The PROBLEM with Active Recall and Spaced Repetition (Truth Behind Studying Smarter)

so this video is going to be a little bit controversial not because i want to be controversial but it just is if you're really into active recall and space repetition and if those are the techniques that you think work the best then you're probably wrong let me explain why for those of you that don't know i'm dr justin sung i'm a medical doctor but i'm also more importantly a learning coach it's what i do full-time i work with students teaching them evidence-based studying and time management skills before i tell you why active recoil and space

repetition doesn't really work let me tell you a really quick story about how i came to discover this okay so rewind like 10 years ago and i'm trying to enter into medical school i'm still in high school right now and i'm doing relatively okay i'm getting a high grade band i'm getting some scholarships i'm doing reasonably well you know people used to look at me as a smart kid i go into university during this year i just studied and studied and studied like non-stop that's all i did and in this first year of uni this

is where i really started getting into active recoil and space repetition it was all the hype monsters or the hype i had thousands of flash cards and i would study literally every day all day when i say all day i was only getting like two or three hours of sleep every night um it was very very bad and i did that every single day every single weekend uh for about nine to ten consecutive months it was pretty brutal um i was incredibly sleep deprived obviously i was hallucinating even i remember one time where i had

been awake for like i think i was awake for like 77 hours and i was probably studying like 70 of those hours i would study when i was eating i would study while i was brushing my teeth i would study in the shower my entire day was just filled with studying uh obviously i was a little bit obsessed and i did end up getting very very good grades um and i ended up getting into medical school so what happened when i entered into medical school well the thing is the thing is that when you enter

into medical school right so before getting in i was studying about this much okay that year i essentially memorized this whole textbook i'm probably a little bit more for the other subjects as well but when i got into medical school i realized that there was a a lot more that i needed to learn and in fact the content was about double i needed to study about double so for those of you that are pretty good at maths you'll know that um you can't study more than like if you're studying 20 hours a day you can't

study 40 hours a day no matter how lingling you are and that was obviously a problem because i just entered into medical school and i didn't want to fail so i had to figure out a better way to study so that's when i started looking into effective study techniques and what really got me was that i was spending a lot of time doing my flash cards and space repetition and active recon all of that sort of stuff and it wasn't really getting the type of results that i wanted there were guys in my class who

i like never saw studying and they would consistently outperform me in the in my tests and exams it was pretty frustrating so i looked into the research and i started experimenting with different ways that i could study and i did this like a crazy person like my life depended on it because my livelihood did i didn't want to spend my whole life just sitting in a library wasting away and everything i learned i taught to other students by the time i finished my third year of uni i'd already gotten a teaching certificate so i'd learn

a lot more about the theory behind learning and how that works and that allowed me to learn even more deeply okay fast forward a few years i'd actually built an entire business around teaching students and one of the things that i learned while i was teaching other students was that there are some techniques that will work as long as you're already pretty good at studying if you're not someone that is like very uh good at what's called deep processing um you know essentially someone that can just pick up a new concept and learn it really

really quickly to begin with then a lot of the techniques don't actually work or it's not enough and so for for me as essentially a learning professional teaching others and getting paid to help them learn to learn i had to figure out a way to help students to do well even if they weren't already you know like a genius and this is kind of where the story begins because it's been 10 years and i've learned a lot so hear me out on this so the first thing that i want to say is that i know

that what i'm going to say today goes in the face of maybe everything that you've heard from your friends or your teachers or your parents or other people on youtube i know and i get it when i teach you uh what i've learned it's gonna make sense to you as well okay but there is a lot to cover there's a lot of stuff i'm gonna go through that you've probably never heard before so uh before we understand why active recoil and space repetition doesn't work as well as people hype it up to we first need

to understand a little bit about how learning actually works in the first place because without knowing that we're not going to understand where it works and then where it fails and that's going to be really important for you to look at your own studying system and actually start tweaking it if you don't know why it works in the first place every time you have an issue you are not going to know how to problem solve and i think that's very important to know so the first thing i want to point out is that studying is

