Speaker 1: The Feynman technique, pronounced fine man, has changed my life. Reviewing every single study technique that I've ever used, this is easily one of the top five study methods that I've ever used. The basis of the technique is that you're trying to explain a complex topic simply. This allows you to better understand this complex topic. The only issue is when I started to actually use the technique, my time spent studying went like way up and my grades went down. Over time, I identified the Feynman technique's fundamental principles, the golden rules. When I started to use the technique properly, I not only noticed a deepening of my understanding, but I also started to make new connections. So in this video, I'm going to give you eight techniques to level up the Feynman technique. The incredible power of this technique is that it's uniquely matched and perfect for every student that uses it. Why is this? Well, the explanations are coming from yourself. So that means your explanations are perfect for you because they come from you. So the first thing I want to explain is what is the Feynman technique? Well, Richard Feynman was a renowned author, physicist, and teacher. And Albert Einstein was actually present during one of Feynman's talk as a graduate student. But personally, the trait I most admire about Richard Feynman, Dr. Feynman, is his ability to be an amazing teacher. I remember when I was doing the research for this video, I was going on YouTube and like looking up different videos of him talking. And I was just enthralled and amazed by his ability to make really complex topics really simple. Hot and cold is the speeds that the atoms are jiggling.

Speaker 2: If they jiggle more, it corresponds to hotter and colder is jiggling less. So if you have a bunch of atoms, a cup of coffee or something sitting on a table, and the atoms are jiggling a great deal in the coffee, and they bounce against the cup, and the cup then gets shaking, and the atoms in the cup shake, and they bounce against the saucer, and the heat heats the cup and heats everything else, the hot thing spreads its heat into other things by mere contact. Because the atoms that are jiggling a lot in the hot thing shake the ones that are jiggling only a little bit in the cold thing, so that the hot heat, we say, goes into the cold thing. It spreads. But what's spreading is just jiggling in irregular motions, which is easy to understand.

Speaker 1: Bill Gates actually reports Richard Feynman as being the greatest teacher he never had. So what are the basic steps of this technique? Well, number one, identify the information. What did you just learn? Number two, how would you teach it? Imagine teaching this information to a 12 year old. And number three, how did your explanation sound? Was it simple? Did you use lots of complex terms? Can you redo your explanation so it's simpler and easier to understand? Okay, so now we know what it is, let's get into actually making it better, making sure we don't mess up this amazing, amazing technique. My first tip is to make sure you understand the topic first. You shouldn't be learning something for the first time with the Feynman technique. You should be understanding the topic before you even go into trying to explain it to someone else. It seems obvious, but I've seen people go straight into looking at the textbook and then just try to come up with an explanation. Number one, you might not understand the information at all, which is not great. But the worst thing is when you start to try and explain this information that you don't understand at all, you're starting to solidify wrong information in your brain, which is a big, bad no-no. This is why I don't use active recall or spaced repetition when I start to learn something for the first time, because when I'm using those techniques, I'm solidifying information that I should already understand. The same thing is true for the Feynman technique, you're solidifying information that you should already understand. If you don't understand the information, you're going to be solidifying wrong information. So make sure you learn this thing first, learn this information first, read a chapter of the textbook, watch a third-party resource video, or have a friend explain it to you. Bottom line, before you even start the Feynman technique, make sure you understand the complex topic first. Number two, we want to focus on long-term retention. So you just read a dense page of a textbook on mitosis. You watched a 20-minute YouTube video on how it works, and then you began to test yourself and draw out the diagrams for the steps of mitosis. And you practiced the explanation three times until you had an amazing, simplified explanation of all the phases of mitosis. Great job. The lamp you've been explaining it to seems to really understand what these different phases are. Mitosis is when cells divide, okay? Bam. Mitosis down. Now we can go straight on to meiosis and the Krebs cycle. No. No, no, no. Don't do that. We want to go straight into that information. You just did so much work on mitosis. Over an hour of work trying to understand and learn and simplify the complex topic of mitosis. You want to consolidate that information and make sure you're going to remember it in the long term. Studies indicate that we lose as much as two-thirds of the information we learn just 48 hours after learning it. We really don't want those one or two hours we spent using the Feynman technique to go to waste. So what should we do? Well, if you know me at all, you know I like flashcards, and we're going to use the magic of flashcards, the magic of space repetition, to make sure we consolidate this information for long-term retention. And I'll link a video somewhere up here about why I love space repetition so