Summary You're Not Forgetful: My System for Memorising Everything - YouTube (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Elizabeth 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, Memorising tens pages of scripts with theater, learn thousands of new concepts in 4
n/a years of medical school, and while this all looks effortlessly impressive the truth is beneath
Elizabeth 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 tell them
n/a the name of a single character or a pace. I'd say the main girl for dad, the first guy. Liked, even a medical report of mine from a few years ago, noticed and described Mike Lea problem with short
Elizabeth to term memory. So needlessly to say, no natural talents in this department, but I've never accepted this problem. I've always tried to to find ways to perform and memorize the
n/a way I was expected to in school or university. Otherwise,
Elizabeth I wouldn't be able to become a doctor. In this process, I've read to experimented and memorized so much when it comes to the way that our brains store for cool and forgets information. Today, I'm going
n/a to share all of that with you.
Elizabeth Let's get straight into its Firstly, we cannot improve our memory without first understanding how for forgetting works. We'd 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 or less
n/a For the longest time, we
Elizabeth used to think that forgetting was this passive process. That we either were able to memorize something fully and if this memo normalization failed, we were left with the default, which was forgetting. This is absolutely no longer the case. In his book forgetting benefits of not remembering professor Scott at Colombia, discusses his studies with Zebra to describe how forgetting is actually its own very active process. It has its own you’re transmitter.
Elizabeth Its whole own pathways and there are things that can act simply encourage it to become activated and to work. And this is amazing because it means we can discover and try to avoid those things simply Memo... And forgetting are 2 separate active processes. Let's see what forgetting moms. Have you ever been in an exam looked as oppression and gone, oh, yeah, Know what this is about.
Elizabeth I remember being told 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 queue or a tag attached to it.
Elizabeth Subconsciously, or consciously, when we're looking for information in our brain we actually go to the queue 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
n/a was our history teacher, but
Elizabeth then there's so many things she told 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,
n/a and then we're like, oh, it was from Christmas but we doing so many things then. So all
Elizabeth of these queues, 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 queues 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 death. Now there is a very good solution for this, which also activates our attention control system, which was described by the study.
Elizabeth Of Memorising Brady, which is basically the thing that grabs things from our short term memory into our long term storage of where we want to keep them, and therefore increases our motivation to do this. This is novelty. New, unique, strong queues means memories you did. Practically, what does this mean for your studying? When I used to be in school?
Elizabeth And I was struggling with a topic that I found either too difficult or too dense because that had lots of things to memorize. I would drop my textbook, which already has too many overs saturated 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 contact Audi watching lectures on 1 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 queue in my mind. If it was a particularly important sub to me, I would also read extra books or watch extra documentaries.
Elizabeth So for this 1 challenging memory, I actually would have so many unique new queues attached to it,
n/a there I became almost impossible for me
Elizabeth not to memorize that thing because I had 6 n cubes top 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 cl because of these lectures, I would definitely recommend this. Next, very frustrating. A huge promoter of forgetting.
Elizabeth Is learning. Itself. The analogy here is that our brain is not like a hard drive, 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 to french.
Elizabeth And now, I've almost completely lost my Turkish. Whenever I think of a Turkish word, the french 1 comes to mind. This was also replicated much more reliably in a... Study where mice were made to learn new maze, and the mice that were the quickest and the best at learning new maze were also the ones that were more likely to forget the old ones The technical term for us is proactive inhibition where there's an interference from previous learning that leads to guessing. You might have experienced this if you’re crammed for an exam and earned new material last minute and you’re actually found on your exam date that you've forgotten or messed up what you’re previously knew actually quite well and therefore you perform worse overall in your exam.
Elizabeth Now how we avoid this proactive inhibition is not to avoid learning new things altogether but is to be strategic about. You’re cram. If we are cram 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 gonna 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 memo 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.
Elizabeth Before I progress onto the ways to address memorizing specifically, I have to say actually the thing that has had the biggest impact on my memory, learning and performance is un unsurprisingly the state of my brain itself. As I mentioned earlier, I should have always known, I didn't have a actual talent for amortization because as a girl in cast, I would refer to people as the second row on the right and someone would tell them their name. And I 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 pluses and my Theater and all the things that I did and assumed that I had an excellent memory when it came to facts.
Elizabeth This progressed all the way into my years, and It was only recently I was told by medical professional that I genuinely have a poor memory that my memory became so much worse. Now that I found out I was labeled this way. There's is a study that shows that young girls that are told that they're bad at stem 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 in general.
Elizabeth 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 determine so much more about my memory and performance than any other specific technique as much as I love everything copy mentioning today. I'll probably refer a bit more to that doctor's lecture diagnosis and effect in the end of this video. But for now, I do want to say they you do charity and peace in order to study things properly and the biggest difference you can make, jack performance is sorting out your mental health. Almost half of the videos on this channel are in some formative to therapy, I've been in therapy for years now but both online and in person.
Elizabeth And I truly believe it is the only reason I am able to cope with, making this 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 BetterHelp, and I'm am so excited to finally have links to give that are related in some form to therapy. I'm sure everyone already knows that BetterHelp is a platform that connects us to credential therapists for online remote therapy. The beauty of it in particular is that are much a therapist based on your preferences want the get go. If you know what you like, I'm a particular fan of family systems and Valor theory, so I can look for that.