not the same thing as learning and this may be something that is really obvious to you but i found that a lot of students have not ever thought about this is the fact that studying is actually this process that we are doing physically right it could be the writing of notes when we're um you know in class or revising material it could be us watching a video about something right now you might be studying this video as you're listening this is the stuff we do out in the physical world uh and the purpose of doing

this is so that we can get learning occurring so the purpose of studying is to produce learning and learning is actually the cognitive process that occurs and this is essentially when information is connected into our brain and we can say that we have learned successfully if that knowledge is retained and preferably we are actually able to use it and apply this knowledge so learning and studying are two separate things so if you were to take a textbook and then you would smash your face into the textbook you would not say that that is either studying

or learning but if you were to smash your face into the textbook enough times you will at the very least have learned the name of the title of the textbook as it comes into your face repeatedly that's not the best wording that i could have used for that as it impacts your face repeatedly and so in this example we have actually learned something so if your friend were to say hey how are you going to study for that test and you say oh you know just the usual slamming the textbook into my face then that

would be your studying technique i guess now that's an extreme example well what about if you were to open up the textbook and then you were to touch the pages what if you would have flicked the pages what if you were to look at the pages while you were flicking them what if you would have read the words on the pages what if you were to read slowly what if you were to then read it and then write something so you see how changing different things about the activity changes the amount of learning that it

engages so it shows that the learning process is something that is activated by the studying process and not all studying processes activate the same amount of learning so that means that you can potentially spend 10 hours studying using one technique and then get only one hour of learning if your technique is only let's say 10 efficient now in reality it's really hard to put these exact percentage numbers on it because it's just really hard to measure but you get the gist some techniques are really efficient you can get a lot of learning in your brain

done using them some techniques are less efficient and broadly speaking we call the techniques that are more effective at learning active learning techniques and there is a huge range of active learning techniques that we can use while we're studying so what is it that is actually happening in our brain when we say that this learning thing is encoding okay so let me give you a very quick dive into how our memory actually works there's this one model for our memory that is called the multi-store model of memory and this can get pretty complicated but long

story short it says that there are different places in our memory where the information goes number one when we take an information it comes in a sensory information so this is the type of stuff that we might be seeing with our eyes or listening with our ears right now you're receiving sensory information and this goes into a part of our brain which is called the sensory memory so that's relatively straightforward now information from your sensory memory is forgotten very very quickly because if you imagine holding on to every piece of information that you are bombarded

with on a daily basis and remembering all of that your brain would just explode imagine remembering every single sensation that is on your skin every license plate you see as you're walking that would be incredibly overwhelming but more importantly it's very energy inefficient if we don't need that information it's not going to keep it in fact it's a life or death situation from your body's point of view your brain consumes already at rest around 20 of your resting energy caloric intake per day so what that means is that if it's unnecessarily being super active holding

on to irrelevant information you will literally die so the point is that your brain is really really efficient at forgetting anything that is not relevant and not necessary what happens after this is that if you intend to keep this information if you want to remember it for longer then it shuts this information into something that is called the working memory now this is also sometimes called the short term memory but i like calling it the working memory because it also talks about one of its other functions which is that when you have information that's in

your long-term memory and you want to use it again it has to go through the work working memory first so here's how this works some of this information that initially came in through sensory pathways goes into our working memory and then from our working memory goes into our long term memory here and this is a process that we call encoding now when we want to use this information we have to retrieve it from our long-term memory and this is a process that's called retrieval so that means that every time you are answering a test question

or an exam paper or someone asks you a question about anything what we're trying to do is we're trying to collect it from our long-term memory call it forth into our working memory and that's where we can actually answer or manipulate the information or do something with it so i like thinking about the working memory almost like a hotel lobby you can stay there for a short period of time but you're going to get kicked out if you don't have a room in the hotel but to get in and out of this building you need

to pass through the lobby no matter what so the working memory is where you're going to be spending a lot of your time when you're manipulating the information but it's not a good place to hold on to it because the working memory will also forget information relatively quickly in the span of sort of seconds to minutes now your long-term memory is a little bit different your long-term memory will forget things as well but it will forget things much more slowly it will forget things in the span of hours to even months and it depends on

