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## Introduction [00:00] In today's video, I'm going to be sharing scientifically proven ways to study better and remember things better. Okay, let me be honest with you for a second. Even if I give you the absolute best memory and study hacks out there, most of you will probably be way too lazy to actually use any of them. Yeah, I see you looking shocked. This is probably your 10th video on how to study better. You're probably watching this while eating or you're watching a Tik Tok because you're bored. So, let me cut you a deal. I'm going to teach you some study techniques and I'm also going to show you a tool that basically does all the work for you. All you have to do is get off Tik Tok for one second, listen to me, and actually check out the tool. Sound fair? Cool. So, let me introduce you to Recall. Now, Recall isn't just another note-taking app. I mean, yeah, you can take notes and all, but it has other features that's meant to help you remember information when you need it the most, which is why it's called Recall, and I've been using it a lot recently. It's definitely boosted my productivity. It helps me learn certain topics faster, speeds up research, and I really like that the more you use it, the better it gets. And the best part, a lot of the methods I'm going to show you in this video are built into this tool. So, even if you're too lazy to apply any of these techniques yourself, Recall will do it for you. And you should also check out this tool because they're also the sponsor of today's ## Brain fun fact [01:05] video. Fun fact, your brain can store around 2.5 pabytes of information. That's roughly 2.5 million GB, which is basically 46,834 copies of Fortnite. Yeah, your brain can crank a lot of 90s. Pretty cool, right? Well, if my brain has all this storage, why can't I remember anything? Well, that's actually a good question. There's a lot of reasons why we forget things. You know, there's health reasons like bad diets and not sleeping, which honestly explains a lot for students. Uh, and your brain also uses some storage to um, how do I put this? Keep you alive. But what about specifically for studying and recalling information? Well, the simple answer is your brain doesn't care enough to ## How Does Memory Work? [01:41] remember it. What? Welcome to Sloth's Memory Crash Course. If you want to study and remember everything like a genius, you should know a little bit about how memories work. Don't worry, the explanation will be quick, easy to understand, and painless. I think our brain manages memories with a three-stage process. Encoding, storage, and retrieval. Your small brain encodes the information. It stores it, and when you need it, it retrieves it. Pretty simple. Now, your brain has three types of memories. Sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Now, of course, it's more complicated than that. You don't care about memory that much, but if you do, go do your own research, nerd. I'm kidding. I'm also just not qualified to teach you this. I don't know what I'm talking about. I just did a simple search on perplexity. Here's the search results. Right now, for the purpose of studying and remembering stuff, we can throw sensory memory and short-term memory out the window. We only care about long-term memory. Long-term memory can store a lot of information for extended periods from days to years. And we can strengthen these memories with repetition, emotional significance, and having a deeper understanding of the topic. Our goal is going to be to move information to our long-term memory. And once they're in long-term memory, we're going to strengthen them. And that's everything you need to know about memories, at least for this video. Now, it's just going to ask you a few questions. And I'd ## Technique 1: Chunk me up [02:45] appreciate chunking. Now that you know a little bit about how memory works, this technique will make more sense. Chunking is a technique that involves breaking down large amounts of information into smaller units or chunks. Now, the idea of chunking was first popularized in this paper in 1956 by this beautiful psychologist, George Miller. Number It's a very famous paper in psychology and it's now been referred to as Miller's law. The average person can hold about seven plus or minus two chunks of information in their short-term memory. The reason why this technique is so effective is because it lets your short-term memory process this information more efficiently, which means you can take in and remember more information. And since the information is organized in meaningful chunks, it'll be easier to transfer this information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Now, if you're a technical nerd just like me, you can think of this as compression. A lot of you have probably done chunking subconsciously. Phone numbers, the numbers are grouped together, chunks. Your debit and credit cards, the numbers are grouped together, chunks. This video, chapters, chunks. There's chunks every now. Chunking is pretty easy to do. Whenever you're studying, you're going to group the information into chunks. Let me give you an example with programming