Study More Efficiently With These 2 Basic Steps

okay so um encoding and uh increasing that long-term memory not being over reliant on space repetition and active recall here's how you do it for those that are new my name is dr justin i'm a medical doctor a learning coach and i help students learn to learn if you haven't watched my video on the problem to do with active recoil and space repetition and this thing called encoding versus retrieval and the idea of cognitive load and all of that sort of stuff you definitely want to check that out first otherwise this video isn't gonna make

as much sense for those of you that have seen it okay let's dive into some of the basics hey it's um future me and someone said that i should do a quick introduction about the points i'm gonna cover and i forgot to do that so in this video i'm going to talk about uh the basic principle behind how you can do encoding and then i'm going to talk about the second point which is to increase your encoding tolerance and cognitive load tolerance because those are two like fundamental fundamentals it doesn't get more fundamental than that

they're like the step zero of starting to do effective encoding what you'll find is that i don't talk about specific like techniques like step one step two step three do this like write your notes like this so you're probably going to have questions like how do i write my notes or what do i do for this subject or what i do for this subject and the reason that i didn't cover that is because there's like literally hundreds of different variations of this and so it's better for me to just teach you the principle if it

abides by the principles that i talk about in this video it's probably gonna be okay-ish if it doesn't abide by these principles then it's definitely not okay but again i've got other videos that i'll post up about you know more specific techniques and examples and this is really just that first step introduction into the basics of encoding which i hope to just build on in future videos anyway back to the actual thing before we really start uh it is important to realize that encoding techniques are not easy by nature like literally by definition right encoding

involves cognitive load and cognitive load naturally feels uncomfortable naturally feels confusing so if you are using an encoding technique especially a new one that you haven't tried before and you're finding that it's hard to wrap your head around and you're just like generally a little lost that's actually completely normal in fact if you didn't feel that it probably means you're doing it wrong so a lot of students will use an encoding technique the first time they'll give it a go and they feel this and then they back off they will give up they'll say hey

it's not working for me i'm not getting those results the results do not come immediately it's kind of like training your muscles it's kind of like learning to play an instrument it takes time to develop the skill for some people that's only a few days for some people it's only a few hours but for most people that that's around a month to two months and that that can be a little bit daunting but i do promise that the the result pays off so how do we do this whole encoding thing there are a lot of

different techniques that you can use to encode but every single encoding technique has to sort of follow a few basic principles and i'm gonna drive them down to just two okay so the first step is understanding about different orders of learning there are low orders of learning and there are higher orders of learning deep processing higher encoding this happens a lot more when we're at the higher order of learning so encoding is really only happening when you have clear organizational structure in your brain what that means is that you not only know what the information

is but you know how it fits in there is a way of navigating this information in your brain that makes intuitive and logical sense there usually isn't a lot that relies on you having memorized things like memorize different groups of anything it's usually pretty logical and so someone that has done a high level of encoding when they explain something it sounds very simple and you can often get that feeling of like wow i never thought of it that simply before and then you can do the classic kind of explaining it to a five-year-old or explaining

it to a 10 year old and that is a sign generally of someone having a higher order of learning so how do we know what higher order learning is there are two different frameworks that we can use to understand this the first one is called bloom's taxonomy and as you can see the lower order learning is really the stuff at the bottom levels the remembering and the understanding a lot of people will say that just memorizing something is not real learning understanding is when you're getting real learning that's not true because understanding something is still

very isolated when we're doing good encoding we never want information to be isolated every single thing that you consume every information that comes into your sensory memory that you shunt into your working memory again if this is foreign to you check out that other video that i mentioned before all of that stuff in our working memory that's gonna be forgotten in seconds we've got seconds so in the in the seconds that that information is in our working memory that's our opportunity to encode it into our long-term memory if we miss that window we're wasting time

so we can't just consume information first and then settle on it and then consolidate it and then try to encode it afterwards by then it's already late we've already put it into kind of like a a memorization box we're already sort of looking at it in terms of stuff to wrote learn through repetition and what i found is that students that are generally pretty heavy with the rote learning or the memorization if they don't follow this right order then they are so pulled into their previous habit of just rote learning that it's it's very very

very difficult to break out of and certainly will waste a lot of time so step number one as soon as possible we want to just jump to higher order learning and that is something like applying but more so things like analyzing and evaluating the ideas so here's how we work up the ladder and i want you to think about where you spend most of your time thinking again we want to be at those higher levels not just in general but as early as possible okay that's that's the key so the lower level is about remembering

this is just like recalling facts and individual details the next level is about understanding if you understand it you can explain it the next level above this is applying so this means solving problems but the problems are usually pretty concept specific like isolated problems testing on just individual concepts and then we have analyzing so analyzing is the first point at which we're starting to take ideas and bring them together and comparing them against each other so it's not just about having one idea and then just understanding that idea really really well and focusing on understanding