how strongly it was encoded in this process here and that is very very complicated i'm not going to be able to get into it and we also don't fully know exactly all the things that that involves but we do know a few things due to extensive research in this field and one of those things is that encoding and retrieval are both very very important you can't just encode because then your brain doesn't know how to retrieve it properly to actually answer the questions but also you can't retrieve what you don't encode you can't pour from

an empty bucket if you don't fill it in the first place or if your bucket has holes then when you need to pour stuff out of it nothing's going to come out so there are two sides of the same coin and students often don't think much about the encoding process and that's because of another thing that we know about encoding which is the fact that encoding uses a lot of what we call cognitive load and cognitive load is in short the brain power necessary to do the encoding process encoding does not happen without sufficient cognitive

load now cognitive load is also something that is actually pretty complicated and a lot of places teach it wrong i've even advised at schools where their own school curriculum taught cognitive load incorrectly but again the long story short here is that your brain has a certain amount of load that it can kind of tolerate and this is something that can actually be trained so if you aren't able to tolerate a lot of this brain power and a lot of this load then you can actually train that which i will talk about in other videos but

essentially what happens is that when the load increases your learning actually increases as well up to a certain point so what happens is if this red line is talking about the amount of cognitive load that you've got on your brain and this green line is talking about the amount of learning that's occurring aka the amount of encoding that is incurring then what we see is that the amount of learning is really low at low levels of cognitive load and it goes up as the load goes up to a certain extent once it reaches that threshold

it actually starts to plateau and go down so if we've got too much load then we're overwhelmed and we're not learning effectively but if we don't have enough we're actually just fundamentally not encoding it at all and all of the techniques that result in very low cognitive load and therefore very low encoding and therefore very low learning and therefore making you forget the same thing that you studied 20 times very very quickly these are all called passive learning and the thing is that this is something that happens in your brain you can use the same

technique such as reading a book but if you're thinking about it differently you could get a lot of learning out of it or you might be completely passive so it's hard to tell based on just looking at someone studying or seeing what technique they're using how much cognitive load is actually going on inside their brain and research is strongly supportive that the relationship between cognitive load and encoding and how good your memory and retention is is very strongly associated with the amount of load so the more load the better to a certain point so what

does this cognitive load actually feel like when you're studying cognitive load feels confusing it feels like you're already trying to figure this out you might have a little bit of cognitive load right now thinking what is he talking about where is this going how does that fit in how do i apply that to my life how does that how is it similar or different to what else i know these questions this confusion this is cognitive load and this is a sign that your brain is engaging high efficiency learning pathways which means that if you're studying

and this isn't happening in your brain you're not getting that cognitive load and another thing that we know is that when this is happening in your brain it's directly opposed to feeling bored or or drowsy so if you've ever been studying and you just find it so boring and tedious and you're getting sleepy and every time you start studying you fall asleep that's what used to happen to me all the time in fact i probably got more sleep while i just took naps while i was studying than i did in my bed well if that's

happening then that is a sign that your studying technique is actually not very efficient because it means that you're not using the right types of pathways in your brain because if you were you actually wouldn't feel that and there is studies that's done on the electrical activity of the brain that shows the different waves and so right here this is one of the main reasons why techniques about encoding and this stuff is not really talked about and you may have never heard of this before is because of the fact that learning correct and coding is

difficult it's not just difficult in that there are a lot of steps and there's a very specific pathway to allow you to do correct encoding in my course where i work with students intimately it takes months to build up someone's encoding to a very very significant degree but it is in essence forcing yourself to become smarter when your encoding goes up you are faster at studying you can just understand concepts faster you can just hold on to the information for longer you don't need to revise it all the time your confidence goes up and you

just start enjoying the studying process a lot more but that takes a lot of effort and you have to be very willing and ready to accept the discomfort that comes with this encoding process and in fact this whole idea that it's difficult and it's uncomfortable this is actually called desirable difficulty and not many students are willing to go through that discomfort in order to learn the skills much like how if you were to go to the gym you're only getting an effective workout if your muscles are feeling pretty tired same thing here is that your

