5 Ways to Train Yourself to Be a Genius (3 Short-term, 2 Long-term)

if you've ever looked at someone and thought man that person's just really smart they're able to understand things so quickly they must be a genius i'm here to say that you can actually train yourself to be like that person that's what this video is going to be about how you can train yourself to think like a genius for those of you that are new i'm dr justin sung i'm a medical doctor as well as a learning coach which means i work with people to help them study and learn more efficiently and before we talk about

how we can actually train ourselves we need to understand that it's first of all possible to do that a lot of the times when i work with students or professionals of any age there are often some beliefs about what you can and can't change often people that haven't had good academic experiences earlier on in life can pigeonhole themselves into thinking that they're just not a good studyer they're not good at learning they just can't learn in certain settings and these concepts are usually not true most of the time it's just about what your brain is

used to doing and what you're comfortable with doing however these may not actually be fixed in fact the branch of science which we sort of refer to now broadly as neuroplasticity is something that has been growing in interest and research over sort of the last 30 years and we now know unlike 40 50 years ago that the brain is actually very very adaptable the brain is able to adapt and modify itself and reprogram itself in more ways than we thought so we don't know exactly where the limits of neuroplasticity are but we do know that

most things can to a certain degree be retrained and reprogrammed which is a good thing because if you've previously been a student that's been academically unsuccessful already struggling then that doesn't have to be your entire life it is possible to retrain yourself and this is the fundamental idea that my course is based on which is the idea that it is possible to retrain this and you can actually then use that to excel in your academic studies now it doesn't mean that just because it's retrainable that it will be retrained so easily the process of retraining

the way that you think can take months or even years however it is possible and if it's something that's really important for you and you want to have a feeling of academic freedom to feel that opportunities are in your grasp and you can take hold of them and learning is not going to be the barrier then i'm here to say that it is very possible and we're going to be covering some of the most important principles to do that in this video so let's break down what we are talking about when we're saying a genius

what are the patterns of genius that we're essentially referring to now it's important to note that when i'm talking about genius in this context we are talking about academic genius the idea of being smart street smart or smart emotionally intelligent completely valid but for the context of this video i will be restricting the discussion mostly to the typical kind of things that you think about when you think about learning or studying now usually when we talk about genius we're referring to usually a few pretty discreet factors the first thing is often their memory when we

say someone's a genius we often say that they have a really good memory and they're able to retain information for a long period of time and not only are they able to retain this information and they have a good memory but number two they usually have a very deep level of understanding so not only do they retain information but what they do retain is of a high quality they're able to learn things very very deeply they can maybe apply new information to complex problems more easily and earlier on and the ability to just move through

the information and use the information as more flexible and fluid than someone that is not a genius so the reason that we want to break it up is because we can think of about what the components are that make up having a good memory or having deep understanding we know that when it comes to memory one of the things that affects your memory the most is the way that you encode information the first time around and i have other videos talking extensively about this so this goes back to good high quality encoding if you're not

encoding information correctly there isn't really any way for you to have a better memory it's very very time consuming very challenging very repetitive and tedious and frustrating to try to hold on to information through pure repetition alone using low quality encoding techniques so the first thing is about increasing our encoding in terms of deepening our understanding what we're looking at here is sort of the wider field that is often referred to as deep processing and deep processing is a term that's sort of thrown around all over the place and the definition for what we are

referring to when we talk about deprocessing is pretty varied but usually what we're talking about is the ability to take information and then think about it in a bigger picture so we're able to connect that information to other things and because we know how a piece of information is related to other pieces of information it means that we are able to see it from multiple different angles which develops a more nuanced and more fluid understanding of the topic so we can see how we can apply it in multiple different angles an example of this would

be if i gave you a never before seen item like i don't know this pen stylus and i said that this pen stylus is really really useful to use as a paper weight and that's the only frame in which you were able to understand the pen stylus is that you use it as a paper weight well we know based on our understanding of what a pen stylus is is that that's really not doing it justice in terms of the amount of functionality that it can have but you wouldn't really know to apply it if you

weren't told that it has these other features deep processing is the ability to take this information and explore it to discover the features that it has and see the ways that it can be applied and manipulated so that we can really make the most out of that information and the side effect is that because of the fact that when you do good deep processing we understand all the nuances of the information we're able to create more relationships with it which means it has more places that it can belong our brain knows how to think about

