sort of make it harder and harder and harder and harder. And the rule of thumb here is just go one step beyond wherever you are comfortable with until you get the result you need. You do not need the perfect learning mechanism for every single learning situation. If you're at a networking event and then you meet someone for the first time and you just want to remember their name for the next hour, maybe instead of just listening to the name, you sort of mentally test yourself. Maybe you apply the spacing effect. you try to use that name again in conversation a few times that could be enough to keep it in your memory for that particular purpose. On the other hand, if you are a software engineer and you're learning about a new technology that has the potential to completely disrupt your industry and you know there's all sorts of implications on the on the projects you're working on and the problems you need to solve, you need to learn that very very deeply. You do not want to have to go back to the reference material every, you know, 15 minutes because you keep forgetting the stuff that you're learning. In fact, you won't even be able to build real expertise because you don't even remember enough about what you've learned to build on it. You'll fall into the trap of, you know, reading a bunch of stuff and technically understanding it. But by the time you finished the book, your actual expertise hasn't increased more than the fact that you are now aware of a few concepts and interesting facts.

And one of the worst things that you can do when you are training yourself to have a better memory is reach way too far outside of your existing current level of habits. If you're currently very very used to this passive learning here and most of your learning sits within this zone, it's going to be, you know, almost impossible for you to try to go all the way to, you know, something over here. If you're if you're at level one, level 10 is going to be overwhelming. And so if you want to actually get real improvements in your memory on a daily basis where every day your memory is just getting a little bit better, then it's imperative that you progress your technique in accordance with the principle of marginal gains. This is the idea that you can just improve by 1% every single day and the gains will compound over time exponentially. If you're 1% better every day, after an entire year, you will be 37 times better than you are today. And so, get into this habit of when you're learning anything new, whether it's about improving your learning skills or any other skill, just think about what your current level of skill is, where you're comfortable at, and where your current habits sit. Then, think about where you want to get to, and just take one step closer to there. Take that one step, and then stabilize until that becomes a new habit, and then take another step. And by doing it this way, you make sure that you have a consistent path towards improvement where every single step you take is producing a meaningful realworld benefit to your current problems and situation. If the skill level you want to get to with your learning is, you know, at the very peak over here, but we're starting right down here at the bottom, then don't waste time trying to jump to the top. You will jump and jump and jump until you eventually give up. Meanwhile, the person who is just steadily step by step walking their way up the mountain is going to eventually reach the top. And even if they don't, they are still going to be much higher than the person who is wasting time trying to get to the top in a single jump.

So here's what you should do if you want to start using the generation effect a little bit more. And you can pair that with the spacing effect. Write out your learning schedule from Monday to Sunday and identify the times where you're going to spend time to review and space out your learning. when you're going to do a little bit of that repetition and then ask yourself how you are going to review the material. Write down the technique or the method you normally would have used and just ask yourself what is one step more generative than what I was planning on originally doing. And every two or 3 weeks do the same thing. Look at it again. Look at the techniques you normally would have used and you can take an additional step. Just by doing this very simple exercise where we pair generation with spacing, the amount of repetition that you will need will start going down.

Now, on the topic of repetition, as you do this and as you try to improve the quality of your construction process, you're going to find that you struggle with a few techniques. As you try to make it more generative, it involves more mental effort. It's more challenging, and you're going to need some trial and error to get it right. And to give you context, for me to steadily improve my construction process to go from where I was studying all the time to being able to, you know, learn 100 plus pages of a textbook with super high retention. That took me years, like several years of diligent, consistent hard work. But it shouldn't take you several years because a lot of my time was wasted on just figuring out what was right and what was wrong. And there also just weren't a lot of resources then either. I mean like this this book which is by the way really good summarizes like 30 years of learning science research. This was published in 2017. By 2017 I already read that research myself and spent the thousands of hours to do that. And so the reason I'm telling you this is that if you want to save some of that trial and error for yourself and just learn from the mistakes that I already made, then one thing that I'd recommend that you check out is my free newsletter. the emails that I send out every single week where I've sat down and I've thought what are the things that I wish I knew when I was first starting and I packaged them into these three to five minute emails with some practical takeaways and things for you to work on during that week. It's pretty much like an entire learning skills course delivered to you through email. So if you're interested in that, it's totally free. I'll leave a link for you to sign up to that in the description below.

