My Biggest Studying Mistake - The Feynman Technique

the feynman technique pronounced find man has changed my life reviewing every single study technique that i've ever used this is easily one of the top five study methods that i've ever used the basis of the technique is that you're trying to explain a complex topic simply this allows you to better understand this complex topic the only issue is when i started to actually use the technique my time spent studying went like way up and my grades went down over time i identified the feynman technique's fundamental principles the golden rules when i started to use the

technique properly i not only noticed a deepening of my understanding but i also started to make new connections so in this video i'm going to give you eight techniques to level up the feynman technique [Music] the incredible power of this technique is that it's uniquely matched and perfect for every student that uses it well why is this well the explanations are coming from yourself so that means your explanations are perfect for you because they come from you so the first thing i want to explain is what is the feynman technique well richard feynman was a

renowned author physicist and teacher and albert einstein was actually present during one of feynman's talk as a graduate student but personally the trait i most admire about richard feynman dr feynman is his ability to be an amazing teacher i remember when i was doing the research for this video i was going on youtube and like looking up different videos of him talking and i was just enthralled and amazed by his ability to make really complex topics really simple hot and cold is is the speeds that the atoms are jiggling if they jiggle more it corresponds

to hotter and colder is jiggling less so if you have uh a bunch of atoms a cup of coffee or something sitting on a table and the atoms are jiggling a great deal in the cork and they bounce against the cup and the cup then gets shaking and the atoms in the cup shake and they bounce against the sauce and the heat heats the cup and heats everything else and hot thing spreads its heat into other things by mere contact because the atoms that are jiggling a lot in the hot thing shake the ones that

are jiggling only a little bit in the cold thing so that the hot heat we say goes into the cold thing it spreads but what's spreading is just jiggling and irregular motions which is easy to kind of understand bill gates actually reports richard feynman as being the greatest teacher he never had so what are the basic steps of this technique well number one identify the information what did you just learn number two how would you teach it imagine teaching this information to a twelve-year-old and number three how did your explanation sound was it simple did

you use lots of complex terms can you redo your explanation so it's simpler and easier to understand okay so now we know what it is let's get into actually making it better making sure we don't mess up this amazing amazing technique [Music] my first tip is to make sure you understand the topic first you shouldn't be learning something for the first time with the feynman technique you should be understanding the topic before you even go into trying to explain it to someone else it seems obvious but i've seen people go straight into looking at the

textbook and then just try to come up with an explanation number one you might not understand the information at all which is not great but the worst thing is when you start to try and explain this information that you don't understand at all you're starting to solidify wrong information in your brain which is a big bad no-no this is why i don't use active recall or space repetition when i start to learn something for the first time because when i'm using those techniques i'm solidifying information that i should already understand the same thing is true

for the feynman technique you're solidifying information that you should already understand if you don't understand the information you're going to be solidifying wrong information so make sure you learn this thing first learn this information first read the chapter of the textbook watch a third party resource video or have a friend explain it to you bottom line before you even start the find meg technique make sure you understand the complex topic first number two we want to focus on long-term retention so you just read a dense page of a textbook on mitosis you watched a 20-minute

youtube video on how it works and then you began to test yourself and draw out the diagrams for the steps of mitosis and you practiced the explanation three times until you had an amazing simplified explanation of all the phases of mitosis great job the lamp you've been explaining it to seems to really understand what these different phases are mitosis is when cells divide okay bam mitosis is down now we can go straight on to meiosis and the krebs cycle no no no no don't do that why would you go straight into that information you just

did so much work on mitosis over an hour of work trying to understand and learn and simplify the complex topic of mitosis you want to consolidate that information and make sure you're going to remember it in the long term studies indicate that we lose as much as two-thirds of the information we learned just 48 hours after learning it we really don't want those one or two hours we spent using the fame and technique to go to waste so what should we do well if you know me at all you know i like flash cards and

we're gonna use the magic of flashcards the magic of space repetition to make sure we consolidate this information for long-term retention and i'll link a video somewhere up here about why i love space repetition so much so this is what i would do i would use the feynman technique so you understand the information and can explain it simply then i would create just one flash card that says explain mitosis hyphen fineman and on the back write your simplified explanation of this topic and again you should be able to fit that explanation on the back of

the flash card because you've made it so simple that you can understand it now you don't have to use a actual physical flash card i love anki because it actually spaces it out based on an amazing algorithm to figure out the perfect time to test yourself with this flash card but you can use regular flash cards too it's all okay so bottom line after spending so much time learning the topic with the feinman technique consolidate that information onto a flashcard so you'll remember it in the long term number three is notes on notes on notes

don't work in college i used to take notes on notes and notes to try and consolidate the information in my head i really wish i like saw some of my own previous posts or just did a little bit of research on the evidence behind studying because then i would have learned okay summarizing really isn't that evidence backed as a good studying method there are techniques that are so much better than this like space repetition and active recall but the idea behind notes on notes seems to make sense right you're taking notes you're consolidating the information

it's kind of like the feynman technique right well yes and no the problem with the notes on notes technique is it's inefficient in medical school time is tough to come by so i make sure i jump on any method any technique that saves me time without sacrificing retention bottom line don't write notes on notes number four choose what topics to do the feynman technique with carefully do i use the finding technique on every single piece of information i learned no that would be a huge waste of time and also certain pieces of information are better

suited to the finding technique while other pieces of information are not as well suited to the feynman technique the best topics for using the find make sneak are big general pieces of information for example in medical school i really liked using the phylum technique for obstructive versus restrictive lung diseases and those are just two different kinds of lung diseases that can be explained pretty simply however if i was trying to understand the histopathology of these different lung diseases and histo is just tissue and pathology is just bad stuff right so that means bad stuff in