because this is a programming channel sometimes. Let's imagine you're trying to learn the basics of programming. If you weren't chunking, you might just write your notes like this, just a list of items and their definitions. In this example, we have eight items. Since we're not chunking, your brain is going to treat these items as the chunks. And if you add more and more to this list, it might become too much to hold based on Miller's law. So what we can do to remember more information is we can group them into meaningful categories. Now your brain is going to treat these categories as the chunks. So instead of eight chunks, it's going to be four chunks. And each chunk is easier to remember because the concepts are related. Now the problem is the notes themselves. I'm too lazy to take notes as is. Now you're telling me I have to pay attention and categorize them. You're asking a lot for me. This is where Recall comes in. Recall uses AI to automatically take notes for you. It'll summarize whatever video you're watching, even if it's over an hour, since people like to make such long videos nowadays. And it'll also summarize any articles you're reading, even research papers. You can either have a detailed summary or a concise summary. Now, what's nice about the summary itself is that it automatically chunks them into different sections. And it also tags the summary, and you can change the tags to whatever fits. Now, you might be skeptical on the AI notes, and I don't blame you. AI isn't perfect yet, but don't worry. Recall lets you modify the notes, and it also saves the original text, so you can double check and make sure everything's correct. And another cool feature of recall is that chunking is kind of built into this because if you notice on some of these notes, some of the words are highlighted in yellow and if you hover over them, it's going to show up with a card and it also shows you all the notes you have that's related to the topic. And when you click the card, it takes you to the notes for that concept or word. These are called connections inside of recall. So, if we go to the connections tab here, you're going to see all the connections inside this card. And it also shows you how to create your own connections in the notebook by clicking the lightning bolt icon or typing slash. Doesn't this look familiar? Categories, chunks. See what I mean? Recall has it built in. So, go chunk up your note. ## Technique 2: Brain = Muscle [05:34] Active recall. I'm a little sick right now, so my voice sounds a little weird. A wreck. Okay, so a day passed and it's not getting better. And we're back. Active recall. It's a classic technique that basically everybody has mentioned for studying because it's just that good. And there's a lot of research that supports it. Boom. Research paper. Boom. Another one. Boom. Another one. Boom. Which makes me question, why aren't you using it? Now, active recall is pretty simple. All you're doing is testing and challenging yourself to retrieve information from your memory. Instead of just passively rereading notes or textbooks over and over, you're actively recalling information out of your small brain. You understand the name? Think of it like working out. If you just watch workout videos without ever doing the actual exercises, you're not getting stronger. The same applies to your brain. If you're just rereading notes without testing yourself, your brain muscles are not going to get stronger. Your memory doesn't improve. So, how do you implement active recall into your studying with flashcards? Flash cards are one of the best ways to do active recall and they're pretty easy to make. Flash cards are a two-sided card where one side has the question and the other side has the answer. So, whenever you're studying, you're going to read the question and try to answer it. And once you have your answer, you're going to flip the card over and see if you got it right. Now, flash cards are great until you have to create like a hundred of them. That's where it gets annoying, tedious, and exhausting. Unless you're using recall, of course, they have a built-in flashcard feature. All you have to do is go on the quiz tab and click the generate question button. And recall is going to generate flash cards based on the notes you have, which saves you so much time. And of course, if the flash cards aren't correct, you can modify them. Now, flash cards are a great strategy for active recall, but we can do even better by combining active recall with some other techniques. Now, ## Technique 3: Vibe Studying [07:06] one technique you can combine active recall with is space repetition. Not so fun fact, studies suggest that within an hour, people forget roughly 50% of new information, and within 24 hours, it rises to 70%. And after a week, 90%. This is called the forgetting curve. and it's pretty depressing. But don't freak out. We can actually do something about this. Now, this forgetting curve happens to information that's not being reviewed. That's why you forget it so easily. So, all you have to do is review your notes. Small brain review notes. Small brain, no forget. Pretty simple. But the real question is, how often should you review your