that idea and you'll hear me talk about this in a lot of other videos as well it's about taking that idea and then looking at it in relation to another idea and comparing and contrasting between them but not just one or two but multiple different ideas and seeing their relationships between them and then the next step evaluating this is about not just comparing and contrasting the ideas but it's about figuring out how we can judge them how we can prioritize them so we might know that we have three concepts that are related to each other

concept a concept b concept c and we know that there is a relationship here evaluating would be saying okay which of these relationships is actually the most important is it this one here or is it is it this relationship that's the most important or is it kind of like okay a that leads to b and then a and b together combined lead to c is that the nature of the relationship so when you're analyzing you may have an understanding that there is a relationship you may get an idea that they are connected that they are

related to each other that they exert some kind of influence but when you're evaluating it means that you understand it much more deeply you're very explicit you're very clear about what the nature of that relationship is and how important it is in the in the big picture in the grand scheme of things so i want you to start trying to find the similarities essentially doing that level five thinking of uh evaluating or analyzing the information with this next part so another taxonomy that we can use apart from blooms is solo taxonomy and i personally like

this one a little bit more so if you think about this one this part where we're actually saying that the ideas don't exist in isolation anymore but we actually sign a c the connections between them we're getting this in this kind of relational type of learning but then when we actually start implementing the bigger picture we have an understanding of its significance with the bigger picture that's now activating higher order learning so in order to do correct encoding we always need to try to relate the information to each other and to the bigger picture so

we're always trying to relate the information to each other and to the bigger picture now for some people this is actually an automatic process that they'll do students that are already pretty good at encoding they will naturally do this but i found that a lot of the time this process goes sort of subconscious and they will sort of flick in and out of this method of thinking what i'm saying is that it's actually possible very possible like this is legitimately kind of one of the core principles of a lot of the techniques that i teach

is the idea that you don't actually need to really spend much time at all on the lower levels of thinking you don't really need to try to memorize or try to understand something now you're thinking justin how am i going to evaluate and analyze and get an understanding of the big picture of something without even knowing what it is like how without understanding something how will i be able to do that and the answer is that you can't you can't do that and that's the point your brain will automatically will automatically fill in the lower

order levels of thinking so the idea here is that you set your goal your focus your objective is to do the higher order thinking as early as possible by doing that your brain will automatically do the memorizing and the understanding and the application of it on the way there without you even trying to do that and the benefit of this is that because you have the big picture in mind the information naturally becomes more organized because if you were to do it step by step if you were to take each individual piece of information sensory

memory into your working memory you say okay i'm gonna memorize this okay now i'm gonna try to understand it more deeply okay now i'm going to try to apply this and then i'm going to try to see how it fits in the big picture if you were to do that then each piece of information is being consumed individually and it's isolated and at that point remember we've got seconds to encode it from our working memory to our long-term memory at that moment we have decided that we are going to look at it in isolation first

and already our organizational structure is starting off on the wrong foot so now we have to spend time to unlearn the way that we had organized it and then find another way to organize it afterwards so it's kind of like if you have a really messy room it's like putting all of your stuff in there first and then going into your messy room and saying okay let's clean it up it actually makes more sense to take each individual item look at all the other items you need to put into your room think okay i can

see that i've got a lot of stationery i probably need to find a way to organize that station area in my room so if you're thinking about this to begin with when you pick up your pencil then you know where it's going to go so it's organized to begin with it takes a little bit longer to process through the information the first time around but it's it's much incomparably faster and it saves you a lot of time because that information is encoded straight away and you'll find that retention can be 80 90 i mean i've

got some of the students on my course that are saying that their retention is like 90 plus after two three weeks of not even having looked at it again and that's far above the uh what the research says is is the just generally accepted norm of around forty to sixty percent sort of fifty percent area so that's the first thing okay that's the first thing so let me just really quickly summarize that is that in order to do coding you have to you have to try to organize the ideas in relation to the big picture

and you do this by comparing the ideas against each other and against the big picture and creating an actual organizational system so each piece of information knows where to fit so every technique that you use should try to leverage off that that means you're not just reading something and just writing notes on it you shouldn't be doing that if you read something and just write notes on it straight away then you're not letting your brain figure out how to organize it first you should never really be committing anything you know into your notes or anything

like that until you've figured out a way to organize it in relation to other concepts and in relation to the bigger picture right so we're always looking for those relationships we're always looking to build big picture relevance now it sounds simple and for some of you it truly will be simple and for those of you you're probably already a pretty good academic achiever yourself this part of the message is really for those students that are listening that will struggle with this and this is the statistical majority vast majority of students even some high achieving students

especially in the high school level they're high achieving because they're relying on repetition but this is a completely different method of thinking so you could be a very high achiever but you may actually still be not that good at encoding uh and then what you'll find is that as the information gets harder and harder this repetition-based learning becomes less and less sustainable like like i talked about in my last video so for those of you that are struggling with this method of thinking just remember what i said before is that it is a skill you