But on to the third principle. So that was spacing and generation. The third one is the testing effect. The testing effect is really self-explanatory. It says that when you test yourself, you're going to remember things better. But the part that I'll add in there to make it more effective is that the way you test yourself matters a lot. Let's say I'm a senior executive of a company and I need to make some really important difficult decisions about the the direction and strategy of this company. And in order to help me make this decision, I'm going to go and learn a little bit about these different industries. And to make sure that I remember everything that I'm learning so that I can really use it to make this decision, I'm going to test my recall on each fact through flashcards. Do you notice something seems a little off there? One method of testing is very isolated, very discreet, just testing on facts. You can see that my ability to regurgitate facts probably isn't going to translate that well to being able to make these complex decisions. Well, the same principle is true for all forms of testing. Whenever you learn something, you normally need to apply that information in a certain kind of context, whether that's for an exam or for work. And they're going to be multiple different levels or depths of knowledge that you need to apply that information to. And so if you're only used to testing yourself at a certain level, then you can expect that your competence will only increase at that level. And so while doing practice questions and practice exams if you're a student are really effective way of testing yourself, you have to check are these questions and exams testing me at the right level for how I need to apply this knowledge. And this is especially relevant if you're a professional and you're learning not just for an exam but also for your career where a practice exam or the exam itself may not be testing you in the way that you need for your long-term career. I felt this sharply myself where in my first few years of university I felt like I was really getting hang of studying. I was getting A's and A minuses for my test. I wasn't studying very much to get those grades. Then when I enter into hospital, I actually failed my first clinical attachment and I realized that the methods of studying that I'd been using before were way too academic and they didn't translate into really seeing a patient in the real world, diagnosing them and thinking about a management plan.

So when you test yourself, think about what kind of thinking, what kind of problem solving, what kind of recall am I being forced to do right now and does that reflect the type of recall and thinking that I will need to do later for you know my ultimate purpose. That's the first thing. The second thing is about how you actually learn from the mistakes you make when you're testing. So effective testing should be marked by at least two different symptoms. First thing is that it's actually level matched, which is what we've just been talking about. But the second is that it finds and fills gaps in your knowledge very effectively. There's this common sentiment that I see sometimes with the students that I work with who will test themselves, but they test themselves in a way that they know they're not going to get things wrong. They test on the subjects they're stronger at. They ask questions that they they're more familiar with and they sort of consciously or subconsciously avoid making mistakes. And I think the idea is that there's this feeling that if I make mistakes, it's an indication that I'm not going to do well in my exam. But that is the complete reverse way of how it should be thought of. The idea with testing is that you want to find and fill these gaps proactively. You want to identify these gaps so that you don't make these same mistakes and errors later when it really matters. And so the faster and earlier you're able to find these gaps, the better it's going to be for you. And unfortunately, most people when they learn something for the first time have a lot of gaps. And so if you're testing yourself in the right way, the first time you test yourself on something that you have learned for the first time, you should find truckloads of gaps and errors. And for a beginner, this can be very confrontational and conflicting because it's a a hit to your confidence and it makes you feel like, man, I've already spent so much time learning it. How am I going to get enough time to fill all these gaps? But the correct perspective is the gaps are there. The only difference is whether you are aware of it or not. And so if what you care about is having real performance later when it really matters, then it is a much better position to be in to feel overwhelmed but at least aware of all of your gaps than blind to them and falsely confident.

And there are two parts to doing this effectively. It's the finding and the filling. These are actually two different aspects. Finding a gap means that the way that you test yourself is difficult enough. Obviously, you know, don't go overboard, but you want to simulate real challenging scenarios that you're going to face yourself with. And you don't just want to test yourself in a difficult way. You want to test yourself at this level as early as possible because it gives you as much time as possible to fill all those gaps. So, the first round of testing that you do should involve something that is very, very difficult. The next part is about filling those gaps. So, you found it, you've tested yourself in a challenging way. How do you fill that gap in your knowledge? On the plus side, this can be very easy. It seems that when you test yourself and find a gap in your knowledge and then go to just learn and fill that gap again using whatever method you might have used before with a little bit of generation applied to it. Your brain is more effective at creating robust knowledge than if you had never tested yourself in the first place. So what this means is that you could use the exact same method to learn something. But if you learned that after finding out it was a gap because you tested yourself, for some reason your memory is just stronger.