much. So this is what I would do. I would use the Feynman technique so you understand the information and can explain it simply. Then I would create just one flashcard that says explain mitosis hyphen Feynman. And on the back, write your simplified explanation of this topic. And again, you should be able to fit that explanation on the back of the flashcard because you've made it so simple that you can understand it. Now you don't have to use an actual physical flashcard. I love Anki because it actually spaces it out based on an amazing algorithm to figure out the perfect time to test yourself with this flashcard. But you can use regular flashcards too. It's all okay. So bottom line, after spending so much time learning the topic with the Feynman technique, consolidate that information onto a flashcard so you'll remember it in the long term. Number three is notes on notes on notes don't work. In college, I used to take notes on notes and notes to try and consolidate the information in my head. I really wish I saw some of my own previous posts or just did a little bit of research on the evidence behind studying because then I would have learned, okay, summarizing really isn't that evidence backed as a good studying method. There are techniques that are so much better than this, like spaced repetition and active recall. But the idea behind notes on notes seems to make sense, right? You're taking notes, you're consolidating the information. It's kind of like the Feynman technique, right? Well, yes and no. The problem with the notes on notes technique is it's inefficient. In medical school, time is tough to come by. So I make sure I jump on any method, any technique that saves me time without sacrificing retention. Bottom line, don't write notes on notes. Number four, choose what topics to do the Feynman technique with carefully. Do I use the Feynman technique on every single piece of information I learn? No, that would be a huge waste of time. And also certain pieces of information are better suited to the Feynman technique while other pieces of information are not as well suited to the Feynman technique. The best topics for using the Feynman technique are big, general pieces of information. For example, in medical school, I really liked using the Feynman technique for obstructive versus restrictive lung diseases. And those are just two different kinds of lung diseases that can be explained pretty simply. However, if I was trying to understand the histopathology of these different lung diseases, and histo is just tissue and pathology is just bad stuff, right? So that means bad stuff in tissue. So if I was trying to understand the histopathology of these things, usually those are pictures under a microscope you would see. So you can't really use the Feynman technique to describe or explain histopathology, right? Because it's pictures. You need pictures to kind of understand those topics. So bottom line, choose what topics to use the Feynman technique on carefully. So now that I've chosen what topics I want to study with the Feynman technique, and I've chosen those topics carefully, I want to make sure I actually put the time in to do the Feynman technique properly with these methods. I want to make sure I'm not half-assing it. Here's the issue. If you half-ass the explanation, you will half-ass your understanding, and you will become a full-ass when it comes to testing. So be a non-ass. This might mean spending a full two hours understanding mitosis or something like that, but it's so, so important. Because once you have the basic framework of what mitosis is, then you can start to fill in the little small things that go into understanding mitosis more deeply. You know you get the cells? Bam. DNA? Chopped. Right in half. You will start to understand the things that make you go from getting a low B to getting a mid or high A. But, if you don't understand the basic concepts of mitosis at all, you won't even get up to a B. You might get a C or a D or an F. If you cheat the Feynman technique, the only person you are cheating is yourself. So take the time and do it properly. Bottom line, spend the time and prepare a simple explanation of a complex topic. Tip number six is avoid jargon and complexity. This is the classic trap of using words that you don't really understand because they kind of sound nice and fancy and they were written in the textbook. So if we were going to talk about a specific phase of mitosis, for example, anaphase, a too complicated explanation might be something like this. Microtubules attach to the centrosomes of sister chromatids and then the microtubules depolymerize to pull the sister chromatids apart to the centrosomes at the respective sides of the new to be daughter cells. Now that was way, way too complicated. I think I kind of know what's going on because I remember mitosis and anaphase a little bit from college and high school, but that's just way too complicated. I was trying to remember all those terms in my head and if I was explaining that to a 12 year old, he wouldn't or she wouldn't understand it. What's a centrosome, a centromere, a chromosome, a microtubule? These are all terms that are way too complicated for your Feynman technique explanation. So if we were to simplify this down a little bit more, a better explanation might be something like the genetic material of the cell has condensed into these things called chromosomes that has lined up across the center of the cell. And in anaphase, these condensed pieces of DNA in the cell are pulled apart into separate sides of the cell in preparation for the cell becoming not one cell, but two cells. The simpler the explanation is, the more likely you are to understand it. So if I was even to double simplify that explanation, I would go even further and say anaphase