Speaker 1: If you clicked on this video, because you know that studying is about 50% memorizing and not just understanding things like your teachers keep telling you, then you're in the right place. Because throughout my undergrad and postgraduate degrees, and now at med school, I've memorized tens of thousands of random facts for exams. And I didn't just use active recall and spaced repetition, I used a better method that helped me become a top 2% med student. And it's called the atomic method. And it helps me memorize a lot faster so that I have enough time left in the day for other things in my life. So I'll give you three very simple step by step parts to help you do this too. So before I get into the whole of the atomic method, I'm going to explain the core of the method first, which is active recall and spaced repetition. Because most people think they know how to use them, but I've seen them being used wrong quite a lot. And I'll start by testing you. Do you remember exactly what I said three sentences ago? Probably not, because you are passively listening to me. And that's how most people try to memorize things. Doing things like rereading the same lines or highlighting bits of text doesn't engage your brain enough for memorizing efficiently. And for exams, you have to reproduce information by retrieving it from your brain. So it's the opposite of passive. And that's why active recalls have been proven to work. It's where you go through a topic, make questions on that topic and test yourself on those questions. And this actively digs information out of your brain, which builds physically stronger connections in your brain to remember better. So as an example, if I had a list of treatments for heart attacks in my notes, I'd make that into a question and do this type of thing for basically everything. So here's a list of some things you'd want to know from your classes or lectures. But you can't do these questions just once, because a model known as the forgetting curve shows us that if we don't try to remember something, we forget that information over time. And this gets us to what you've done as a child, which is spaced repetition. Because what helped you learn language was hearing the same word again and again over time. So now it's when you do those active recall questions at increasing intervals over time. And that resets the forgetting curve so that you retain the information for longer. And you have two choices. The first is doing something I did two years ago where I made a page of questions and notes for each lecture, manually checking through them and setting dates of when to apply spaced repetition. And the second is what I've been doing since then, where I use Anki which has spaced repetition automatically built in. And any automated spaced repetition app works, but I stick with Anki. And to save you from the mistakes that most people make where the questions are too frequent making it overwhelming, or too far apart that the forgetting curve is too far gone, just copy the settings I've used for the past two years in Anki that made it possible for me to remember literally thousands of these notes of mine. So that's the first part covering active recall and spaced repetition. But now you need to know how to effectively use them, especially for making your questions and answers. And this is where more of the atomic method comes in. And I'll start with an example. What do you imagine in your head when I say the words phone or laptop? You won't spell out the words in your head, you'll most likely visualize your laptop or your phone. And this should change how you make your questions in two ways. With the second being something that most people don't do that can double how fast you memorize. So the first is to use images in your questions, because they're a lot easier for your brain to interpret and remember than words. And it makes sense, because back in the tribal days, being able to visualize and remember the poisonous berries from the edible ones was necessary for survival. So if I'm doing a question on the causes of a heart attack, I'll have an image showing the causes so that when I see the question, I'll immediately visualize the problems from the image. So for school or uni, literally just use the images from your lectures, lessons, textbooks, or even from Google. Now for the next point, I'll give an example about heart attacks again. Which sentence is easier to follow? Myocardial infarctions are precipitated by hypercholesterolemia and hypertension, or the risk of heart attacks can increase by high cholesterol and high blood pressure. The second simpler one, right? Because just as how you're more likely to visualize your laptop or your phone from the previous example, personalizing your answers to be more familiar or simpler makes it easier to remember. So write your answer notes in simple form. Write it in a way that you'd speak, or at least somewhere in between. And think similar for your actual questions. Like in an exam, you'd be shown how many marks a question's worth. So give hints for how much you're expecting yourself to answer for a particular question. And at this point, you might be thinking, this sounds like a long process. And a few years ago, it was. But the next thing you should do to speed up this process is to use AI, like ChatGPT, to organize your questions. So after you've made some of your notes and questions, put them into the AI application and ask it to use them as a template for making future questions. So that when you make new notes, literally just copy them and ask it to make questions for you based on your initial style of questions. And that saves you hours of thinking of your own questions. And again, just copy what I do so it doesn't miss anything. Now the final part of the atomic method is about understanding how to go through your questions as efficiently as possible. And it's in two parts. And the second part's going to help you do this consistently without fail. So first, let's go back on the examples that I gave. One was on treatments for heart attacks, and the other was on causes of heart attacks. And one reason why I stuck with the same problem of heart attacks is because they're well-known and not vague like Cotard's Syndrome. And in med school, making sure to learn the bigger topics first is more effective than learning niche content. So when you go through your questions, prioritise your memorisation. Like at school or uni, look at the bigger topics in your syllabus. Make questions for them and do those first. Or pay more attention to what your lecturer or teacher seems to emphasise the most. Because that's what's more likely to come up in exams. And that follows the 80-20 principle that 80% of the important information is in 20% of the content. And as a bonus, try to memorise similar topics one after the other. Like if I've learnt about heart attacks, I'd then go into other heart problems like heart failure because that reinforces a web of connections which helps retain information. So in your syllabus, go through the higher-yield subtopics underneath a general topic heading together. And now you need the mental energy to do these questions regularly as part of the spaced repetition system. So that you keep resetting the forgetting curve to retain all that information. And what helps with this is structuring your studying to be as effortless as possible. Because how many times have you sat down to study, but what you're trying to learn takes too much effort to remember, so you just give up. And that's because it takes a lot of effort to learn something new when your brain isn't properly warmed up. So what you should do is, after you've had a few days of doing questions, and the same ones come up again as part of the spaced repetition system, start by reviewing what you've already done first. Because questions or facts you've already seen have a lower activation energy for your brain to get into the studying mindset. So by the time you get to the new information, you're ready for deep work. But there is another big problem that basically everyone has when it comes to memorising. And it's that it does get boring pretty quickly. So it's hard for you to focus for too long. So in this video here, I talk about how I can focus straight away and maintain that focus for hours. So click the video so that you can do this too.