But the biggest thing we need to avoid here are the traps of recognition and overconfidence. Recognition is when you see something and you recognize what it means. So if I previously, you know, studied from this textbook and I tested myself on something in here and I, you know, got it wrong and then I read the answer and I recognize the answer and I think, ah, yeah, that's right. That's the answer. Yes, I remember now. You don't remember now. All you do is you recognize that that is the correct answer. So if the answer had been completely wrong, you might have recognized that hm that answer doesn't make sense. it doesn't mean that you can actually generate that answer from scratch by yourself. And so the gap between our ability to recognize something and actually recall something is huge. We can recognize the Mona Lisa as a painting when we look at it. It doesn't mean that we can actually reproduce the Mona Lisa from memory. So to avoid recognition, what you have to do is when you test yourself and get something wrong and then you check the answer, don't judge your level of confidence based on whether that answer makes sense to you or not. Ask yourself why. If it makes sense, was I not able to get it right? And regardless of what you find, make sure you test yourself on that. again not in exactly the same way but through some kind of variation testing on the same part of the knowledge and then see do you get it right or wrong so that's recognition so we want to make sure that we avoid recognition the second thing we want to avoid is this overconfidence and what I'm referring to here is very specifically when you test yourself on something and you are not confident about the answer that you've given but then you check the answer and then you become confident because you got it right that is the incorrect judgment to make. If you felt unconfident when you were giving an answer, it means that there's a gap. If there was no gap, you would have felt confident giving the answer. All it means is that either you were lucky with the answer or you were lucky in the way that it was tested and you were asked that question and you just so happened with the knowledge you had to be able to put it together in the right way. But if you are asked that at a slightly harder level or a slight variation or, you know, a little bit more complicated, you may get it wrong. So, as a rule of thumb, when you learn something and you feel confident about what you've learned, always be skeptical. Test it. Test yourself at enough of a difficulty to find the gaps that you don't see. Be wary of overconfidence. But if you are underconfident about something, believe it. Assume that there truly is a gap there and don't convince yourself to be confident of that. So, that's the point about avoiding overconfidence. So these are the nuances about testing. It's not enough just to test yourself. If you're not testing yourself in the right way, and then when you get feedback from your attempts, you're not processing it in the right way, the benefit of testing goes down precipitously.

One of the doctors I'm training for their board certification exams was telling me about how they spend hours and hours every single week just going through this question bank. And they've gone through thousands of questions and every time they sit down, they're getting through like 50 to 100 different questions. And after I taught them about these nuances, they slowed that right down so that each session instead of doing 50, they're only doing five to 10. And so even though they were actually doing less questions, they started getting more benefit from each study session because the quality of learning they're extracting per question is so much higher. Before they would get questions wrong and then be tested on very similar questions later and then get them wrong again and then it would take a lot of time to fill those gaps. Whereas now when they get a question wrong, they're never getting that question wrong later. And that change came from mostly just avoiding recognition and overconfidence. So that was the third principle, the testing effect. So far, we've got spacing, generation, and testing. And you can see how they can all come together. When you do your spacing sessions, each time you repeat it, this is a great opportunity to test yourself. When you're testing yourself, you want to apply these principles. And when you're filling the gaps, you want to make sure you generative in the way that you think about it. When you learn something for the first time, you want to make sure that you are doing enough generation. And so these principles apply universally for every type of learning scenario that you find yourself in. But there is one thing missing. Been watching my videos for a long time, you might guess what this last one is. Because personally, I think this is probably the most important out of them all. And this is higher order thinking.

