Study Less Study Smart by Marty Lobdell
I am not in college anymore but I need to learn new things constantly as they say you are a student for life :P. I was going through my YouTube feed and found this incredible video about “Study Less Study Smart” Please go and check it out, worth spending 1 hour than watching CSK losing matches :(
Here are the notes/summary from this lecture.
Take breaks while studying:
The lecture begins with a story of a girl who tries to study 6hours straight each day. But she wasn’t able to improve her performance and failed. Your ability to grasp things decreases continuously since the time you sat for study. Giving breaks for 5 min for each 30 min to do something fun is more effective and boosts your concentration, trains the brain to study more effectively.
Separate workstation for Study:
So you study/work on bed? or in the hall in front of TV? Well, if you do then you are giving yourself less chance to concentrate. Also your brain is trained to do multiple things in that place. Like in front of TV you will be trained to study and watch TV, in the bedroom you will be trained to sleep as well as study. Train your brain to study subconsciously by having the workstation separate from other activities. So whenever you are at the workstation you will be only trained to study and not anything else.
Concept Vs Facts:
Try to understand if you are studying fact or concept. Remembering concepts are easy but not fact. To remember facts you can repeat those facts again and again Or use Mnemonics (like people use for periodic tables or they use to remember rainbow colours).
On the other hand if you think you have understood the concept, try to explain it in your language and if you can’t then probably you need to do more work to understand it.
Study groups:
Learning in groups improves performance. I have personally noticed it, whenever we try to study in a group, we discuss, we explain, we question, we try to understand it in our language. This activity makes the learning more effective and stores the information for a longer time in the brain. I always learn something very easily when someone explains to me than reading that topic.
Recognitions Vs Recollection:
When you read something superficially and come back to it after a while to read it again, you think you are recollecting it but you are just recognising it. This is what happens when most of the people study just before the exam, they have to go through the sufficiently large portion in a short time and hence in exam they tend to recognise and not recollect what exactly they learnt. Giving enough time for studying a topic so that you can recollect it is a way to go forward.
Learn Actively :
Don’t just read and say I have learnt it. Take note of it, try to summarise it, try to explain to a friend or that matter of fact to the chair :P, write blogs about your learning (which I do), make projects on it etc. Bottom line is give your brain enough activity to grasp the things so that you are learning effectively .
Sleep:
Good sleep is important for health, it’s also important for learning. Prof says, the good sleep time giving makes your learning to last longer in the brain.
Take Notes:
Take notes, I repeat take notes. How can you remember everything that is said in 1hour lecture or meeting? Just after the lecture is done try to extend each point you noted down so that you can utilise those notes in most effectively(that means even if you do it a couple of hours later you will be losing the information about the notes you took).
SQ3R: Use SQ3R for studying textbooks.
So that’s everything I got from this lecture.
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