The Read And Recall Technique - Learn Everything You Study

hi everyone this is Tom and in this video I want to talk to you about a technique I've been using for many years to really help me study and remember information that I'm reading and this technique is called read and recall i've used a different name for it in the past called effortful reading but uh when I did a kind of survey at some of my courses the the one that people really liked for this name was read and recall so we're sticking with that so what is read and recall well it's an alternative uh

method for learning information this is really the thing that you should be doing when you take your textbooks to the library when you when you've got your study resources and you're taking them to to study this is how you should absorb the content and remember it it's an alternative to either casual reading meaning you have your book and you're just sat on the sofa casually reading through it you're in the bath it's at nighttime whatever it is you're just casually reading hoping that the information will somehow absorb into your brain this is the alternative what

we're trying to do with read and roll call is get it to stick to stick i don't know if you found this when you casually read through something then an hour or two later you think back what was those details that I I was reading through and you just can't remember it or you're going to like an anatomy lecture or a class or a small group session you've read through the content then when you're in the actual session you can't remember anything that you read through which can be very frustrating so reading recall is an

alternative to this casual reading that doesn't work it's also an alternative to note takingaking so people uh have this thing where they take a textbook and then they have their own they've got a textbook on one side and they've got their notepad on the other side and they're basically copying out the information from the textbook to the notepad so it's like a passive process of transferring information and they're creating their set of notes what's the point of this set of notes well the set of notes is then just what you copied it from so all

you've done is recreate a new resource and at some point you're going to have to learn from that new resource but people end up with this crazy thing where they take a textbook they make their set of notes then they make a set of notes on their set of notes then they make a set of notes on that set of notes so they have this kind of like inception uh process of more and more note takingaking we're not making notes with this system we're trying to learn the information straight from the textbook so here we

are learning rather than creating so learn don't create when you sit down to study stuff try to learn it don't try to create a new resource when it comes to the exams when you're sat in your exams or you're seeing patients or you're trying to apply that information you all you have is what you've learned you don't have your set of notes ready for you then the third thing it replaces is this process of kind of highlighting or putting little stickers on or kind of taking the textbook you going through with a highlighter to highlight

keywords what you're not trying to this is not for your future self to learn what we're trying to do here is learn now so when you go through a textbook and you're highlighting key words what you're doing there is just pointing out stuff to your future self so that when you go through that textbook again you kind of straight to the highlighted words and so what what you're doing is kind of assuming that your future self is going to be better at learning stuff than you are what you're trying to do with read and recall

is learn right this moment not highlight something for future Tom or future Sally or whoever it is to learn you're trying to actually learn it right now present Tom is trying to learn it so that it's stuck in the brain so this is the kind of what read and recall is replacing so let's go through the aims of read and recall so the aims are number one to learn it now you want to learn the information right now you don't want future Tom or future whoever it is to learn the information present Tom needs to

learn this information right this moment in the library so that when I sit the exams I'll have that retained second thing is to retain the information long-term so if you just passively read something for the next 5 minutes you might retain that information in your shortterm memory but what read and recall aims to do is transfer it to your long-term memory so you retain it over the long term instead of just a real short-term effect that then fizzles out and a week later you can't remember what you read the third aim is to understand the

information so really to gain a a a good understanding and a picture of it rather than just taking very specific key points or drilling facts like you might do with a multiple choice question question bank where you're just or with like an Anki set of flash cards so if you're just using Anki and you're just drilling these key facts you don't understand the bigger picture with read and recall you're trying to understand how everything fits together and the fourth thing is to get the key words to stick so you're learning the vocabulary you want to

retain that v vocabulary long term so you can use it in the future so let's move on to the next point which is why it works so this is the key principles behind or the kind of psychological theory or the evidence behind why it works and I've been using read and recall since my GCSEs long before I did any sort of scientific research long before I did my psychology degree or my medical education degree and I didn't know why it worked at the time i just knew intuitively that it was working and everybody that I've

kind of in uh given this technique to has found it very beneficial and found that it's worked but actually there's some key principles that have been proven in the scientific literature and the psychological research that that show why it works number one is a process called active retrieval or the testing effect so when you get your brain to retrieve information that's how you put that information into your long-term memory so people think that creating memories is is done through absorbing the information but actually creating memories is done through retrieving the information um if you're just