it more easily it's more organized and these things directly increase the quality of our encoding as well so there is a relationship here where good deep processing increases in coding which it further improves the quality of our memory the other really important part of deep processing is that it's activating this thing that i've talked about previously which is called higher order learning now higher order learning and deep processing are sort of in this case synonymous with each other when we're referring to higher order learning we're talking about the types of cognitive processes the types of

thoughts that we have about the information we consume that would force us to create more organization and more meaning to that information which therefore increases the encoding which therefore increases our memory and also allows us to use the information to a greater depth one of the best frameworks that we can really use for this is called the revised blooms taxonomy i mentioned it in a lot of other videos as well i talk about it all the time or another one that we can use is called the solo taxonomy you'll see if you look at both

of them that they're actually very similar there's some trends between them but i like to break it down very very simply like this there are sort of four main stages of learning and in this case we'll say that the first stage is the highest order and then the fourth is the lowest order in the fourth stage we're really thinking about information and isolation that is the key feature of lower order learning information is viewed purely just as what it is it's not related to anything else it doesn't have a meaning associated with it it doesn't

seem particularly important so study techniques that facilitate low order learning are things like root memorization just repeating things over and over again rewriting your notes out re-reading your notes doing flashcards that test purely on just basic fact recall even explaining how something works like a process or a cycle or a concept can still just be low order learning because that concept could just be in isolation so anything that is viewed in isolation is lower order learning and the sad reality is that most study techniques that are commonly used are lower order learning and the main

reason is because lower order learning is much much easier to do it requires pretty much no real effort whatsoever and therefore it's the most common method of learning that people tend to revert to we go a little bit higher and we're starting to see how information can be applied and related specifically to maybe one or two other concepts so at a middle level of learning we're starting to apply the information to contexts that are different to how we initially would have learnt it if it's a maths or an engineering problem we're able to change some

of the variables we can maybe mix and match some of the scenarios and we can apply the information to a real world problem so it's definitely a step up from your normal just isolated learning the next step beyond this is when we're actually starting to create more relationships and groups here we're really entering into a higher order of learning now the information is not viewed in isolation all information that we consume whether it's read or listen to or seen on a youtube video we are taking that information we are thinking about it and we're thinking

how is it similar or different to other information that i've learned or already know or am learning right now how is that different to other sources of information we're finding relationships between them cause and effect relationships form versus function beginning versus end before versus after we're trying to find these different patterns that we can leverage off of and what this does is it allows the information to feel a little bit more intuitive because we know how to think about it now it's not just a random isolated piece of information it's information that actually has meaning

it is related to other things so now because the brain sees that this information is related to so many other things it's a lot more likely to retain it and because as i mentioned before we're seeing it from multiple different angles we're able to see multiple different ways that we can apply this information and how we can combine it with other concepts to apply it in more complex or nuanced ways as a result of seeing how different ideas are related to each other we're also able to group some of these ideas together and we're able

to say that all these ideas actually are related to each other they may serve a similar purpose they may be important for similar reasons and so we can actually start grouping them together into these sort of boxes and we can have groups inside groups inside groups inside groups and it gets progressively more and more organized it's at this level where information really starts to make sense those light bulb moments those points where it feels like it just fits together and we can think about it and it's not about us having just memorized things and recalling

it it feels a little bit more genuine it feels like we really know it and we can approach the information from multiple different angles and that's because each piece of information has multiple entry and exit points lots of relationships going to and from each piece of information so now we have more of a network of knowledge which have these big landmarks which are the groups that we have created for the information and that makes it a lot easier for our brain to hold on to it and directly improves our quality of encoding so study techniques

that facilitate this would be doing things like mind maps where you're really focusing on creating good groups and good quality relationships between them there'll be things like creating high quality questions that challenge you on the relationship between different ideas and then the top here the highest order that we can really get to now we are creating priorities and we are making judgments on the groups and relationships so not only are we saying that we can group the information not only are we able to say it's related but we are now even able to say which

relationship is more important than another relationship we're able to make a judgment call on how important one group is in a certain context versus another group we're able to say we could group the information this way or we could group the information this way there is a relationship between these and so we're having to actively prioritize and so this is the next level beyond because before we're just comparing concepts and grouping concepts but now we're comparing entire networks against other entire possible networks and so our brain is working overtime and all of that effort and

