Transcription
Today, I'm going to be exposing something that I think is kind of irresponsible in the studying influencer space. What I'm talking about is the obsession with making pretty notes that look like this. In this video, I'll talk about the problems with making notes that look like this and why top learners usually have messy notes instead. Towards the end of the video, I'll also give you a demonstration and explain how you should be thinking about writing notes and why pretty notes would just never really be as good.
So let's say I'm reading a textbook, and I'm reading through page by page. There's a few things that need to happen in order for that knowledge to go inside my brain. Step one: I need to literally consume the information; I need to read it. Step two: I need to think about the information in such a way that it allows the information to be organized, made sense of, and therefore retained within my memory. Just because we did step one and information went in doesn't mean that it's going to stay there; we all know that. And the third part, which is where note-taking comes in, we need to write notes in such a way that it allows our brain to do that thinking and not get overloaded. It's like if someone gives you directions somewhere and there's like 50 different steps to go from point A to point B; it's a lot easier to plan it out if you write down what they're saying. And obviously, when we write our notes, it also gives us a reference for us to refer back to later, which is great for our revision. But the way you write the notes makes a really big difference. You cannot just, for example, skip step two. You can't go from reading everything and then just typing out everything that you can think of and then saying, "Hey, here's my perfect set of notes; it's like structured perfectly in like Obsidian or Notion or like Evernote, whatever you're using." If you've skipped step two, which is the actual thinking about the information to decide how you want to represent it, you haven't done any actual learning.
Now, some people like to just write out a bunch of notes and say, "Okay, I'm going to come back to this later. I haven't properly learned it yet; I'm just like creating my notes first." And while I completely understand that—in fact, that's what I used to do as well—it's actually kind of pointless. There's no need to do that because you're just creating extra unnecessary work for yourself. It can take hours to write out all of your notes, and if at the end of that you haven't actually really learned it, and all you've done is like create a reference document for yourself to do the proper learning later, you may as well have just done it right the first time round. If you had two options: option A is to spend 5 hours writing notes and learn only half of it a week later, and the other option is to spend the same 5 hours writing notes but learn and remember 90% of it a week later and have it even deeper with more nuanced understanding, it's pretty obvious which one we should take. The reason that people take option A most of the time is not because they're an idiot; it's because they're usually not aware that there is an option B, and and everyone around them just uses option A, and it just feels like that's the norm. But thanks to the amazing work of really smart researchers out there over the last 20-30 years, uh, we've got an option B now.
So what is that option B, and how do top learners write notes, and why is it messy? So let's say that I'm studying from this page here from SimpleMed, which is about a type of antibiotics, and I read through this first sentence and see this diagram. Now there's a lot of information here, and there's a lot of different ways that I can try to tackle this. I've got some ideas here. I can I can try to recreate this existing diagram and this existing existing structure. Uh, and if I read down through here, I can see that each of these categories are expanded upon pretty significantly, uh, with a lot more information. So I'm going to go ahead and read through this while thinking, "How could I possibly arrange this information in the way that makes the most sense for me?" So give me a [Music] minute.
So now I read this sentence here that says that, you know, these penicillins inhibit bacterial cell wall synthesis, and it's uh, right there in bold for me as well. Now I'm looking at what I've written here, and I'm thinking, "Okay, well bacterial cell wall synthesis, how does that kind of fit in?" And uh, the reason that I I bring up this one is because in the one directly below it, it also says inhibiting cell wall synthesis, and then this one also says cell wall synthesis, and this one also says cell wall synthesis. So this seems to be like a common recurring pattern, uh, and so I'm going to want to link this up in lots of different ways. So let me say bacterial cell wall synthesis here, and I'm thinking that there's something there's some kind of relationship between all of these ones, but there's also a relationship between all of these ones. Uh, so really all of these relate to this singular function that's kind of like my my macroscopic view on it. So naturally I start having questions like, "Well, is there anything else that inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis? Is it only these uh beta-lactam antibiotics that inhibit cell wall synthesis?" And so now I've got more questions; there's more things for me to be curious about; there's like another direction that I want to pursue. And you can imagine how if this is the only thing that inhibits cell wall synthesis, that's going to change the way I structure my notes compared to if it's one of two things or one of 10 things. And I'm also thinking, "How are these actually different from each other if they all contribute to bacterial cell wall synthesis? Like why, when would you use one over the other if it if it seems like it's kind of the same thing?" I don't know; let's read some more. And with just a little bit more reading, I've come across this thing that says it's effective against certain bacteria that are gram-positive but it's not against certain bacteria that's gram-negative. So these are now like two additional words: gram-positive and gram-negative. And so now I'm starting to understand that, okay, well maybe some of these other antibiotics, they're effective against gram-positive more or gram-negative more, and you know maybe all beta-lactams are only effective against gram-positive but not against gram-negative. But either way, I'm thinking that this is going to have some kind of impact; like it's going to be related to this in some sort of way. Let's read a little bit more. Picked up another word here: the idea of anaerobic versus aerobic.