passively absorbing the information it doesn't uh it doesn't actually sink in it's only when you retrieve the information that um it sort of grows and develops and the the um the memory sticks with you so active retrieval is essential number two is that you're practicing so you're practicing getting that information out of your brain when you're in the exam or you're in a clinical scenario and you need to retrieve that information from your memory the more times you've retrieved it the more you've practice that process of retrieving it the easier it's going to be and

the third one is a principle called desirable difficulty what you'll find when you do this um read and recall is that it takes some effort and the more strain you put on your brain the more difficulty you put on your brain when you're learning something the more that thing will stick so you want your brain to be straining a bit for it to recall that information in your memory if you're just passively casually reading your brain doesn't really think and it's important enough to store it but if you're straining your brain to understand the information

it thinks let me store this properly similar to lifting weights if you're lifting very very light weights your your body won't adapt and you won't grow muscles or strength if you're lifting very heavy weights and straining that stresses your body enough for it to adapt and and improve so these are the principles of why it works next let's go through the process which in order to do that we need a piece of paper or blank blank pad of paper and we need your learning material so for this example I'm going to be going through um

I'm going to be going through some information on hemocromattosis assuming that we're going to be learning about hemocchromattosis for this example and we're learning it from the zero to finals medicine book okay so here we've got our textbook and we've got our um notepad and we got some colorful pens just for fun so we're going to do a topic on hemocromattosis so the first thing I'm going to do before I do anything else before I even open the textbook is I'm going to take hemocromattosis and I'm going to write down the everything that I can

remember about hemocromattosis so remember it's a genetic condition i think it's autotosomal recessive and I know it's a problem with iron being too high and I think the test for it is ferotin and there's something about iron studies but I can't remember what what actually happens with the iron studies i think it affects the liver so it causes cerosis see and uh treatment is I'm guessing to remove iron so this would be ke chelation no it's not keelation it would be uh venus section okay so we could say what what else genetic test but I

can't remember what is the gene i'm not sure so here you can see just scribbling down the key things that I can remember probably the things that I think would come up in a uh in a in an MCQ test you'll notice this is not me creating notes this is me just scribbling down ideas okay so first step note down everything you can remember from memory before you even start next step is to open the book and cover up the topic with the piece of paper so you can't see it and then what you're going

to do is take the piece of paper and in order to read it you have to bring the piece of paper down so we're going to read the intro hemocchromattosis is autotosomal recessive yeah I got that resulting in iron overload so we got that there is excessive total body iron and iron deposition in tissues is an iron storage disorder okay cool iron storage disorder so we got autotosomal recessive then you bring the next thing down the human hemocromattosis protein or HF gene which is important in regulating iron metabolism located on chromosome 6 okay so we

we didn't quite manage to get what the gene was for hemocromattosis so it was the human Or was it hemocchromattosis protein protein so that's HF gene so we need to remember the HF gene okay let me cover that up and just remember it for myself i need to remember HF gene human hemocromattosis protein gene and that was on chromosome 6 so I want to remember HF and chromosome 6 okay majority of cases are C282 Y mutations so C282Y mutations okay I need to remember that in this gene mutations are required in both copies of the

gene so it needs to be homozygous because it's automal recessive okay so I'll come back to this in a moment so the presentation at this point we've got a title of presentation so what I'm going to do is say okay presentation so iron overload i'm going to think we've got kind of liver liver disease joint pain because I think the iron stores in the joint remember something about hormone irregularities so am aora in women and uh erectile dysfunction in men uh what else can I remember something about bronze skin maybe the iron goes into the

skin okay so usually presents after age 40 when the iron overload becomes symptomatic later in females due to menration okay later in females menration need to remember that so chronic tiredness joint pain pigmentation testicular atrophy atrophy need to remember testicular atrophy erectile dysfunction amen cognitive symptoms so yeah cognitive symptoms cool and hippatomegaly so big liver okay cool now on to the next bit so how do we make a diagnosis so I'm testing myself now on what I can remember about diagnosis so for diagnosis we need uh iron levels so ferotin and we talked about iron

studies something to do with transferin saturation but I can't remember if the transferin saturation is high or low i'm going to guess high in hemocromattosis so what are the raises causes of a raised feritin ah here we go serum feritin is the initial investigation the causes of a raised feritin are so raised feritin causes we've got hemocchromattosis then we've got uh I think it's an acute phase reactant so it can go up in like infection liver disease and it can go up in like cancers i'm going to guess iron supplements will put the iron level

up okay infections alcohol okay so we missed out alcohol so I need to remember alcohol as one of the causes of a race biotin fatty liver disease I got liver disease and hepatitis C and cancer okay cool so transference saturation helps distinguish between high feritin caused by iron overload the transfer saturation is high and other causes where the transfer saturation is normal okay transfer saturation is high in hemocchromattosis so that was correct and other causes will be normal like liver disease genetic testing for the HF gene and a liver biopsy with pearl stain okay let

me remember that one liver biopsy pearl stain pearl p E R L okay so imagine the pearls of iron in the liver that's how I'm going to remember it an MRI scan can can be good for the liver instead of having to do a biopsy complications um okay let me go through the complications and then I would do that process where I write down the complications and we'll go through it that way and management venus section like we said monitoring the feritin and monitoring complications okay so now we finish going through hemocromattosis at this stage

we close the book up and we go through everything we can remember just like we did at the start so there was a key a few key things hemocromattosis so it's the HF gene human hemocromattosis protein chromosome six and uh the presentation we forgot testicular atrophy um what were the other key things mood changes is okay late it came later in women because of menration what else did we did we remember from there okay so we also got investigations so feritin and high transfer and saturation and the HF gene MRI pearl stain okay let me

just have a very quick note through my look through my scribbles oh yeah there was the C282 Y mutation got to remember that one um an amenorhea erectile dysfunction testicular atrophy cognitive symptoms okay pulse staining that's it oh causes of a raised feritin let's just go through that again ferotin alcohol non-alcoholic fatty liver disease cancer infection um hepatitis C and of course hemocromattosis cool what else have we got genetic so that pretty much covers everything and that's hemocchromattosis done we've been through all the content we needed for hemocchromattosis in the book and we've been through

this so the process is write down what you can remember before you even start then go through one thing at a time noting down everything you can remember then at the end scribble down everything you can remember and now I'm left with these pieces of paper which have got rough scribbles on them importantly these are not notes i'm throwing these away these are these are going in the bin or in the recycling and the next time I come to study hemocromattosis I'm going to go directly to the book all over again and start the same

process again okay so now we've been through the process of how you do it that's how you actually sit down and do a read and recall session there's some final notes and some final things that I want to to discuss firstly repetition is key you've probably come across the forgetting curve if not it's in some of my other videos but essentially whatever technique you use very quickly after you use that technique to learn something you will start to forget the information the only way to retain the information long term is to repeatedly learn that information

so if we did hemocchromattosis today we need to do it again in say a week or two weeks and then again in say a month and by spacing out repetitions and covering it again and again again that's how we get it to stick long term the second thing is don't get stuck you might be thinking after you've seen that gosh this is a very um intensive process and it takes a long time actually it should be quite quick what you're trying to do is keep going and pushing through until you get to the end don't

get stuck on every tiny detail what I would say is keep going if you come across something that doesn't immediately make sense and you can't start drilling it in just keep pushing through the important thing is you will repeat it so if you're stuck on a top on a section and you just can't get that section to stick in your memory don't stay there for a long time just move on and each repetition what you got to do is pick out the key points you want to learn for that repetition so with each repetition pick

the key points that you want to learn on that repetition knowing that you're going to come back to it again and again so you don't have to learn 100% of everything in each study session you just want to learn the key points for that study session and get an overview of everything and an overall understanding of that particular topic with some key facts that you want to remember then you're going to come back to it the next time those key facts from the previous time will probably be quite um you know have stayed quite well

with you and so you can pick out some other key facts that you need to uh really get uh stuck into then the the third repetition you pick out some new key facts and each time you're building layer upon layer of understanding of that topic so repetition is key each repetition stick to some key facts that you really drill into your memory and over time you'll build up a really solid understanding of the whole topic so hopefully that video was helpful try out this read and recall method it's far superior in my opinion to casual

reading note takingaking highlighting the other techniques that people tend to use make sure you're recording your sessions so you can space out those repetitions over time and make sure you're also incorporating uh some testing in your learning so I hope that was useful and I'll see you in the next video which will hopefully be tomorrow