Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing how to study and learn that is what the scientific data say is the best way to study in order to remember information and to be able to use that information effectively in different areas of your life. So for those of you that are still in school, this could be any stage of school. Today's discussion will be very useful for you. However, even if you are not formally enrolled in any kind of school at the moment, today's discussion will also be extremely effective for you to be able to study and learn better information from, say, the Internet or podcasts, or any area of your life where you are seeking to learn and use new knowledge. Now, one of the most important things that you're going to learn today is that learning, that is the best learning practices are not intuitive. So before we dive in, keep in mind that whatever you believe about how best to learn for you is probably incorrect. And I confess this was humbling for me as well when I started to dive into this literature. Because as somebody who was a student for many years and in some sense still considers himself a student of science and health information because of this podcast, and certainly as somebody who still teaches university courses both to medical students and graduate students and to undergraduate students at Stanford, I thought I understood the whole teaching and learning process. But I too learned that it is anything but intuitive. In fact, most of what we believe about the best ways to study are absolutely false. Fortunately, today you will learn the best ways to study. Turns out there's a rich literature on this dating back well over 100 years and the data are absolutely fascinating and incredibly actionable. It's incredibly interesting how the fields of education, the fields of psychology, and the fields of neuroscience have now come together to define the optimal strategies to study and learn. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep, both enough sleep and enough quality sleep. Now, one of the key things to Getting a great night's sleep is that your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep. And to wake up feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. One of the best ways to ensure all of that happens is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And with eight Sleep, it's very easy to do that. You program the temperature that you want at the beginning, middle and the end of the night and that's the temperature that you're going to sleep at. And it will track your sleep. It tells you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much rapid eye movement sleep you're getting, which is critical. And all of that also helps you dial in the exact parameters you need in order to get the best possible night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an eighth sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod 4 cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, you can go to eightsleep.comhuberman to to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to over health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy should provide insights with BetterHelp, they make it very easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you have these critical components of therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's very time efficient and easy to fit into your busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist's office or looking for parking or sitting in a waiting room. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.comhuberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NIDRA sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation, and you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga Nidra or what is sometimes called non sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, please go to wakingup.comhuberman where you can access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman to access a free 30 day trial. Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And of course people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading. Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight. Some people call themselves auditory learners, other people consider themselves visual learners. But guess what? When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is is defined not by the medium in which that Material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined. Whether or not you review slides or a textbook or you watch small videos. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode. Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind. Cognitive or motor learning, musical learning, math, et cetera. Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode. The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information. You're trying to inoculate against forgetting. That is the way to remember things. That is the way to gain mastery over them. And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer reviewed literature. Now, before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is. I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher. For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity we sometimes hear as neural plasticity, two words or neuroplasticity, those are the same thing. Essentially, the change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms. One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another. It's actually a gap between the neurons. It is technically called the synaptic cleft. It's a gap. And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons, to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons. Okay, so one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons. And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis, or the addition of new neurons. So let's just get this out of the way up front, because the addition of new neurons again grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion, or frankly for most all discussions. It is true. You have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible for smell, as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory, in which new neurons appear to be added throughout the lifespan. But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections, or the formation of new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons. Now, the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important. For sake of today's discussion, I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good. However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections, removing new connections. Let's just leave it at this level. Mechanistically, when you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections, and that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of, say, memories or information. Just know that these are the important mechanisms. In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific, typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort, or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent or teenage. You know, despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens, and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant. Of course, and believe it or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter, from birth until the adolescents and teen years and adult years, is largely the reflection of the removal of. That's right, the removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust. They become much more reliable. Okay, so that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn. And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz. Now, the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline. They start feeling stressed. But don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself. And you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question. This is a two question quiz. How many different ways, mechanistically speaking, does neuroplasticity occur? Is it one mechanism, two mechanisms, or three mechanisms? Or is it four or five? Okay, can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo which are reflective of neuroplasticity? Okay, so the answer to question was is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity as you recall or as you may not have been able to recall. And by the way, if you were not able to recall the three different modes of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity, that is fine. As you'll soon realize, recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical and very useful way to retain more information, even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know. In fact, especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know. So the three ways are the strengthening of neural connections, second, the weakening of neural connections, and third, through neurogenesis, the addition of new neurons. Why did I provide this quiz? Why did I test you? Well, as you'll soon learn, if you look across the total body of research on how best to study and learn, it involves doing exactly what we just did, did, which is to periodically stop and test yourself on the material that you learned. Testing is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you've acquired and which knowledge you have not managed to acquire. It also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any kind. And I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment. So yes, today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast. And no, there will not be a test at the end, although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end. I'm going to provide you with an excellent, zero cost, very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence of having listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast. So if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end, there it is. Okay, let's talk about some of the other practical aspects of studying and learning. I know a lot of you out there who want to learn and want to come up with the best studying strategies are trying to think about how to structure your day or how much to study or when to study. Let's get the most important things out of the way. First. Neuroplasticity and learning, that is, converting your studying efforts into retention of knowledge is a two step process. You've probably heard about active engagement. That's just a fancy set of words for focus, for really attending to the information that you're trying to learn. And it is very important anytime you're trying to learn new information. So focus goes with alertness. You can't be focused if you're not alert. This is prerequisite. So you need to be alert and you need to be focused in order to pay attention to the information that you're trying to learn. In fact, it is the process of being focused and attending that cues your nervous system that something is important, that something's different about whatever sensory experience you happen to be having when you're focused and attending, whether or not it's the information you're hearing or that you're looking at, or both, that cue at the level of neurochemicals in your brain and body signals to the neurons, hey, you're going to have to change. You're going to have to alter your connections, either make them stronger or weaker or a combination of those things in order to make sure that your nervous system can retain and use the information at a future time. So that's step one. And of course as a part of step one, most people, when they hear about optimal studying strategies, they want to know, you know, what should they do? What should they take in order to learn Better. Well, here's what everyone should take in order to learn better, which is a great night's sleep the night before. Limiting your external stress. Although some stress is good because it cues up your alertness, it actually allows you to remember certain things better. We'll talk about this a little bit later. No one can remove all stress from their life, but we know one thing for sure. Your ability to be alert and focused is going to be greater if you slept well the night before. Okay, so sleep is without question the best nootropic, right? The word nootropic means smart drug. I don't really like that term because learning involves all sorts of things. It's not just about being smart, it's about being able to attend. It's about sometimes being creative, flexible with ideas and information. Here's the point. You're going to need to get your sleep right in order to be able to study and learn at your absolute best. And I've done many episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast about sleep. We have a newsletter about sleep that details in a short PDF format the various things you can do to get your sleep optimized, so to speak. You can find all that hubermanlab.com by putting sleep into the search function. We don't have time to discuss that material now, but get your sleep right so that you can be alert and focused when it comes time to learn. Now, the process of being alert and focused on particular material that you want to learn can be enhanced by just having a silent script within your head. Silent meaning you're not saying it out loud. Where when you sit down to learn, you're looking at a book or you're listening to a lecture, perhaps a podcast like this, you're thinking, okay, I need to learn this. I need to learn this. You can voluntarily ramp up your level of focus and alertness by telling yourself that information is important. Important. Don't be a passive participant in learning. This is the basis of active learning. By expecting the information to be so interesting that it pulls your level of attention and focus out of you. Rather, learn to engage your attention and focus voluntarily, volitionally. Okay, when we hear about adhd, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, we know that people with ADHD can attend very rapidly. They can really pay close attention for long periods of time if they like a given topic or a given experience or activity. They have serious challenges, however, engaging their attention and alertness if they are not excited about an activity or information. And so it is the hallmark of all good learners to be able to Voluntarily force yourself to attend and to focus. And when I say force yourself, that means a constant bringing back of your mind's attention to whatever it is you're trying to learn. It is meant to feel difficult. I say meant to feel difficult because that strain that you feel, that encouraging or in some cases forcing yourself to attend, sometimes even putting on a hoodie and hat, you know, literally putting blinders so that you can only attend to the material right in front of you. That straining that you feel reflects in part the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine adrenaline in the brain and body, which serve to cue the neural circuits that they need to change at a later time. Okay, so the strain that you feel in trying to learn, the strain that you feel in forcing yourself to learn how to focus, that is good. That's a cue to your nervous system that it's going to need to change, that neuroplasticity needs to take place. Think about it. If you didn't feel that strain and you were able to perform whatever it is that you were doing or remember whatever information it is that, that you're being exposed to seamlessly, well then your nervous system wouldn't have to change because it already has the capabilities within the neural circuits. So that strain that you feel, that agitation is great, that's a cue that you are learning or that you set the learning process in motion. Now, it's also the case that some people don't have great levels of focus and attention. And there are of course, pharmacologic tools. I would encourage anyone that has clinically diagnosed ADHD to talk to their doctor about whether or not they should use prescription meds and or other methods. Great. Sleep is always going to be an important substrate for attention and focus for anybody, but especially for people with adhd. I highly encourage anyone that's interested in enhancing their levels of focus and attention to also consider the non pharmacologic approaches. So this is irrespective of whether or not you need pharmacologic approaches. Yes. Being well hydrated. Yes. The appropriate amount of caffeine for you that allows you to be alert, but not, you know, shaking and agitated can be very useful. However, the scientific data also support the fact that doing a brief, say 5 to 10 minute mindfulness meditation each day, these are the data from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University showing that people who do a 10 minute meditation per day, where they simply sit or lie down, close their eyes, focus on their breathing, their attention invariably drifts, they bring their attention Back to their breathing. People who do that on a regular basis improve their level of focus. They improve their memory and recall ability. And of course there are a bunch of other positive effects of that simple zero cost tool of mindfulness meditation. So if you are interested in improving your levels of focus and attention for sake of learning, I highly encourage you to explore the oh so valuable tool of mindfulness meditation. Just five or ten minutes per day, done on a regular basis. You miss a day, no big deal, just get right back to it the next day. Does it matter if you do it morning, afternoon or night? No. Some people find that doing it too late at night might disrupt their sleep. But if you think about meditation of the sort that I just described as a perceptual exercise, maybe you don't even call it meditation, you're just teaching yourself to focus. You could even do it with eyes open by focusing on a visual target, allowing yourself to blink. There are good data on this sort of approach as well. And then just making sure that your visual attention and cognitive attention comes back to that visual target over and over again. It's a deliberate process of bringing your attention back to a particular location that is very valuable for improving your levels of focus. In fact, it is known to create significant improvements in your ability to focus, which is critical for your ability to study and learn. So I know that many people are interested in what to take, what to do at the level of kind of esoteric practices or things to buy. There is stuff out there. Again, I mentioned hydration, caffeine, great sleep and so on. But the simple practice of mindfulness meditation, or just what I describe as a focusing perceptual exercise of bringing your attention back to the same location over and over again, deliberately will train you to train your nervous system to bring your attention back to whatever it is you're trying to learn. Now, I've done other podcasts about how to focus about attention specifically and ADHD. Again, you can find all of those@hubermanlab.com simply put ADHD or Focus or tools for focus into the search function and it will take you to the exact timestamps in those episodes that are relevant Right now. However, I want to talk about the second part of neuroplasticity, which is that the actual changes in the nervous system, the strengthening and weakening predominantly of connections between neurons that underlie learning, do not occur during the focusing and learning or rather the exposure to the material, but instead during deep sleep and sleep like states. And again, I've done a lot of podcasts and Talked a lot about tools for getting better sleep, but I just want to remind everybody that the actual reordering of the connections, the strengthening of connections between neurons that underlie learning, the weakening of those connections, occurs during sleep, in particular during rapid eye movement sleep, which tends to predominate in the latter half of the night. So make sure that you're getting enough sleep for you, for some people at six hours. For some people it's eight hours. And yes, there is something called the first night effect. The first night effect is the experimentally observed phenomenon whereby information that you learn on a given day is mostly consolidated during the night's sleep that you have on that first night after the learning occurs. Does this mean that if you get a poor night's sleep on the first night after learning something, that you are forever going to forget that information, that it cannot be consolidated into your neural circuits? No. However, it's very clear that the first night after learning you want to get the best sleep possible. So if your learning bouts, your studying is going late into the night and you're drinking a lot of caffeine, be mindful that the sleep that you get after drinking that caffeine late into the day, the all nighters that you're pulling, those are not serving your learning well. So you need to structure your life as a student of any kind so that you can get focus and attention to what it is you want to learn and you can get sleep to the best of your ability. And of course, people who are raising young kids or who have stress in their lives for whatever reason, perhaps won't be able to optimize their sleep on that first night or even subsequent nights. But do your best to get your sleep right. It's the single best thing you can do for your mental health, for your physical health, and for learning and performance of any kind. And it's really worth the effort. Now, with an understanding of the mechanisms, the focus and alertness and the sleep phase of neuroplasticity, what are some other things that you can do to enhance whatever studying and learning you've obtained? I already talked about a tool, a behavioral tool for enhancing focus. What about a behavioral tool for enhancing plasticity? If your sleep is great or especially if your sleep isn't great. And there I highly recommend you explore Non Sleep Deep Rest or nsdr. There's a script for this in the show. Note captions NSDR, sometimes referred to as Yoga Nidra, although those things are similar but different, is a 10 or 20 minute practice that you can do to restore your mental and physical vigor if you haven't slept enough so you could do it first thing in the morning when you wake up. If you feel you haven't slept enough, you can do it in the afternoon. You can do it in the middle of the night if you're not able to sleep and offset some of the sleep loss that you otherwise would have experienced. NSDR is a very powerful tool in order to enhance neuroplasticity, and I'll talk more about this in a future episode. There's a lot of exciting data coming out about NSDR and Yoga Nidra, but if you're sleeping well, and even if you aren't, I highly encourage you to incorporate a 10 or 20 minute NSDR into your schedule. Someplace. Again, where you place it in your schedule isn't as important as the fact that you do it in order to enhance neuroplasticity, that is the reordering of connections between neurons to serve the studying and learning that you're doing. Now let's talk about how the best students structure their days. Turns out there are great studies on this. There's a really nice paper, in fact, that surveyed close to 700 students. These were medical students, approximately equal number of male and female students, and analyze the most useful learning habits, that is the learning habits associated with the most successful students. Now, anytime you do a study like this, where people take surveys, there's always the issue of causality. In fact, we can pretty much set aside any possible causality. For instance, I'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to study for about three or four hours per day. But you could easily say, well, they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day. They don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students. And you'd be exactly right. Okay, we can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation, about reverse causality, and on and on. However, none of that is the point here. The point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again, regardless of what classes they're taking, regardless of where they are in their arc of their learning trajectory. And so what we know based on this study, and I'll provide a link to it in the show, note captions, is that there are at least 10 study habits that the highly effective students use. I'm going to focus on the top five or six just for sake of time, because it turns out that most of the effect it Appears of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits. First of all, they set aside time to study. They literally schedule time to study. Now this probably serves several roles. The first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions. And