Higher order thinking and higher order learning is a term that's used for the specific processes and types of thinking that create long lasting knowledge and deep understanding of information. And amazingly, all of these methods share the same commonality that they look at pieces of information as part of a wider network. And an easy way to understand what higher order of thinking really means is to think about information that feels relevant versus information that feels irrelevant. Imagine being back in school learning a topic that you really don't care about. You're not interested. Your teacher is boring and you're just sitting there learning it basically because you just need to pass some exam. That topic feels more difficult to learn because it's so irrelevant. Whereas think about something that you know a lot about. It could be something academic. It could be something for your work. It could be a favorite hobby or a book or a movie. And I bet if I tell you a fact, a new fact about that topic, you would be able to think about it, understand the implication of it, how it affects everything else around it, and probably remember that new fact forever. You don't need any spacing. You don't need any flashcards. You don't need to write any notes. It's almost like this network of knowledge just comes out to grab this new piece of information and it's consolidated into your memory immediately. The reason that happens is that when a topic is irrelevant. We can't connect it to anything else. So our brain is finding it very difficult to actually have thoughts about it. And so even if you want to build really robust memory, you're not going to be able to because you don't have the resources there. you don't have enough thoughts to layer on top and give this that good memory attribute. On the other hand, for the topic you know a lot about, you have this wealth of information. And as soon as this information comes in, there are so many different angles that you can think from. And so this information doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in the context of everything else you know around that information. And being able to think about new information in a way that fits it into a network is what higher order thinking and higher order learning are all about. And the reason I said that this is so important is because when you use higher order learning, you're able to increase your memory drastically. This is the secret to how instead of having a knowledge decay curve that looks like this one, you're able to learn something for the first time and immediately have a decay curve that looks like this. It's almost flat. And yes, you still need to repeat it and test yourself at some point later, but you may not need to test yourself for another month. And even then, your attention is 80 90%. And learning to think at this higher order translates directly to how well you can use the generation effect and the testing effect. Higher order thinking naturally involves more mental effort. To do higher order thinking correctly, you have to generate more. And being familiar with higher order learning allows you to test yourself at the higher orders, which is usually the level you need to get to to solve complex problems or have deep discussions and write thought-provoking essays or to make highstakes complicated decisions. Interestingly, it's also the inability of AI to do higher order thinking and reasoning that makes it so bad in scenarios that are really complex where there are a lot of different things interacting with each other and the situation is nuanced.

So, here are some ways that you can train yourself to be better at this higher order of thinking and higher order learning. Uh, and now again, this is a huge topic and you know, training this is kind of like my main thing. So, I'm going to simplify it for you in this video. So first of all, higher order thinking is all about being integrated in your thinking. Thinking about the big picture, creating a network of information rather than so this is what you want to do. And what you don't want to do is you don't want to be isolated. You don't want to think about things fact by fact or concept by concept. And you definitely don't want to be stuck in the trap of trying to memorize information through just repetition. Remember, you don't have to memorize things because if you apply these principles, you naturally construct a better memory, which means that your attention is better and you will just automatically remember it. If you are actively trying to memorize what you are learning through just reading it again and again, that is like a super super red flag. That flag is neon red. There are times when you do have to memorize things, but it is the minority of your learning and usually only after all of these other things have failed.

So what are some techniques that you can use to get better at this higher order of thinking and learning? The first and maybe simplest one that you can apply is creating analogies. Try to create analogies often when you're learning. Go through a concept, pause, make an analogy. You can even make analogies of your analogy. So have multiple analogies and then bring them together to create one mega analogy. The reason this works is that creating an analogy forces you to think about what you're learning in the big picture. It pulls you out from just thinking about each piece of information as fact by fact by fact and it asks yourself how does it all come together? How can I tell a story with this? Another method that you can use is teaching. Teaching is also a method of testing that you can utilize. But importantly, the way you teach matters. If you just ramble on this endless internal monologue and the thoughts are very disorganized, that's not going to be very easy to follow and you're not having to use your higher order thinking skills to organize it. So try to teach it in the most intuitive, most logical way possible. That is the easiest to follow. Some people say teach it to a 10-year-old. This framing is great because it forces you to think about it simply, but you don't have to just do at a 10-year-old. If you teach at a 10-year-old, sometimes you miss out on that really detailed technical information that you want to test yourself on. The point is that you want to use teaching as an opportunity to organize all of your thoughts and think about which concept or groups of concepts should I talk about first? What makes the most sense for me to start my teaching with? You can see that in order for you to make that decision and make that judgment, you have to be comparing each concept against every other concept. It's a very integrated network style of thinking and of course that involves a lot of mental effort. That's a lot of generation. There's a lot of thoughts. That's a lot of residue. Another method that you can use is mind mapping or any form of nonlinear notetaking. The reason this is good is because it visualizes the connections that you're making instead of writing things out linearly sentence by sentence which makes it easy to be locked into this one fact at a time kind of perspective. Creating a nicely connected mind map forces you to take a step back and look at the big picture. But at the end of the day, whether you're using analogies or teaching or mind maps, these are just methods that try to get you to think in a certain way. Remember, it's higher order thinking. It's not higher order drawing a mind map. It doesn't matter whether you create an analogy or teach or make a mind map if you're not activating the right thinking process.