energy is going into deepening our understanding and deepening our memory and so that's going to help us to understand things faster and this is where neuroplasticity kicks in because the more we do this and the more we exercise this type of thinking the better our brain gets at the process we start recognizing patterns in the information our brain doesn't have to try so hard to find the connections and these groups become more and more intuitive and over time it becomes just as easy as your old method of studying but now it's actually facilitating higher quality

and coding and this is how you can train yourself to be a genius it's tough work at the beginning but as you get those reps in over time and i am talking realist realistically uh months to probably more like years but over that period of time you do start feeling that it's getting easier and easier and easier and at that point your brain has literally been retrained to be smarter okay so that's the theory that's kind of the overall direction and strategy that we want to apply so let's now make that a little bit more

concrete with some actual steps that you can take now these steps are ones that are based on my experience working with students and yes there are component pieces of research here and there about how each of these things work and i have other videos talking more about the evidence behind each of the individual principles but it is really about taking all of that research together and putting it into a practical system that actually works any of you who have spent some time reading educational research will know that often a lot of it is very not

practical you'll usually read it and think that's interesting to know what do i do with this information i've sort of taken that and experimented with it with a crapload of students and i've realized that there are some things that are relatively easy to get started and make it much easier to do this retraining process and that's what i'm going to leave you with now so i want to break it up into two different categories one are things that you can do in the short term that will give you pretty instantaneous gains they're not going to

be like game changing but they are things that get the ball rolling and start slowly retraining the way that you think and then there are things more long-term they're sort of the prerequisites to really create lasting transformative change so i do recommend that you do both of these at the same time obviously you can't do the long-term ones after the short-term ones because then you'll just have to wait for ages to see the benefits it's better to start the long-term ones now and then do the short-term ones at the same time so that by the

time the long-term gains are starting to kick in your short-term gains are already there from the short-term strategies okay that's really obvious i don't know if i needed to explain that but okay here are the two different types of strategies that we can go into so the first short-term strategy is just to figure out at what level of learning you are at right now so if we think back to the previous diagram where we have the different levels of learning we want to see what most of our study techniques what most of our time and

effort and energy is going into are we more about isolated information or are we about really expansive big picture networks of thinking or are we even at the stage where we're comparing different big picture networks and entire knowledge structures against each other to prioritize which schema makes the most sense if you're already at the top level probably have a really good memory and you understand things super deeply and you're probably like getting you know the top marks for your respective cohort already to begin with then you're sort of maybe already the person that everyone else

wants to become and maybe you can pick out a few additional tips from here that can help you just edge that up a little bit closer but for most people and this is kind of just the statistics of it most people are going to be down in those lower orders most people are going to be using techniques that are just like lots and lots of flash cards a lot of fact recall lots of rewriting or relearning maybe there's just heaps of past paper questions which is sort of in this mid level where we're applying it

and we're creating some basic relationships between things but it's not really very expensive it's not looking at the entire topic it's usually just like small pockets of relationships that aren't connected with each other in a meaningful way or very prioritized if you look at the techniques that you're using and you think what part of thinking what type of thinking is this activating that will allow us to figure out what level we are sort of on you can have a look at the revised blooms taxonomy or solo taxonomy as well for further reference to just try

to see roughly what level you're at and so the short term strategy is fairly straightforward is number one we just want to go up a level so whatever level you're on start incorporating a few of the strategies at the level above and you might want to start slow if it's really difficult just a couple of those higher order learning techniques and then when you get more used to that you can use a few more and a few more and a few more and a few more and so on and so forth i usually don't recommend

that if you're at a lower order that you jump straight to the highest order and the reason is because it's going to be a little bit overwhelming your brain is not really ready for that it's kind of like being a couch potato and then going straight from there to running a marathon step number one short term we go up a level step number two is to start creating some pre-study structures so when i refer to pre-study what i'm talking about is pretty much any type of studying that you're doing that is before the main learning

event so it could be in class it could be in lectures or maybe if it's a big self-study session that you're having pre-study just refers to any little bit of studying that you're doing that would make that session easier so if you're going to class or lectures it's about what can you do before the class or lecture to make the class or lecture experience more useful so you can extract more learning from it and walk away with it having understood more pre-studying is an effective way to overcome that but most people are pre-studying at a

