You're Not Forgetful: My System for Memorising Everything

I think you were taught to memorize things wrong since we first start to speak we begin to get tested on our memory I've sat hundreds of exams memorized tens of pages of scripts for theater learned thousands of new Concepts in four years of medical school and while this all looked effortlessly impressive the truth is beneath it all this girl actually has a terrible memory a friend of mine actually made me summarize a full novel to them because they could not believe I'd read it as I could have tell them the name of a single Char

for a place I'd say the main girl her dad the first guy she liked even a medical report of mine from a few years ago noticed and described my clear problem with shortterm memory so needless to say no natural talent in this department but I've never accepted this problem I've always tried to find ways to perform and memorize the way I was expected to in school or university otherwise I wouldn't be able to become a doctor in this process I've read experimented and memorized so much when it comes to the way that our brains store

recall and forget information today I'm going to share all of that with you let's get straight into it firstly we cannot improve our memory without first understanding how forgetting works we like to focus on ways to be able to remember and recall things better while completely ignoring the sorts of things that encourage us to forget and therefore end up not really improving overall and we can't be excused for this for the longest time we used to think that forgetting was this passive process that we either were able to memorize something fully and if this memorization

failed we were left with the default which was forgetting this is absolutely no longer the case in his book forgetting the benefits of not remembering Professor Scott at Colombia discusses studies with zebra fish to describe how forgetting is actually its own very active process it has its own neurotransmitters its whole own Pathways and there are things that can actively encourage it to become activated and to work and this is amazing because it means we can discover and try to avoid those things memorization and forgetting are two separate active processes let's see what for guessing NS

have you ever been in an exam looked at supression and gone oh yeah I know what this is about I remember being taught this but you cannot for the life of you remember the actual answer so this highlights a very important way about how we store retrieve and delete information so the way that memories work in our brain is that they are just not stored in these individual packets almost everything has a cue or a tag attached to it subconsciously or consciously when we're looking for information in our brain we actually go to the CU

first and we look at the tag and then we find the memory that's connected to it in this case for example we might go oh it was it was our history teacher but then there's so many things she taught us so we can't find it there and then we go oh it was it was the bottom right hand side of my textbook but there's so many things that are on those pages and then we're like oh it was Christmas but we learned so many things then so all of these cues do not help for us

to tag and find the information that we need the answer to this question what has happened here is Q overload each of these cues has too much memories attached to them and they do not like this when it happens they start to delete the information connected to them and this leads to the case that we just saw the technical term for which is transient forgetting now there is a very good solution for this which also activates our attentional control system which was described by the daddy of memory Alan Brady which is basically the thing that

grabs things from our short-term memory into our long-term storage where we want to keep them and therefore increases our motivation to do this this is novelty new unique strong cues means memories you don't forget practically what does this mean for your studying when I used to be in school and I was struggling with a topic that I found either too difficult or too dense because it had lots of things to memorize I would drop my textbook which already has too many oversaturated cues and I would go straight to YouTube and watch MIT or Yale open

courses which God bless them they've taken me through so much it's amazing but because this is such a different context I would be watching University lectures on one small aspect of that lesson that I found challenging and therefore this is such a difficult context to my normal classroom teacher teaching that it would create a new cue in my mind if it was a particularly important subject to me I would also read extra books or watch extra documentaries so for this one challenging memory I actually would have so many unique new cues attached to it that

it became almost impossible for me not to memorize that thing because I had six uqs popped to mind every time I thought of it in an exam I would absolutely smash these topics I still remember so much about the chemistry of cloning because of these lectures I would definitely recommend this next very frustratingly a huge promoter of forgetting is learning itself the analogy here is that our brain is not like a hardrive but like a cassette tape when we are putting new information in it we are very often overriding information that was previously there I

was semi fluent in Turkish when I stopped studying it and started French and now I've almost completely lost my Turkish whenever I think of a Turkish word the French one comes to mind this was also replicated much more reliably in a study where mice were made to learn new mazes and the mice that were the quickest and the best at learning new mazes were also the ones that were more likely to forget the old ones the technical term for this is proactive inhibition where there's an interference from previous learning that leads to forgetting you might

have experienced this if you've crammed for an exam and learned new material last minute and you actually found on your exam day that you've forgotten or messed up what you previously knew actually quite well and therefore you perform worse overall in your exam now how we avoid this proactive inhibition is not to avoid learning new things all together but is to be strategic about our cramming if we are cramming last minute very last minute for an exam I would recommend that we never learn new things that we have not learned before because this is where

we are overriding what we knew in the past what we can do instead is cram revise which is learn only the things that you knew previously revise those as fast as you want that's absolutely fine and pray that they're the ones that going to come in the exam and on the other hand if we have a longer time to cram or learn information or if we are learning things that are in a similar field it's really essential to do a mini memorization and comparison with what we knew before if when I learned French I also