brain is only really being used effectively if it has that level of discomfort and cognitive load so on the flip side that actually means that retrieval techniques are easier to learn and this is where active recall and space repetition come in they're very easy techniques to learn pretty much anyone can pick it up it doesn't have any real learning curve you can hear about it and then 10 15 minutes later pretty much just do it straight away and there is going to be a benefit so we're getting there we're gonna understand now why it doesn't

really work beyond a certain point because the reason active recall and space repetition works in the first place is by adjusting and working on this forgetting curve now the forgetting curve is a very popular well-known concept and it basically says that the first time that you learn something if this is time on the x-axis here and this is the amount of knowledge that you have in your head stored able to be recalled on the y-axis the first time you learn something you actually forget this information relatively quickly now if you were to then revise this

information again let's say a few hours later then you would then forget it a little bit more slowly and so every time you repeat this information you're going to forget it slower and slower and slower until this curve starts plateauing so you can see that the slope of this here is you know pretty steep whereas over here it's not so steep which indicates that we are forgetting information a lot slower over here than over here where we're forgetting a lot of information very quickly now research will say that after one week of learning a fact

with your without doing any other type of retrieval in between you can actually forget around 60 percent of this information 50 to 60 of it so that effectively means that half of all the studying that you did completely just went to waste after just one week and to be honest a lot of students are not revising stuff at the end of every week to begin with either so it's actually in reality going to be a lot more of an issue than this because you essentially just study everything throughout the year and then before your exams

it's like you're just studying it from fresh you've forgotten everything and i'm sure some of you can relate to that so what active recoil and space repetition is doing is it's actually moving you along this forgetting curve so instead of being on this line where the rate of decay and that is the technical word for this the rate of decay is very very quick we're getting to this slope here so we are moving and progressing along each slope so that our rate of knowledge decay is a lot slower which is obviously a good thing and

this is why it works this is why space repetition will work for you if you're not doing it at all if you're already not doing any type of retrieval if you're not doing any type of repetition and revision then it will help you it will work but the thing is it has diminishing returns in fact very rapidly diminishing returns so for those of you that aren't familiar the idea of diminishing returns is that something can be really good at the beginning but then it's not so good later on so let's say for example you need

to organize your room because it's a mess and you can't find anything anywhere and every time you're trying to find a sock it takes you 30 minutes then it might take you an hour to clean up and organize your room a little bit and after an hour sure it's not completely organized and it's not the best it could possibly be but now you can find your sock in just 30 seconds or less so there's been a huge improvement but now if you were to go and try to organize it even more if you were to

try to get it perfect maybe right now it's 80 90 there but to go that extra 10 maybe now what you're gonna have to do is organize all your books in alphabetical order and then organize all your socks by different colors and fabrics and that might take you another three or four hours and at the end of the day it might only help you find your sock faster by like five more seconds so that's what diminishing returns would be in that first hour of organizing we get huge and rapid gains but then it's slower and

the gains that we're getting for the amount of effort that we're putting in is just not quite there so the reason that active recall and space repetition are so evidence-based is that the research strongly shows that students that don't use active recall and space repetition do worse than the students that do use it and that is completely true you're going from a situation that is bad to better but from better there's a very big difference between better and really good or best so if you're a student that's not aiming to go from failing to just

passing or doing relatively well but you're actually a student that's already doing relatively good but you want to be excellent then you're going to find that using active recoil and space repetition if you're not using it already will help you but it's going to be very difficult to get to those very top marks and so again when you look at the research there isn't really strong evidence to say that for people that are already achieving pretty well that doing more active recall in space repetition helps them in fact some research says it's the opposite it

actually makes it worse and that's because of the fact that active wrinkle in space repetition is inherently very repetitive in fact that's kind of the whole reason it works is that it's repetitive and you're always fighting the forgetting curve your brain is constantly trying to forget this information and you are forcibly putting it back in there saying don't forget it don't forget it don't forget it but you have to do that for everything that you're learning and that will stack up when you look at all the different subjects that you're taking all the different facts