very lower order level of learning and their pre-study is basically the exact same technique that they would normally use in their revision or you know in the lecture it's like the same thing they're just doing it earlier and that's not an efficient use of time because your brain is not really ready to absorb information at that level of detail what we want to do is we want to lay out a basic organizational structure so that when the information comes in we know where it's going to fit it's kind of like if you imagine moving into

a brand new house and you've got all this furniture from your old house you're not gonna just get the people to move your furniture in shove it in through the front door and just lay it wherever it ends up laying and then walk into your house and think all right cool time to move the furniture around what's more efficient is to have a look at the house look at the rooms and visualize okay i can put my lounge set here i'm going to put my dining table over here i'm going to put my you know

the items in my clothes over here i'm going to put my you know computer over here and arrange my disc maybe in this corner or maybe i'll arrange it in this corner so what we're doing is we're really figuring out where in the house we want to put these items so we want to spend a little bit of time maybe 10 15 minutes learning just a little bit about some of these big ideas so we can at least figure out where approximately we want to lay out the information we want to create some very simple

groups and a really good rule of thumb that i would say is whatever topic that you are about to study and i do recommend it doing it for an entire topic at once rather than just individual lessons because sometimes there are really important groups that of that you can create between multiple lessons and it's just a waste of time to go through listen by lesson and then realize oh you know i should have actually put all of this together because that makes the most sense better when you're doing the pre-study because it's so superficial to

begin with you can actually manage to do like a whole week or even more of content in one go and not overwhelm yourself because you're only really taking a very very superficial slice of just the biggest ideas so take that entire topic and then divide that down into the three or four main ideas and then take those three or four main ideas and figure out what the relationship is between them what is the basic framework the basic backbone that we can build for this information and you'll find that actually this is a pretty interesting engaging

experience your brain is working back and forth and you'll be evaluating different structures and this is a way of exposing yourself to higher rate of learning and just getting used to that if you haven't encountered that before and you'll find that doing this and just working with three or four main ideas makes a really big impact for when you go and actually study it properly if you have a bit of extra time and you're able to do this fairly easily then do another layer so do the three or four main ideas and from each main

idea figure out the two to four ideas that are within them so we might have sort of these sub ideas that exist between them and we can figure out how all of these things are related as well so we might end up with something like that but if you don't have time to go to that level don't worry about it just getting three to four main ideas and seeing how they fit makes a really really big difference to creating some structure in your brain and prepping your memory to receive all this new information and the

third thing that we want to do is start delaying our note taking so a lot of people will write notes as soon as they hear the information but by writing notes as soon as the sensor information comes in what we're doing is we're essentially offloading the work that our brain would have to do to make sense of it by putting it on paper and so we have that sense of security my notes are on paper i don't have to worry but that's not actually a good thing because if we were to hold on to it

in our brain it forces our brain to deal with the information and process and organize it and that's uncomfortable and it's like man how am i going to hold on to this and our brain has to work overtime and that in itself is actually what produces the learning by writing notes straight away we actually stop our brain from having to do that our brain gets a take of rest and learning doesn't end up happening which is why you can go through an entire lecture writing heaps of notes a couple hours later you look at it

and you don't remember half of it that's because the information was not encoded at all in fact it's pretty easy to just write mindlessly without even thinking about it i had an old history teacher in high school that made us write everything for like an entire hour you still always fall asleep in class and i can tell you that i actually genuinely don't remember anything i learned i you know i don't even remember what subjects and topics i learned in this class but i do distinctly remember sitting there writing notes endlessly it's the issue because

if you've been in that experience before and you respect your teacher you may think that that's a good way of studying because your teacher makes you do it i'm in a position where i'm actually working with schools and teachers as part of my job and let me tell you there are a lot of teachers that mean well and genuinely care about helping you succeed but they do not know how learning in the memory works delayed note-taking simply means instead of writing notes straight away just hold on to that information in your head first think about

it process it manipulate it make it your own make it make sense to you think about it maybe ask some questions about it and when you get to the feeling like that makes sense then write the notes in your own words on there it's a little different to paraphrasing because it is happening in our head [Music] and it is not like a mega awesome ultra technique you know it's just for those people that really struggle with getting rid of that note taking chain it just helps them break that habit a little bit more and then