revised the Turkish equivalent word I'm giving a signal to my brain that I actually need both of these and can you store them separately and it's much more likely that I remember both rather than overriding and forgetting things from the past before I progress onto the ways to address memorizing specifically I have to say that actually the thing that has had the biggest impact on my memory learning and performance is unsurprisingly the state of my brain itself as I mentioned earlier I should have always known I didn't have an actal talent for memorization because as

a girl in class I would refer to people as the second row on the right and someone would tell them their name and i' would be like yeah that's the person because I couldn't memorize names at all and yet because I was compensating so much and trying all of these strategies I don't think I even realized how bad my memory was and everyone saw my A+ and my theater and all the things that I did and assumed that I had an excellent memory when it came to facts this progressed all the way way into my

University years and it was only recently when I was told by a medical professional that I genuinely have a poor memory that my memory became so much worse now that I found out that I was labeled this way there's a study that shows that young girls that are told that they're bad at spem subjects perform a lot worse than those that are told that they are good at them and I truly believe this is what happened to me and I'm still slowly rebuilding and focusing on improving my memory and overcoming this year or so of

having just really bad memory performance General when you tell yourself that you're stupid or you're less capable than other people or that you're just going to struggle with something you genuinely do end up performing a lot worse my confidence mood and happiness determines so much more about my memory and performance than any other specific technique as much as I love everything I'll be mentioning today I'll probably refer a bit more to that doctor's Le and diagnosis and effect in the end of this video but for now I do want to say that you do need

Clarity and peace in order to study things properly and the biggest difference you can make your academic performance is sorting out your mental health almost half of the on this channel are in some form related to therapy I've been in therapy for years now both both online and in person and I truly believe it is the only reason I am able to cope with making these videos alongside studying a quite an intense degree and dealing with all of the problems both internal and external off my brain this video is a paid partnership with bre help

and I'm so excited to finally have links to give that are related in some form to therapy I'm sure everyone already knows that better help is a platform that connects us to credential therapists for online promote therapy the beauty of it in particular is that you are mat therapist based on your preferences from the get-go if you know what you like I'm a particular fan of family systems and Bower Theory so I can look for that but if you don't know what you don't know they will ask you questions that can get you matched in

the best way it's almost expected that you shop around and you find the best therapist for you and because there are so many available it makes switching the easiest that I've seen anywhere before I could genuinely go on for days about how much therapy has changed my life and how much I encourage it so because of that I've made another separate video which is unlisted on my channel and linked below so if you want to see the reasons that I think people should go to therapy that I do not hear mentioned a lot elsewhere and

also my top tips for either starting as a complete novice or if you've been out of the game for a while kind of what advice I would give myself if I was starting again that's listed in that video below there's also a notion template for free which will have all of the top tips summarized together so if you're thinking about this that might hopefully be slightly helpful I also have a link in my description which is betterhelp.com Philip that will give you 10% off your first month so if you're interested in starting or thought about

this before the sooner honestly the better because of the sure size and reach of the platform better help can remain one of the cheaper options of therapy out there and I've had an amazing personal experience trying them out for a few months actually before making this video so I want to thank them so much for supporting this channel but also for making therapy more accessible which is something that I am incredibly passionate about so back to memorizing now an important reason memorizing is hard is because our brains were never meant to do it the way

that we are expected to JN at the University of Toronto describes that our memories are not there for us to go oh she remember that time but they're there to help us make decisions we're supposed to store what we understand or what helps us understand things to make better decisions this is called conceptual memory but it is not what we commonly think it is conceptual memory can be so powerful because when done properly it also means that ideas connect so well to one another that they end up kind of collapsing and taking less space in

our brain therefore making it easier for us to store larger amounts and volumes of data so how do we actually do this I always think of learning as either being horizontal or vertical and the way that we are often taught to learn or taught things is in a vertical way what this means is that we are given a topic and then we are given details about this topic that come underneath this is a vertical form of things to learn and this is terrible because it remains one discret thing and we just have to learn about

it it might even be turned turned into a mind map but still it will have one main topic and everything underneath it and this is just very hard to memorize all of these details it's super likely that I'll forget one or a lot more of these points here and sometimes I'll forget that the whole condition exists and it will be gone in the sea of endless vertical conditions I have to learn inste I learned things in a horizontal way so let's say I have to learn about retinal artery occlusion I'm not going to learn this

topic I'm going to go and look at one of the symptoms that stands out to me which is painless loss of vision because I know that there's at least least one more type of painless loss or Vision so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one of the characteristics in this vertical list and try to find all of the conditions that have this characteristic and this now creates a whole group of eye conditions related to painless loss of vision all of them connected by this one fact already this is much more logical