and all the different concepts you're gonna have to repeat the same thing three four or five times to keep it in your brain which means that you have to do three four five times the amount of studying and revision to keep it in your brain if you imagine that the first time you learned something you could encode it 100 highest quality and you just don't forget it for like six months then you would probably find that it's really easy to study for your exams because you don't ever need to revise the information now that isn't

possible but we can get a lot closer to that than most students realize in fact more than even most teachers will realize and so this experience of just repeating information and maybe doing your flashcards over and over again and constantly trying to use space repetition and study things but then still not getting the results that you want this is probably a very familiar experience to people and actually a lot of the students that are using space repetition active recall based systems will find that it's not actually working as well as it seems like it should

be working it's not giving them the results that they've kind of been promised that they expect it to get it can be extremely monotonous and incredibly tedious very very time consuming and in fact actually pretty demoralizing if you're not getting the results so in fact what some of the research will show is that if you were to look at all the different people that are using a technique that involves space repetition or active recall like active recall based space repetition algorithm anki flash card you actually find the majority of the people that use that technique

don't do well so what that means is that it's actually a really common technique that a lot of people are using and only some people are going to do well and those people that will do well using that technique probably already have a pretty good inherent ability to encode now if you want not one of those people that already came into things with a high level of encoding then you're going to find that active record space repetition might actually make your life harder because you're having to spend so much of your time just repeating and

relearning the same stuff that you forgot and that's not necessary like i said before you can actually train this process you can train your brain to become smarter you can train your brain to encode information more efficiently the first time you learn it and this is because of something called neuroplasticity which essentially says that your brain is the ability to remode and adapt and become better and learn new things so if you're not someone that is previously really like book smart and academic and you're not someone that's usually really good at picking up concepts really

quickly you can actually train that and you can not just train it a little bit but you can completely just like absolutely massively shift to the point where some of my students in the past have actually had interviews with their teachers because the teachers didn't understand how they were suddenly doing so well just think about that for a second i do this day in day out for thousands of students all across the world so it's very very consistent i haven't really ever encountered a single student that couldn't be trained to do this literally ever over

the last almost 10 years of me teaching this okay but the purpose of this video is not to pitch my course so if you're interested and you want to just have like that proof that hey this actually works it's not just like some random theory that this dude on youtube is talking out of like just random thin air this is stuff that's like real life cemented an actual practice i've got real students real data that shows the stuff in fact i'm gearing up to publish it in journals then you can learn more about that but

anyway to summarize what we have said right now is that your brain tends to forget stuff very efficiently if it's not encoded into your long-term memory encoding takes cognitive load that's confusing that's uncomfortable but if you learn the techniques to navigate that then what happens is that your forgetting curve actually just starts becoming a lot flatter to begin with which means that you just don't need to revise it so often you can cancel out some of those revisions and that means that because you're just fundamentally forgetting stuff a lot slower you just don't need to

revise as much and it's just a huge time save so at this point you may be thinking two things number one well justin then how do you do all this amazing encoding magical super silver bullet technique well i will have other videos talking about that because this video is already getting pretty long and it's necessary to explain why the whole active recoil space repetition like cult is not as hyped up as it really is in real life but because again the encoding techniques are not easy it's not something i can just smash out through like

a one minute tick tock there's really a lot of explanation that goes into it so i will be having a lot of other videos talking about encoding techniques and going through demonstrations and examples and work throughs and all of that sort of stuff to just prove to you that it does actually work it's not just you know me making stuff up but the other thing that you may be thinking or doubting is well justin if this is as good as you say it is and this is like the third eye of studying waking up then

why have i not heard of this before why does everyone else on youtube say that active recall and space repetition are god level tech i've actually i literally saw a study guru say active recoil and space repetition was a god level technique i was vomited in my mouth why is everyone else saying that there's a few reasons and there's actually even some studies done around why people believe studying related myths and one of those things is because of something called the dunning-kruger effect and it looks a little bit like this this is the dunning-kruger graph