notes? And this is where space repetition comes in. All you're doing is reviewing your notes at increasing intervals. So, when you first start, you review your notes after 1 day and then 3 days and then a week and then a month, 2 months, 3 months. You get the point. And when you do this, you're going to dramatically slow down how quickly you forget stuff. Now, the reason why reviewing your notes is so important is because you're literally tricking your brain into thinking, "Hey, I keep seeing this information. It must be important. I should remember this." And when you combine this with active recall, oo, the quality of your studying is going to be so much better. And it's really easy to combine both active recall and space repetition. All you have to do to add space repetition is review your flash cards at increasing intervals. So, review them after a day and then 3 days and then a month, two months, blah blah blah blah. If you're using recall, then you have all those features built in. And it's pretty obvious that this is built into it because the URL says space repetition. The page itself recall review uses space repetition. It doesn't get more obvious than this. And you can see how recall handles these intervals. They have three different types. Immediate review, subsequent review, and then they have incorrect responses. But not only that, recall has this really cool feature that takes space repetition even further. It has a feature called augmented browsing. And you can think of it as a built-in space repetition tool whenever you're on the internet. Because if we simplify how memory works, in order to remember information, you just have to review it. Well, with this augmented browsing feature that recall has, whenever you're on the internet, the words that you have notes on will be highlighted, and when you click on them, your notes are just going to show up. And if you're reviewing your notes, what is that? Space repetition. It's really helpful. So nice. I actually use it a lot because whenever I'm reading some article about data science, machine learning, data structures, and algorithms, sometimes I see some terminology that I know I've studied, but I forgot a little bit of it and I don't want to waste time digging through my notes to find some information. So instead of wasting time, all I have to do now is hover over the word and my notes about that topic show up. It makes it way easier to review my notes and it makes whatever I was reading way easier to understand. I love ## Technique 4: ELI5 [09:27] this feature so much. Have you ever heard of the famous physicist Richard Feineman? Nobel Prize winner. Smart guy. Well, he developed one of the simplest but most effective methods for truly mastering a topic, the Fineman technique. You can combine this with all the techniques we've talked about, and it's a very simple technique. All you have to do is explain a concept in the simplest terms you can. Here's the technique in a nutshell. Step one, choose a concept you want to understand deeply. Step two, teach it to yourself or to someone else. Step three, identify where you get stuck. If you struggle to explain something clearly, that means your understanding needs some work. Step four, simplify those notes and maybe create some analogies. And once you do that, you're going to repeat the process again. But trying to explain something to someone else every single time you want to learn something can be pretty inconvenient or embarrassing. And if you're watching this video, you probably don't have any friends. Well, we can use the next best thing, AI. Now, with recall, you have access to a chat feature. You can ask AI stuff about your notes. But if you want to use the Fineman technique, you can ask AI to rate and critique you based on your explanation of the concept and check if your explanation is correct. And now when you give AI your explanation, it's going to let you know if you did good or if you need to review your notes again because you're a little dumb. Now, another way you can use the Fineman technique with recall is by telling AI that you'll be explaining this concept and to test you by asking clarifying questions like a real person who cares would. It's like having your own personal tutor that won't judge you. I need to touch some grass. Okay, I already know some of you are still not going to use these techniques, which is actually pretty insane, and you probably broke the contract. All I have left to say is just try Recall. Seriously, no jokes, no memes. It does everything for you. You don't have to do much. You press button, you get notes. You press another button, you get flashcards. You can chat with AI that probably knows more than your teachers because they use AI, too. And with augmented browsing, you can always check out your notes whenever you're reading something or watching a video. It just makes studying so much easier. You can try out recall at getrecall.ai or click the link in the description. And if you use the code sloth 25, you'll get 25% off until May 1st, 2025. So, use it before it expires. And if you're watching this video and it already expired, um, sorry. Moral of the story, you probably forgot what this video was