And an effective way of training yourself to get good at this thinking process is as you are trying to use these techniques and doing any other type of learning after every session ask yourself these three questions. Question number one, how often am I trying to connect what I'm learning to the big picture? How often am I zooming out and thinking about the overall purpose of what I'm learning? The answer to this question should be almost constantly. There should not be more than two or three minutes at a time where you are not coming back to the big picture. And yes, that is very challenging for people who have not experimented with higher order learning before or don't have those habits. But remember what I said about the marginal gains. If you are down here in terms of your current level of habits, do not try to get to a constant level of thinking immediately, just do it a little bit more. Zoom out. Look at the big picture once every 10, 15 minutes. And once you're comfortable with that, do it every 5 to 10 minutes. Just take one step in the right direction. So that's the first question. The second question to ask yourself is, how often do I actively try to simplify what I'm learning? Simplifying is all about trying to understand something in such a way that you don't need to memorize it, making something feel more intuitive and more obvious. When you do this, it forces you to think about the information in relation to what you are already familiar with. Creating analogies is an example of trying to simplify information. When you ask yourself this question, the answer should be after every concept, after each block of new information, you should be pausing. You should be thinking about what you've just learned to simplify it and apply that thinking to it and create a robust memory. You don't want to end up with 14 pieces of new information that you now need to apply all of this thinking for simultaneously. That's going to be way too overwhelming. And the third question is, how long do I delay creating relationships? What this means is how long do you wait after having heard something or reading something before you think about how it compares or connects with something else? Do you read sentence after sentence after sentence after sentence just trying to understand everything that you have read and then only after one or two pages go and think about okay how does it all relate to each other? How are they similar? How are they different? How can I simplify and group these things together? If you're doing that, that's way too delayed. It's going to be very, very hard for you to make sense of that because there are so many connections and so many possible relationships, you're going to be spending hours just working them out. It is much more efficient to think like an expert where for each new piece of information, you're immediately trying to think about, okay, so how does that compare to what I already know? How does that compare with what I've just learned? How can I simplify and group that information? And this is actually the part of higher order thinking that most beginners trip up with the most and they get stuck on. They're so used to consuming and consuming information assuming that just understanding means that you're going to remember that they feel very very uncomfortable with ignoring how deeply you've understood it and just going straight to creating these relationships and thinking about it like a network. But the reality is that when you think about it in a network, it actually helps you to understand. Comparing something that you don't fully understand with what you already know and the other things that you've learned deepens your understanding of it. On the other hand, when you just try to understand each thing in isolation, all it does is it increases the risk that you've misunderstood it. And so when you ask yourself, how long do I wait? How long do I delay before I start forming these relationships? It should be as close to zero as possible. And again, this is challenging, so take it step by step.

And so these four principles, spacing, generation, testing, and higher order thinking, if you're able to apply these principles in the way that you learn, I can guarantee you that your memory will shoot up. Your memory may not be exceptional overnight, but if you continue to take one step at a time, just getting 1% better every day, you will improve. That's how I improved and that's how all my students and coaching clients improve. Now, if you like this video and you want to see how all of this maybe fits in with the bigger picture of learning and all the other techniques you might be using, then you might be interested in checking out this video here where I talk about learning more holistically and how you can actually build a learning system. The principles I talked about in this video, they all apply to everything that I talked about in there. So, if you're looking for the next step in your learning journey, check that video out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.