and what you can see here is that there is knowledge on the x-axis and confidence on the y-axis so when you don't know anything your confidence is really low well zero because you know you know nothing but when you learn a little bit about something compared to nothing that's a lot more so your confidence grows much much higher you become much more confident in this thing and then when you learn more and more and more you realize actually man there's more to this than i thought uh and then as you just commit your life towards

learning this 10 20 years later you truly become an expert and your confidence grows again because you legitimately know a lot so there's only two points in which the confidence is really high and that is after you've spent decades learning about this or you've only learned a little bit and you just don't know what you don't know and this is the case just objectively like it's just the fact i don't want this to be insulting really don't like i don't want this video to have as much backlash as i suspect it will have but a

lot of the study youtubers out there don't know a lot about how learning actually works or what goes on in the brain it's a lot of that is just they've watched other youtube videos and they have tried a few things and they i don't know got into medical school or law school or something and they sort of said hey it works let me make a youtube video about it and so learning is actually really really complicated because i did all of that i did well and then i used techniques and then i got good grades

and i got into medical school and i graduated i became a doctor i even did this whole business thing on the side while i was doing that all that stuff and i realized the more i learned the less i knew really i had overestimated how much i knew 10 years ago learning is legitimately really really complicated to the point where just one of those concepts that i've talked about today i've actually done whole like five hour workshops on just one of those concepts and that it's it's still just barely scratching the surface for a lot

of students active recoil and space repetition of some of the first techniques that they learn about studying before that it's like turn your phone off don't listen to your favorite song while you're studying don't study inside your bed covers you know stuff like that just simple tips and tricks of just straight up don't do that that's a terrible idea type of advice an active record space repetition are often some of the first actual techniques that someone will learn and it's a good first technique to learn because it's easy to use and it does again produce

benefit if you're not doing it already but again statistically speaking there's more people that use that technique and don't do well than people that use that technique and do well and this leads me to the second reason why you don't hear about it so much which is success bias now the story behind success bias says that there were these planes in world war ii or something that came back after their raids and they found that the wings had the most amount of bullet holes in them so the military said okay well we should put less

armor around the cockpit area because obviously that place is not getting shot as much and then a military statistician said no that would be a terrible idea the only reason that our planes that we're seeing have more bullet holes on the wings is because all the planes that got shot in the middle never returned they all died so when's the last time you saw a youtube video from someone talking about how they failed and that's the thing is that when you don't do well you're not super keen on telling the world about it you're a

lot less likely to make a big youtube video or grow a channel about failing to use a technique so you don't hear a lot of the stories of people using these techniques and not doing well i on the other hand as someone that is actually employed as a coach to help students that tried to use techniques and didn't work i get to see how many times people are following this advice and it's not producing those results the number of times that students will use techniques like active recoil and space repetition and not do well is

overwhelmingly more common than the students that will use it and then do well and even for the students that do well they usually come back one or two years later when they're later in uni or the content is more difficult or there's just more to know and they're saying it's no longer sustainable because they're just spending way too much time or there's just too much content and they're just not able to keep on top of it they're falling behind and they're not able to finish all of their flash cards or however else they're using it

so because we're only seeing the success stories we're led to believe that it's more useful and more effective than it actually is which leads me to the third bias which is something called availability bias and what this says is that we will judge how legit something is based on how commonly we encounter it so if we encounter a bunch of different people saying hey vaccines are dangerous we will believe that vaccines are dangerous the same can be said of climate change the same can be said about flat earthers and the same can be said about

active recall and space repetition because so many videos and so many people are talking about it because of the fact that it's easy because of the fact it's popular because of the fact of success bias because of the fact that this encoding related stuff is just not as easy to explain in a very short youtube video as you can see from this unnecessarily long youtube video probably you are led to believe that it's more legit and it's not your fault it's just the way that our brain is wired it's just the biological tendency of the