I'm much more likely to remember that these conditions exist and when I see them I know at least one important thing about them which is that they are painless loss of vision next as I start vertically slightly expanding with one of them when I see things that they have in common either tests that need to be done either cures that need to be done I create another horizontal layer that connects them with one another and in this way I haven't just studied retinal artery occlusion I studied a whole bunch of things which are all connected

to this very strong visual cue of this whole group this is 360° memorizing because when we memorize things in a book or when we take notes usually it's very vertical it's top to bottom it's never a bottom to top that would be very confusing but all of these conditions exist in this hor izontal plane and there's no beginning or end up or down left or right they're all there together and therefore I can kind of rotate it in my brain and connect it with other medical conditions so it's compressed it's flippable it's expandable everything is

really well connected and I'm much more likely to remember a lot more about these conditions than if I was creating separate mind maps for them or learning them completely as vertical lists the next rate to improve your memory has to do with the immense power of intuition I used to play piano when I was younger and sometimes times I would take a piece of new sheet music to my teacher and ask them if they would let me learn it with them and they might have never seen this before and they just sit down and learn

to memorize the piece so easily even though this was a song they'd never seen it before so I think it's fa non-controversial that experts in a field are a lot B and a lot quicker at memorizing information in that field than someone who is a complete novice now you don't need to spend 20 years to become an expert in a subject to benefit massively from this intuition because this is what I realized I used so much when I was younger in school now there's something I have to admit when I was in school and I

was younger I would really be a lot quicker at learning and memorizing things than other people and everyone would think oh my gosh like she's so smart this is not true it's not true this is not the reason this is not the reason I was memorizing things well the reason I was memorizing things well was because I had less to remember people who were seeing things for the very first time had no intuition no concept of what was happening in their brain as I do for a lot of things had to learn a whole bunch

of information me I'd done prep if I have to learn something I need to learn a tiny bit of it because I know what became before what came after I say oh yeah that's probably where it happened so me learning it is a lot easier which is why I can learn more memorize more and do things in a way that appears to be so smart to other people so let me explain how to do this let's say you have to learn the wars in France in the 1800s if I had to do this now do

not have a clue if I would see a year ad plus- 60 70 years 200 100 years I don't know when that happened so before even approaching this if you want to memorize it well in a logical way because you can use visual neonics but that's a separate topic if you want to learn it well what you can do is you divide the whole 1800s into like 10y year brackets and for every 10 years you write the main thing that happened the main person that was in charge or the main political context and you just

learn this and so when you're in an exam and you have a multiple choice question for example you don't have to approach every new date as though it's just a bunch of scrambled numbers and go like oh is it this one and try to remember what the number looked like in the textbook but you can use this intuative logic when you approach it where you go well it can't be then because then that was resolved and it can't be here because that was way too soon they were fighting about something else so that's the correct

date and this is helpful for exams this is helpful for learning the information because you already have this thing built which does not take that long you can then memorize things a lot earlier because you have this Skeleton on which to link things the same thing can be said for languages before learning a language it's great to just hear it a whole lot because you build intuition and when you're studying it or trying to speak you can sense that you're saying something wrong because your intuition is like I've never heard that that that that sounds

wrong even though you don't know the grammatical rules the way we all speak our native languages fluently even though we might not necessarily be able to tell you why to use that tense or form of a word these things could also be stacked with one another to create crazy efficient memorization and learning when you're creating dates that's a horizontal timeline and instead of learning things about one War what happened in one date vertically you now put it in the space where it can be really flexible and moved around because you have a timeline this is

a visual representation it's a really strong cue because you have to find this information potentially outside of your textbook to build the timeline this is where you're researching and adding external cues the uniqueness to your methods of study the intuition you build make it so much easier to memorize this in a way that your potentially will not forget for the next 30 Years very lastly I eared and OD so much in this video about adding that little doctor's note and about talking about the negative effects that some things that doctors say have to us as

someone who in a few months hopefully will be a doctor themselves I thought in the end it's really important to mention just how empowering or disempowering the story that we tell ourselves can be and how easy it can be to overcome challenges when you don't think of them as challenges and I was struggling with this realistically I should have realized a long time ago that I was struggling with this I have a terrible memory and I never knew it because of the fact that I was compensating working hard at it and believing that I could

do this and I wanted to do this and in this last year it's just been really hard and I I feel like I've forgotten more than ever because I just accepted the fact that I'm worse than other people at this thing this is a huge topic I'd potentially want to do a whole other video on if but if you do want a bit more information about how therapy specifically has helped me with this that extra video I've made below should help and clarify things and also if you're cautious about therapy I know it's really scary

it takes a while to get into it especially when it's online so if you made it so far thank you so much for watching me and I here to the end of this video I hope you have a wonderful rest fore day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye