NARRATOR: I spent over a decade studying to become a doctor, and believe it or not, until recently, I had no idea how to learn. In college, I had heard horror stories about pre-meds studying all day and having no life, and I was, like, sick, dude. Sign me up. 

I'm just kidding. But I wanted to become a doctor, so I knew I had to put in the work. And through sheer effort alone, studying 10 hours a day, I got into med school. But things didn't get easier. 

I wouldn't say the curriculum was more challenging, but the volume quadrupled. People compare it to drinking from a fire hose. By that math, I needed to study 40 hours a day just to keep up, which seemed hard, but I tried it anyways. And I was right. It was incredibly hard. 

At one point, I was studying nonstop, yet I still failed an exam. I remember feeling hopeless. I was so burnt out. And that's when we started this YouTube channel to explore how to study. And it changed everything. 

The reason most of us struggle with studying is because we don't understand our brain. Honestly, it's not even our fault. We aren't taught this stuff in school. But from obsessing and teaching how to study for years now, I've come to realize that even a simple understanding of how the brain learns can change your life. 

So I want to share how I understand the learning cycle, which I've simplified to the 3 C's. The beginning of the cycle stands for Collect. Information is presented to us from our teachers, books, and lecture slides. It's the stuff that we need to learn. The problem is, most of us don't know how to think about that information when we receive it. 

How many times have you read something, weren't sure what to make of it, wrote it down anyways, and then moved on? By the end of studying, you might feel like it was a win. But just because you took a whole bunch of notes doesn't mean you actually learned anything. Actually, you dug yourself deeper in the hole, because now, when you go through it again, you might be even more confused about why you wrote something down. 

And so the realization I had is that when we collect information, it's not about trying to absorb everything, like a sponge. We want to be a filter. We want to sift through and figure out which concepts are important and which ones are less important. 

One of the best questions to ask during collection is, why does this matter? What's the point here? Or what's the main idea? And if you can't figure that out, don't write it down, because it's not worth remembering yet. 

You don't have enough context to fully understand it right now. But remember, this is a learning cycle. Maybe on the next cycle, it will matter, and you'll collect it then. Just focus on collecting the pieces of knowledge that you can. 

At a certain point, we stop collecting and start working with the ideas that we have. And this is when we move on to the next step-- Connect. Some people think of our memory like a bunch of filing cabinets, where we store information in specific places of our brain. But from our understanding of neuroscience, our memory is more like a web. 

For example, when I think about a concept like fashion, I think of clothes, shoes, jewelry, different brands, trends-- you know, both the ones that were pretty sick and ones that were kind of a miss. And each of those separate ideas have their own associated webs and interlinkings. We don't think about ideas on their own. They all go together, like a package deal. 

The more connected an idea is, the stronger our understanding of it is. Think about it. If a spider just spun a web by making one connection to another branch, nothing would stick, and it would starve. But a dense web with many connections is sturdy. 

The goal of Connect is to create a dense web of knowledge. In neuroscience, this is called a schema-- the mental model and way we think about an idea. We've collected and filtered all these individual pieces of knowledge. Now it's time to connect the dots and put things into context. 

This is why I really love hand-drawing notes. I'm basically glued to my iPad nowadays, because it's so much easier to draw mind maps and connect ideas together to create those schema. Check out this video up here for our mind-mapping guide. Typing notes just isn't able to do this as well-- even with the more sophisticated apps nowadays that have hierarchical or relational-linking features. 

At least for me, something about the freedom of drawing just makes it way easier to visualize connections instead of having to click on links or decipher big walls of text. I'm not saying that digital note-taking is useless. It does provide value. But that's a topic for another video. 

Now that we've connected our ideas and created a schema, we move on to the next step-- Challenge. Think of this entire process like building a raft. We've collected all the materials and resources. We've connected the dots to conceptually build a prototype. Now, it's time to test the raft to see if it actually works. 

A big mistake I used to make with learning was getting stuck in the Connect step. I'd just reread notes over and over, or re-watch lectures, thinking that all of those connections were accurate, but I didn't test them until the exam. And if you've ever been stumped by a test question and realized what you thought you knew actually doesn't make sense, that feeling of, oh, snap, everything I know is wrong, is soul-crushing. 

Challenge reveals the gaps in our knowledge. If the raft doesn't float, break it apart and figure out why. Why doesn't this work? Is there a missing connection, or is this connection actually not even a connection? 

We need to assess and deconstruct our thought process to improve it. Some of my favorite ways to challenge my thinking is with practice problems and through teaching. These strategies force us to really know our stuff, as opposed to rereading our notes or blindly accepting that our schema is accurate. But there's a lot of nuance to these skills, so I definitely recommend checking out our videos on how to use these strategies effectively, if you haven't already. 

What we gain from Challenge are new insights and new understandings that now funnels back into the Collect phase, and then the cycle repeats. So to put it all together, we collect information, whether that's new material or the insights from the previous cycle. Then, we need to connect the dots and create schema-- a mental model of how we believe that information relates together-- and then challenge our understanding by putting it into practice and applying it. 

It's a cycle, meaning that for any subject or topic we learn, we continue making rounds through the cycle until we deeply retain the information. And that idea of making multiple rounds has been shown to be very important for retention, thanks to the work of Herman Ebbinghaus. He was a German psychologist who basically discovered what we all know as spaced repetition. 

Looking at his learning curve, our memory of a topic decays over time unless we review it. So with interval practice, we can improve our long-term retention. So it's not enough to just run through a cycle and then forget about it. We need to repeatedly reinforce and strengthen the neural circuits until that knowledge becomes second nature. 

So this learning process has been an absolute game-changer for me to study more effectively. But I do have to mention that it won't feel that way-- at least, not at first. It's important to understand that real learning is an uncomfortable process. It's an active process, and it requires critical thinking to evaluate what we know. 

It feels stressful. But that feeling means it's actually working. Passive learning, like rereading your notes, highlighting things, flipping through lecture slides-- there's no real thinking involved. But it feels comfortable, because that's what we've always done. To make progress, we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. 

If you don't want to put in the effort to learn the skills to study smarter, that's your choice. But your mental health and scores will reflect that. But sooner or later, you're going to hit a point in your life where you plateau-- where your current abilities to learn won't be able to keep up. College, grad school, professional school-- they only get more difficult. 

And I say this because I wish someone had told me this back when I was a student, because we all want to enjoy being students, not stress about being students. Anyways, hope you enjoyed the video. Let me in the comments what aspects of studying you struggle with so we can make more content to help you on your journey. I'll see you later.