human brain is that when something is more available we think it is more legitimate and this has been studied across all different fields including you know politics and science belief and all of this stuff if we see it more we think it's more legit and it creates this spiral we get people that are learning this from these common and popular videos they think it's legit they try it the ones that are successful feel really confident they make a youtube video about it and that becomes even more common so it produces this sort of spiral of

really confident people learning something from common knowledge then just kind of making it more and more and more and more common and now it just it seems like that's kind of the only way to do things but that's actually very demoralizing because if that truly is the best study technique there is and you've tried it and you're not getting the result that you want then does that mean you're not able to achieve your academic goals does that mean you're too dumb does it mean that you're just not going to be able to do it but

that's not the case that's not the case so again i'm not saying the active record space repetition are bad it's a good part of your studying system but if that is the only thing that you're relying on and you're not actually building good encoding techniques then you're essentially just trying to refill a bucket with a hole in it obviously the best step is to patch that hole to begin with now most students really underestimate their potential if you're already good at encoding the chances are that you can actually improve that even more usually significantly some

of the students that are coming into my course are already getting let's say 90 or in a test or an exam or more they are increasing their study efficiency by two to three times they're studying only 50 30 or 50 of how much they used to study beforehand and getting the same grades i've got students that are going from getting like failing their papers c's and d's to getting the top marks in their entire cohort and yes it's not easy no it's not just hey plug in this technique and you can just solve all your

problems it evaporates and you know you become you know like a yoda of studying it's not like that they are working hard and they're developing these skills just like you'd have to work hard and develop the skills to play a musical instrument or to play a sport really well same thing is that when you really train yourself to use certain studying techniques you can actually kind of unlock your brain's potential which is a super cliche thing to say and it makes me cringe a little bit to say it but it's kind of true so i

would say for those of you that are feeling super confident about your study skills right now because you feel like you already know all the techniques and you know how to use them approach things with an open mind um you never know maybe if you were to study this field for another 20 years you might realize that there's more to it than you realize it's possible it's just it's possible i'm not saying that's the case you could be an absolute just genius but it's possible right it's just it's possible like it's worth having an open

mind about right that's all i'm saying or if you're someone that is in the situation where you've tried a lot of study techniques and hasn't worked for you and you're feeling demorally deep the more demotive no demoralized and you're feeling like it's hopeless and you don't know whether you can do it or you don't think a career is right for you because you think you're too dumb or it's not within your capacity and other study techniques you've tried it and tried it and tried it and none of it has worked before then this video is

really for you and i'm here to say that you can do it you can train yourself to be better and you will have to work hard but you're probably willing to work hard if you know what's going to get you the results so for you i'd say actually have some hope it may be that you've just tried really hard at the wrong thing if you want to learn more about this then consider subscribing anyway if you learned something new from this video if you found it insightful i'd appreciate if you leave a like helps with

the algorithm all of that sort of stuff i'd really be interested for you to leave a comment about the things that you want me to clarify if there's something that you disagree with let's have a conversation about this like to mature people not saying you suck this is just bs uh but actually saying hey can you clarify on this point because there's a lot of explanation and it is pretty deep and complex and i wasn't able to cover everything so if you've got questions check them down below and let's have a respectful discussion about it

and again if you're having this like if you're one of the people that's really really into active recall and space repetition and all the other youtubers that you know preach that sort of stuff look that's up to you it's all good you can do whatever you want that's cool you know that's fine we don't have to we don't have to fight about it right we can just be open-minded and uh if anyone is interested in the real sort of hardcore research and theoretical basis for this sort of stuff then again leave a comment i'm in

the middle of currently writing up a full report of the research but based on the comments from my previous videos i've learned that most people don't care about the research at all so i'm not putting too much of it in this video you can check the link for that as well and as i said before if you're interested in learning sort of step-by-step of exactly how to do this encoding process how to match that with retrieval techniques how to blend it all together into a seamless study system how to remove your procrastination all of that

sort of stuff got a full course you can check the link in the description to just learn a little bit more about it see if it's right for you anyway thanks for giving me your attention for this very long video i hope you learned something new and i'll catch in the next one