is when the condensed genetic material or chromosomes are pulled apart to the separate sides of the cell. Isn't that much simpler than that really crazy explanation I said before? Yeah. And I can see it. I can picture it in my head, this genetic material being pulled into separate sides of the cell. The simpler the explanation, the more likely you are to understand it. You can fill in the specifics later with flashcards and memorization and all that stuff. But if you don't have a basic understanding of what's going on, what's going on in this topic, you won't even perform at a medium level on the test. Make sure you avoid jargon and avoid complexity. That's the whole point of this technique. Tip number seven is to use it for real. Once you definitely learn a topic, actually prepare a lecture to explain to other students. In the first two years of medical school, every week we would have to come up with a topic to explain to our classmates. And usually there were 10 other classmates and we were in like a small group and we would have to prepare that topic to explain to the other classmates on like a Tuesday or a Thursday or something like that. A supervising doctor would be present to kind of listen to our explanations and our explanations were graded. So you can bet I wanted to do the best I possibly could on these explanations. Not only because I wanted to get a good grade, right, but also because I wanted to make sure I was teaching my other classmates, my fellow colleagues well. I wanted to make sure they understood what I was teaching them because we would be tested on this material later. And even now, like two years since that time happened, the topics I remember the most from medical school are like topics that I taught in those small mini lectures. The actual teaching seems to solidify the learning in your head. In one study, two sets of students were asked to prepare a presentation, but only one of those sets of students actually got the opportunity to teach to a real class, to a real group of people. Guess which group of students retained information better? Well, they both prepared for teaching, right? But the group of students that actually taught had better retention than the group of students that didn't teach. That's interesting. That's interesting because it seems the act of actually standing up and teaching people what's going on or talking through your slides solidifies the information in your head. So how would I use this? Well, with most of the content, with most of the things you're learning, you don't have time to prepare a lecture and actually teach it to other students. But if, for example, your school makes you teach stuff, or there's one topic that's really, really complex and you're having a tough time, I would do this. I would take the time, create a PowerPoint, create a lecture or something like that, and actually present this topic to other people. So bottom line, try teaching this topic in real life. So tip number eight, and this is the most important tip of my entire video, simplify your explanations so you understand it. This is the most important tip. If at any time during your explanations, you find yourself getting lost or that you don't understand what you're talking about, stop. Just stop what you're doing right there and just rework everything. Go back to the drawing board, go back to the textbook, go back to the YouTube video and see where your explanation got lost. See where your understanding got lost and then redo it. Redo your simplification of the topic so it makes sense to you. When you're at test day, staring at that exam, you're not going to remember the complex sentences that you tried to come up with to sound smart to people. You're going to remember the simple explanations that you said to yourself so you understand the topic. So make sure you make sense to you. Don't be a donkey. As you may know, I talk a lot about studying. Most of my videos are about maximizing your mental performance in some way, shape or form. Whether that means making sure you exercise at a perfect time during a study session or using the magic of active recall and space repetition, my videos teach you hopefully how to study better. And I've been working on something really, really big for a while now. And it's finally here. I've done my first ever complete studying class on studying. And my course is on Nebula Classes, which is a platform I'm creating with a bunch of other creators. And it's on everything I know about studying better. My class has over 100 sources for a reason. I wanted to make sure I was providing you the best possible information from top academic journals. And the result is a class that I wished I had. I wish I had this class when I was starting high school or starting college because it would have saved me so much time and made me score better on every test. And this is a class on how to learn. The course will cover how to get your brain to peak cognitive function to do your best possible work. It will go into specific study techniques that work and specific study techniques that don't work. 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So click on the button on screen or head to the link down below to sign up and you'll be supporting me and tons of other creators while you're at it. You made it to the end of this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was helpful. These techniques really are great. All these studying techniques are amazing. But if we take the time to figure out why these techniques work, what parts of them are good and what parts of them are bad, and how we can actually individualize these techniques for ourself, I think we can maximize our potential and maximize our performance. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you on the next one.