do need to you know practice it and that confusion of thinking how does this fit how does it come together where does it connect can i organize it this way or maybe i can organize it this way instead all of that is good that that's learning that's good cognitive load being used and that's actually directly contributing to improving your memory and i'll be releasing several videos coming up as well where i go through actual examples of subjects where i go through and and you'll see what i mean by this comparison and the relationship and you'll

see the areas where you might struggle so i've got a bunch of videos coming up on that let me say it again i've got videos of examples coming up all right i'm doing my best to try to cover the material as best as i can in this format but youtube is honestly not a great format for delivering stuff that is like pretty sequential and uh like has you know a pretty specific structure in terms of how i need to teach it so that's the first thing the second thing is a much uh smaller point and

this is just something that's going to help you do that first thing which is you need to start training your cognitive load tolerance you need to start becoming more and more familiar with the idea of keeping information in your brain when you when you're writing notes you will get the sensation that as soon as you've written notes about it there's a sort of burden that's been lifted from your mind you can kind of breathe a little bit easier you can probably relate to this feeling that's not necessarily a good thing and this again is pretty

nuanced because it can be good sometimes and it might not be and again i've got videos on that coming up as well but as a rule of thumb if you're someone that generally writes notes in a very linear format and by linear what i mean is that your notes kind of just look like this you might have some bullet points in there as well but they're pretty pretty linear you might be typing them you might be using an app like notion or something the idea is that all of these ways of writing notes are linear

and they're usually quite wordy so this method of writing notes is not very effective for a number of different reasons and if you're doing it that way already you probably have a habit of reducing your cognitive load and offloading it into your notes and that's that's not a good thing because it means that yes you've got a record of it but you're not actually encoding it so that again is going to create future work for yourself and repetition is going to end up wasting a lot of time what you want to do is you want

to get into the habit of slowly increasing your cognitive load capacity so if you're finding it really really difficult if you tending to write a lot of notes just practice reading something or listening to something and instead of writing notes straight away get into the habit of just holding on to that information a little bit more taking in a little bit more information and asking yourself the questions how does that relate to what i just learned and then how does that relate to the big picture ask yourself these questions and as you do this more

and more you will start to be able to hold on to more and more information at a time to a certain point where you'll be able to really read for 15 20 30 minutes without writing any notes at the end of it you can put down a very highly organized beautifully processed set of notes and people will look at you and think man how did you actually do that and that takes time and it takes practice but slowly graduate gradually just trying to expand your tolerance for cognitive load is very very important skill most of

the more advanced encoding techniques require you to be able to have require you to tolerate a certain level of cognitive load uh to be able to do it at all if you don't have a certain level of tolerance a lot of these techniques are just completely impossible so this is something that you're going to need to develop as like a very fundamental skill for any and reasonably even intermediate encoding techniques from this we'll be able to build on this we'll be able to incorporate things like chunking we'll be able to use non-linear note taking like

mind maps we'll be able to bring them together into something that i call chunk mapping which is a very specific variation of mind mapping that facilitates this chunking process optimally we'll be able to start layering in a lot of other techniques like more interleaving micro learning we'll see how flash cards can fit into this system we'll see how we can do our space repetition in a healthy and productive way we'll learn how to add on memorization techniques that supplement this just like rote learning techniques to fill in any other gaps we can look at revision

techniques all of these things we can start layering on but we can't do any of that unless we patch the hole in the bucket right we can't we can't do anything else until that hole in the bucket is already at least reasonably patched and that means we need to start getting a system where our encoding is relatively high and we're not forgetting things quite as quickly the first time we learn it and this is a process that again it will take you some time but i also promise that it will contribute uh and help you

and and benefit you for those of you that struggle with the idea of like comparing and thinking about the big picture if you find that you've got way too many relationships way too many connections and it's just overwhelming then what i'd suggest is that you take it down a notch first think about applying the information first so we know that applying the information is not quite as good as that high level evaluation where we're comparing and contrasting and prioritizing different ideas but it's still a lot better than just the memorization and understanding so if you

think about taking information in and just thinking how can i apply this how can i apply this and you focus on that that will increase your tolerance a little bit when you're good at that then you can bring it up to the next level all of the stuff that i've just talked about that i've only briefly mentioned i have plans to make videos on all of that and i've got a lot of examples that i can work through stuff that my students have sent me where there are very common mistakes and issues that are found

that i think you'll find very helpful i've got all this footage i just need to sit down and edit them because again youtube is not my full-time thing the the teaching students how to learn that's my full-time thing this is just something that i do when i have the time and space to be able to do it so that stuff is coming out if you do want to see again that step-by-step process then feel free to check out the course that i've got where i go through all of this sort of stuff and more and

all the examples all of that stuff you can learn a little bit more about that if you check the link in the description as well or you can just simply wait for my next big batch of videos to come out hopefully you enjoyed this if you did please leave it a like if you have any questions anything you want to clarify as always leave a comment do my best to try to answer them as long as they are relatively respectful anyway thanks for listening and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you