Principles of Studying

Everything in life is a learning opportunity, yet no one teaches us how to learn. Teachers and parents are always stressing about the importance of education, but no one actually teaches us a specific way to learn. We're all thrown into a sea of knowledge and expected to organize that into wisdom that we can use to change the way we act in the world.

I'll be sharing about general principles of learning, with a focus on studying for exams, but really these principles are scientifically proven to help with learning of any kind. I'm doing dentistry which involves a lot of practical, hands-on components and I apply this exact same process for the practical part of my course.

Hopefully you'll pick up some tips and tricks that will make your study a little more effective and efficient.

🤔 The Power of Active Recall

If you think about it, the way we think, the way we move your muscles, the way we do anything at all, is through electrical input from the brain, carried by the nerves to our entire body. So it seems logical that the way to boost memory is through strengthening those nerve connections. Active recall does just that.

Put simply, the more effort it takes to retrieve something from memory, the stronger that connection seems to become.

What is active recall? Active recall or active retrieval or practice testing (whatever you want to call it) means recalling something from your brain at every stage of the learning process.

How does it help boost memory? Biologically, active recalling strengthens the connections between your neurons. The myelin sheath (the blue thing) around the axons get thicker, which prevents electrical signal loss. The more we test ourselves, the stronger the connection, the easier we can retrieve that memory to get that A+ or whatever it is that we want to achieve.

This concept absolutely blew my mind when I first learned about it. I thought that testing was the last thing to do in the study process, that I should only test myself after learning all the information, but this couldn't be further from the truth. As you will see in the practical part of the course, nowadays, I test myself at every stage of the learning process to see if I really know my stuff, and this cause my studying to become so much more effective and efficient.

If you're an athlete or music performer, the exact same thing happens when we practice our craft. Its common sense that we get better the more we practice something. We may attribute your success to muscle memory, but muscles themselves don't have memory. What happens is, the more we use those neural pathways to practice our throw or our instrument, the better, and more confident we become. We want to achieve the exact same thing using active recall, but this time in our studies.

Learning dentistry requires an immense amount dexterity for extremely precise hand movements. It felt awkward to hold a handpiece at first but the more I practiced (either in real life or even practicing in my brain 🤯), the stronger the neuromuscular connection, and the more control I get over my hands.

🪄 The Magic of Spaced Repetition

There's this thing called the forgetting curve.

The red curve basically shows that if we read something, we forget 50% of it the next day, and by day 4 we would have forgotten 90% of it. To combat this, we need to intervene at a certain point when we are just about to forget something, and refresh our memories. This technique is called spaced repetition.

Spaced repetition is, as its name implies, repeatedly recalling information but at increasingly spaced out time-intervals (e.g. day 1,2,4,8,16). With that, we can transfer information from our short-term memory into our long-term memory.

Active recall is powerful on its own, but couple it with spaced repetition, and you can remember anything for a very long amount of time. Spaced repetition is also the reason why our names are forever seared into our brains, and the reason why I still remember how to fold a paper car even though the last time I folded one was when I was still a kid in primary school.

And when you look at that graph, the rate of forgetting (the gradient of the curve) actually decreases the more we do this spaced repetition thing, so the longer that stuff will stick in our memories.

It feels like a lot of work, and it is, so I personally use a software called Anki to automate this so that I don't have to think about it, and I'll show you my own Anki set up for Dentistry in another article.

Conclusion

Being effective and efficient in my learning has really given me a boost on the amount of information I'm able to consume (and hopefully digest). I've given you a basic idea of how our brains think and how we learn, and hopefully this inspires you to start your own journey of actively improving the way you study.

‌Enjoyed this post? If so, you might want to subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I discover new articles, books, and podcasts every week, and condense them down into a short life lesson or two.

Click here to check out the previous issues ( and maybe subscribe :D )