tissue so if i was trying to understand the history pathology of these things usually those are pictures under a microscope you would see so you can't really use the feynman technique to describe or explain histopathology right because it's pictures you need pictures to kind of understand those topics so bottom line choose what topics to use the finding technique on carefully so now that i've chosen what topics i want to study with the findman technique and i've chosen those topics carefully i want to make sure i actually put the time in to do the 5-minute technique

properly with these methods i want to make sure i'm not half-assing it here's the issue if you half-ass the explanation you will half-ass your understanding and you will become a full ass when it comes to test day so be a non-ass this might mean spending a full two hours understanding mitosis or something like that but it's so so important because once you have the basic framework of what mitosis is then you can start to fill in the little small things that go into understanding mitosis more deeply you know you get the cells bam dna chopped

right in half you will start to understand the things that make you go from getting a low b to getting a mid or high a but if you don't understand the basic concepts of mitosis at all you won't even get up to a b you might get a c or d or an f if you cheat the feynman technique the only person you are cheating is yourself so take the time and do it properly bottom line spend the time and prepare a simple explanation of a complex topic tip number six is avoid jargon and complexity

this is the classic trap of using words that you don't really understand because they kind of sound nice and fancy and they were written in the textbook so if we were going to talk about a specific phase of mitosis for example anaphase a too complicated explanation might be something like this microtubules attach to the centrosomes of sister chromatids and then the microtubules depolymerize to pull these sister chromatids apart to the centrosomes at the respective sides of the new 2b daughter cells now that was way way too complicated i think i kind of know what's going

on because i remember mitosis and anaphase a little bit from college in high school but that's just way too complicated i was trying to remember all those terms in my head and if i was explaining that to a 12 year old he wouldn't or she wouldn't understand it what's a centrosome a centromere a chromosome a microtubule these are all terms that are way too complicated for your feynman technique explanation so if we were to simplify this down a little bit more a better explanation might be something like the genetic material of the cell has condensed

into these things called chromosomes that has lined up across the center of the cell and in anaphase these condensed pieces of dna in the cell are pulled apart into separate sides of the cell in preparation for the cell becoming not one cell but two cells the simpler the explanation is the more likely you are to understand it so if i was even to double simplify that explanation i would go even further and say anaphase is when the condensed genetic material or chromosomes are pulled apart to the separate sides of the cell isn't that much simpler

than that really crazy explanation i said before yeah and i can see it i can picture it in my head this genetic material being pulled into separate sides of the cell the simpler the explanation the more likely you are to understand it you can fill in the specifics later with flashcards and memorization and all that stuff but if you don't have a basic understanding of what's going on what's going on in this topic you won't even perform at a medium level on the test make sure you avoid jargon and avoid complexity that's the whole point

of this technique tip number seven is to use it for real once you definitely learn a topic actually prepare a lecture to explain to other students in the first two years of medical school every week we would have to come up with a topic to explain to our classmates and usually there were 10 other classmates and we were in like a small group and we would have to prepare that topic to explain to the other classmates on like a tuesday or a thursday or something like that a supervising doctor would be present to kind of

listen to our explanations and our explanations were graded so you can bet i wanted to do the best i possibly could on these explanations not only because i wanted to get a good grade right but also because i wanted to make sure i was teaching my other classmates my fellow colleagues well i wanted to make sure they understood what i was teaching them because we would be tested on this material later and even now like two years since that time happened the topics i remember the most from medical school are like topics that i taught

in those small mini lectures the actual teaching seems to solidify the learning in your head in one study two sets of students were asked to prepare a presentation but only one of those sets of students actually got the opportunity to teach to a real class to a real group of people guess which group of students retained information better well they both prepared for teaching right but the group of students that actually taught had better retention than the group of students that didn't teach that's interesting that's interesting because it seems the act of actually standing up

and teaching people what's going on or talking through your slides solidifies the information in your head so how would i use this well with most of the content with most of the things you're learning you don't have time to prepare a lecture and actually teach it to other students but if for example your school makes you teach stuff or there's one topic that's really really complex and you're having a tough time i would do this i would take the time create a powerpoint create a lecture or something like that and actually present this topic to

other people so bottom line try teaching this topic in real life so tip number eight and this is the most important tip of my entire video simplify your explanations so you understand it this is the most important tip if at any time during your explanations you find yourself getting lost or that you don't understand what you're talking about stop just stop what you're doing right there and just rework everything go back to the drawing board go back to the textbook go back to the youtube video and see where your explanation got lost see where you're

understanding right got lost and then redo it redo your simplification of the topic so it makes sense to you when you're at test day staring at that exam you're not going to remember the complex sentences that you tried to come up with to sound smart to people you're gonna remember the simple explanations that you said to yourself so you understand the topic so make sure you make sense to you don't be a donkey as you may know i talk a lot about studying most of my videos are about maximizing your mental performance in some way

shape or form whether that means making sure you exercise at a perfect time during a study session or using the magic of active recall and space repetition my videos teach you hopefully how to study better and i've been working on something really really big for a while now and it's finally here i've done my first ever complete studying class on studying and my course is on nebula classes which is a platform i'm creating with a bunch of other creators and it's on everything i know about studying better my class has over 100 sources for a

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you'll be supporting me and tons of other creators while you're at it you made it to the end of this video i hope you enjoyed it i hope it was helpful these techniques really are great all these studying techniques are amazing but if we take the time to figure out why these techniques work what parts of them are good and what parts of them are bad and how we can actually individualize these techniques for ourself i think we can maximize our potential and maximize our performance thank you so much for watching and i will see

you on the next one you want to hear about mitosis how you doing so mitosis