Okay, so as you can see now, the notes are starting to develop into something that looks a lot more complex and a lot messier. And the thing is that these are all very important connections and relationships for me to think about. And when I'm writing notes linearly, there isn't a good way to really represent it. Now, at the moment, it looks really messy because my mind is going in lots of different directions, and you might look at this and say that looks like total crap; I can't understand what's going on at all. And it's totally fair because this is not the final product, but it is helping me to track my thoughts so that I can come back and clean it up later. But unlike writing it linearly where it might look relatively neat to start with, I'm keeping keeping track of more connections and more relationships. All of these things are going to deepen my memory and deepen my knowledge. It's keeping my brain in this very active relational state where I'm constantly thinking about how each new piece of information relates to the other pieces of information and how it all fits together. And these are the exact processes that promote a stronger memory and a deeper understanding of knowledge. These processes are also very hard to do if you cannot see the relationships that you're thinking about, such as when we write the linear pretty notes.
And so at this point, when I look at this, I think, "Okay, there's a few things going on here that I think might be recurring themes and ideas: cell wall synthesis, gram-positive, gram-negative, aerobic versus anaerobic," and I'm starting to see that these might be more important concepts because they repeat so frequently in what I'm reading that maybe that's the main stem of this topic and not the actual specific names of the antibiotics themselves. And so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to spend about 5 minutes to clean up what I've got to make it more organized. So as you can see, I'm going back and forth; I'm moving around; I'm moving things around, uh, and I'm basically trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. I'm taking pieces; I'm seeing if it fits somewhere; if not, I'm putting it back; I'm picking up another piece, testing it out. And mentally, I'm just trying to make it all make sense into a clean big picture. I don't want to get 3 hours deep into a study session and think, "Okay, I've got no idea what's going on; I feel overwhelmed; you know, there's a ton of information I need to get through, uh, but at least I've got a nice set of notes; you know, I'll leave the actual learning for the weekend." I don't want that, cuz that's just going to create learning debt for myself, which I'm going to have to just deal with eventually, and that's going to make me overwhelmed. And just like how it's pretty much impossible to solve a jigsaw puzzle by, you know, gazing at the pieces and then perfectly picking up each one in order and placing it exactly where it needs to go, building the picture of what you are learning and building a conceptual web of knowledge takes some trial and error, and you can see me doing that trial and error, uh, on on the page, and it's it's a lot easier to do it because it's here on the page. And that process is naturally messy. In learning science, we use the word recursive, that which means that uh learning by nature involves us going back and forth, uh, over things multiple times, looking at it through different lenses. And so this process of like having a mess that you are progressively trying to clean up at a big picture level, this is necessary for effective learning. And this is where the problem with pretty notes comes in. It's like trying to solve a puzzle perfectly the first time round; there's no room for exploration or rearranging any of the ideas. In fact, the only way that we can create like this perfect set of notes first time round is if we skip step two, the actual thinking and processing. If we don't think about things much, nothing becomes overwhelming. It's easy to make these pretty notes while feeling productive. We give ourselves a reasonable challenge of trying to make it look nice, which creates the illusion of learning.
Here's a video of me making pretty notes for 5 minutes, and just to show you how actually ineffective it is for learning. Note, I'm actually also listening to a very catchy and distracting music at the exact same time, and I'm also letting myself get distracted every 20 seconds with a timer. Both of these things are obviously uh incredibly distracting; it makes it essentially impossible to do any deep and effective learning. But notice how the quality of my notes or how pretty they are is completely unaffected despite my brain essentially being turned off. That's the illusion of learning. We've got something that looks visually great but cognitively empty, and this is a clear sign that you would be engaging in something called passive learning, which is basically when you're doing something where your brain is not actively engaged in the learning process. And passive learning is in all situations a waste of time. Now, not everyone that makes pretty notes is always doing passive learning and obviously not getting like distracted every 20 seconds either. But what it means is that writing notes in this way doesn't require you to really be thinking about it, and if you are thinking about it in a more effective way, then writing notes in this way will actually hold you back. So there's no win criteria here; there's no way that this becomes more effective than an alternative. And it's not just when we're reading either; you can apply the same thing for even something like when you're sitting there in a lecture and information is getting bombarded at you full speed, and you feel like you maybe have to write break down everything. Well, I actually talk a little bit more about how writing lists completely changed my experience of lectures, which I talk about in this video.
And look, I'm not saying you need to have your notes messy forever. I am like I love the really nice aesthetic notes as much as anyone else. It doesn't mean your notes have to look like the the tangled web of cables behind your TV. But in fact, when you start messy and then you try to progressively clean it up and make it more organized, it has a beneficial effect on your memory and depth of understanding. And that's the key; that's the sweet spot. When you start messy and you try to clean it up, you get all the benefits of being able to think at that higher level and having notes that look good too. If you want to learn more about just writing nonlinear notes in the first place, you can also check out a video that I made on that here. I'll check out a link in the description too. And if you want to learn about some of the the other things that you should be thinking about other than just note-taking to build out a full learning system, then I've got a free quiz that I created that's also in the description, as well as a video around how to find your learner type. When you do the quiz, it will tell you what your learning strengths and weaknesses are, so you know what's holding you back and what you need to work on first. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.