Elizabeth But if you don't know what you don't know, they will ask you’re 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. And 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.
Elizabeth So because of that, I've made another separate mini 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 of this or if you've been out of the game a while, kind of what advice I would give myself if I was starting again. That's listed in that video video. There's also initial template for free, which will have all of the top tips summarized together.
Elizabeth So if you're thinking about this, that might hopefully be slightly helpful. I also have a link in my description which is better to help dot com slash but bullets that will give you 10 percent off your first month. So if you're interested in starting or thought about this before, the sooner honest dot be the better. Because of the sheer size and reach of the platform BetterHelp can remain 1 of the cheaper options of therapy out there. And I've had an amazing personal experience, trying them out for a few months be actually before making this video.
Elizabeth 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 Aside is because our brains were never meant to do it the way that we are expected to. Suggestion at the University of Toronto describes that. Our memories are not there for us to
n/a go, oh, she remember that time, but they're there
Elizabeth help us make. I 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 1 another that they ends up kind of collapsing and taking less space you’re brain, therefore making it easier for us to store larger amounts and volumes of data.
Elizabeth 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 tote 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 1 discrete thing and we just have to learn about it.
Elizabeth It might even be turned into a mind that form But still, it will have 1 wing topic at everything underneath it, and this is just very hard to memorize all of these details. It's super lucky I'll forget 1 or a lot more of this 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. Instead I learned things in a horizontal way. And So let's say you have to learn about Retinal Artery effusion. I'm not going to learn this topic.
Elizabeth I'm going to go and look at 1 of the symptoms that stands out to me, which is, painless loss vision because I know that there's is at least 1 more type of painless loss vision. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take 1 of the characteristics in this vertical lists, and try to find all of the conditions that have this characteristic, and this now creates a whole group of eye conditions related to pain loss of vision. All of them connected by this 1 back. Already, this is much more logical and much more likely to remember that these conditions exist. And when I see them, I know at least 1 important thing about them, which is that they are painless vision.
Elizabeth Next, as I start to bot slightly expanding with 1 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 1 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 queue of this. Whole group.
Elizabeth This is 360 degree 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 these conditions exist in this horizontal plane. And there's no beginning or end up or down left or right.
Elizabeth 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 flip. It's expandable. Everything is really well connected and what more likely to remember a lot more about these conditions than if I was creating separate mind maps with them or learning them completely as vertical list, The next she improved your you’re has to do with the immense power of intuition.
Elizabeth I used to pay Piano when I was younger and sometimes 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 I just sit down, I learn to memorize the piece so easily even though this was some, they've never seen it before. So I think it's very non controversial that experts in a field are a lot better and a lot quicker at memorizing information in that field, than someone who is a complete novice. And you don't need to spend 20 you’re to become an expert and a subject to benefit massively from this intuition because this is what I realized, I used so much when I was younger in school.
Elizabeth 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
n/a my gosh. Like, she's so smart. So this
Elizabeth is not... Such. This is not the reason. This is not the reason I was memorizing things as well. The reason I was memorizing things as well was because I had less to remember.
n/a It's People who were seeing things for
Elizabeth 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 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 came before what came after I say, oh yeah, But 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.
Elizabeth In a way that it 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 and brands in the 18 hundreds. If I had to do this now do not have a clue If I would see a year, I'd plus minus 60, 70 you’re, 200 years, I don't know when that happened.
Elizabeth So before even approaching that. If you want to memorize it well in a logical way because you can use visual harmonic, but that's a separate topic. If you want to learn it well, what you can do is you divide the whole 18 hundreds, into like 10 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 scramble numbers and go, like, oh, is it this 1 and try to remember what the number looked like in the textbook, but you can use this intuitive logic when you approach it where you go, well, it can't be that and become 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.
Elizabeth And this is helpful for exams, this is helpful for learning the information because because you already have this thing built, which does not take that long, you can then memorize things a lot or earlier because you have this skeleton on which to link things. The same thing comes out for languages before learning a language, it's great to just hear it's a whole lot because you build intuition and when you're. Studying it. You’re trying to speak. You can sense that you're saying something wrong because the intuition is like, I I've never heard that.
Elizabeth 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 1 another to create raise the efficient memo maximization and learning. When you're creating dates, that's a horizontal timeline. And instead of learning things about 1 war what happened in 1 day, vertically you now put it in the space where it can be really flexible and moved around.
Elizabeth Because you have a timeline. This is a visual representation. It's a really strong queue. 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 cue.
Elizabeth The uniqueness to a methods of study the intuition you build make it so much easier to memorize this in a way that you’re potentially you will not forget for the next 30 years. Very lastly, I owned and odd so much in this video about adding, that little doctor's note and about talking about the negative effects that some that doctors say have to ask 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 dis empowering the story that we tell ourselves can be. And how easy it can be to overcome challenges.
Elizabeth It's When you don't think of of with challenges, and I was struggling with this realistically, I should've 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 this thing. This is a huge topic.
Elizabeth I potentially want to do a whole other video on but if you do want a bit more information about how therapy specifically has helped you 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.
n/a So if you made it so far,
Elizabeth Thank you so much for watching me and I hate to end
n/a up this video. I hope
Elizabeth you have a wonderful day. You kind yourself. Others and didn't beneath everything you think. Thanks. Bye.