opens the door to a range of other techniques so those are the three short term strategies that you can use and now we have another few long-term strategies that we can use so the first long-term strategy is simply about increasing what is called the cognitive load tolerance this is the idea that whenever you're doing higher order learning better encoding pretty much any technique that is efficient it does require you to use your brain and be pretty active and that can feel uncomfortable it can be quite confusing you go back and forth and you can sometimes

feel like you're not really learning because you're not writing lots of notes but there's actually a lot going up here so it's time well spent as opposed to spending time writing heaps of notes without anything going on in here which is actually a waste of time coding of low tolerance and increasing this means that we're getting more and more used to doing higher order learning we're getting more used to that sense of confusion and we're getting more used to using that confusion to figure out how to organize information it's like if there's a really difficult

problem to solve you know that you're gonna have to really sit there and think about it and that feeling is what is you know the symptom of your brain working uh to really use the information and to do something with it a lot of the time when we're studying we're very very passive and so we're not actually doing anything with the information building cognitive load is a really important and sometimes very difficult step for students that have been used to passive note taking passive studying techniques so if your studying technique is mostly writing notes reading

the notes rewriting the notes doing past paper questions and heaps of flash cards these are all pretty relatively different differing levels of fairly passive so you're not going to be used to holding on to information and processing and manipulating in a higher order building up the tolerance for it is just like building a physical strength you have to work on it slowly over time to just strengthen the processes that allow you to do that so how can you increase your tolerance well actually the short term strategies that i've talked about if you continue to apply

them and you continue to use them diligently they will over time build that cognitive load tolerance cause going up a level increases cognitive load delayed note-taking increases cognitive load simplifying ideas into three or more main ideas and thinking about relationships increases cognitive load so all of these things will improve your cognitive load tolerance and then the second final thing that we're going to give you for the long term strategy is about critical reflection of your technique and what i'm talking about here is understanding what works and what doesn't work and this may seem like a

really fluffy soft skill type thing but it's actually extremely important when i work with the students going through my course a lack of critical reflection is probably the number one reason why people will fail to improve even when i'm literally teaching them the technique with actual examples they will still not be able to use it because a critical reflection might not be there which by the way we actually teach in the course as well how to do it it's just that some people don't feel that it's very important so if you're listening to this and

you're thinking this is not important you may need to listen you may be the one that needs this the most what critical reflection is talking about is being very clear about what particular components of your studying technique or system are working and contributing to higher quality learning and what things are not it might just feel like you're being productive a great example of this that's not about studying would be like time management a lot of people feel that they are being productive by scheduling their day and arranging their tasks except it's only productive if you

execute on that it's not productive if you just did it and then didn't do anything with your schedule or follow your plan so this is the illusion of productivity it's the same thing there's an illusion of studying writing lots of notes making lots of flashcards is not necessarily good quality learning it may not be in your brain so critical reflection means looking at your study techniques and thinking about okay what parts are working why are they working and how can i make it work even better and what parts are not actually contributing and can i

remove that so it's about taking away the parts that don't work and enhancing the things that do work so a lot of the techniques that i teach including the techniques that i teach in my course which can be relatively specific they are drawing on fundamental cognitive processes that we already know were and people may be using components of those systems in their existing techniques but if you're also using techniques that aren't working that's going to overall hold you back one of the things that i always try to encourage for all of my students is to

be very very critically reflective of their system look at all the components and always bring it back to the theory about why things happen and this is a reason why my videos are pretty long and i know people complain about it all the time but i just feel it's really important for people to understand the theory behind why things work because otherwise you don't have the skills or the knowledge to solve your own study related problems you don't know how to improve yourself it's like having a car but not you know being able to repair

it you have to go to the mechanic every single time and what i want is for people to be there the mechanic of their own brain if you understand the theory you can take a studying problem and think okay why might my technique not be working in some situations and then draw that back to a solution that can actually help and can actually work these are just some fairly simple strategies that you can start using in the short and long term to help improve your memory deepen your understanding train yourself to be smarter and hopefully

give you a little bit more control over the studying process i hope you learned something new if you did please make sure to leave a like and a comment if you enjoy this type of content and you want to see more then i'd appreciate if you leave a subscribe as well thanks for your attention and i'll catch you next one [Music]