in fact, that's the second thing that they do. They are very effective. Or they make it a point of putting their phone away and off of isolating themselves. That's right, they're not studying with other people. They study alone. Which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying. But the best performing students seem to study alone. They put their phone away, they tell their friends and families that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time. And yes, they study for three or four hours per day, but they break that up into a couple of different sessions, typically two or three sessions. So they're not doing a three or four hour studying about all in one shot. So they're managing their time, they're eliminating distractions, and they're studying for a consistent amount of time, at least five days per week. Okay. Presumably they're taking some weekends off, although that wasn't made clear from this paper. The other thing that they do, and this is very important, is that they make an effort to then teach their peers to teach other students in the class. Now, some of you may be thinking, and I'm thinking back to college here mostly, that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students, that teaching them the information is kind of a freebie for them and is harder for you, meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair advantage for not having done the work. Now, while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the learners from the other students got an unfair advantage, it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation, then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students. So don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test. This is key to test and develop mastery of the material. Now, in my laboratory for years we used to have a saying which I simply picked up from the laboratories I was trained in. I didn't come up with the saying which was watch one, do one, teach one. And that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing or doing an antibody reaction or a Western blot, or things that you do in laboratories. Watch one do one Teach one Watch one do one Teach one, of course, should be reserved to anything where no one's going to be put in danger by the Watch one do one Teach one procedure. Right? Some procedures, especially in laboratories, can be dangerous given the materials you use, et cetera. And of course, today we're talking about learning and studying generally. So provided it's safe. Watch one do one Teach one is an excellent means to learn, that is, to study new material, to develop proficiency and even mastery, and over time, perhaps even virtuosity. We'll return to that later. Those distinctions. So, going back to this idea that the best students set aside time, they designate time to study alone, without distractions, that is sure to help them anchor their focus and attention. They know that they're going to need to use their focus and attention during that time. And we know with absolute certainty that focus and attention are a limited but renewable resource in the human brain. The longer you're awake, the more is the buildup of a molecule called adenosine in your brain and body. It makes you sleepy, makes it harder to focus. When you sleep, adenosine levels are pushed down again. You're able to focus again, you feel more alert. You can think of adenosine as limiting your attentional budget. Which is not to say that some people don't study best in the afternoon or in the evening, or even late at night. Right? I recall times during university when I'd study between the hours of 10pm and 2am I don't do that any longer. But scheduling time where you know you're going to need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things toward being able to focus and attend to the material. Now, if you're taking courses, you probably are going to be a slave to the timing of the courses. You aren't going to be able to tell the instructor, okay, listen, I want you to do this course at, you know, 3pm because that's when you learn best, or at 8am because that's when you happen to be able to attend best. However, to the extent that you have any control over the time in which you're going to study, keeping that at a regular time or times, perhaps one block early in the day, one block later in the day, perhaps two blocks early in the day, and so on, is going to be beneficial. It turns out that's also supported by the research literature that the brain, just like with its sleep wake cycles that entrain to a regular Schedule, that is your brain and body. Get used to being active and inactive at particular times based on your exposure to sunlight, your exposure to activities, your social rhythms, et cetera. If you regularly, meaning for the course of about three days, make it a point to focus and study at particular times. Again, pulling your attention back. It's not an automatic process, but pulling your attention back to a specific location, perhaps on a page or that you're listening to in a lecture, your body and brain will start to entrain to that rhythm, such that you will be able to focus and attend better, simply by virtue of the regularity of the timing of the exposure to the material. Okay, so you probably need about two or three days to break into a regular schedule of focusing and attending and studying at a given time or times. Allow yourself that transition period, but then make it a point to schedule those times to study. Set aside your phone, tell people you're going offline, turn off the WI fi if you need to, or have to. You may need it for your studying. I don't know. Depends on what you're studying. But limit distractions at all costs and learn to just focus on the material. And this is a skill. This is the most important thing to understand. It's a skill to be able to focus and study, and it's a skill that you can learn very quickly, especially if you schedule it for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which to adapt to those schedules and times, and then try and stick to them as regularly as possible, perhaps even on the weekends if you're approaching the end of the quarter or semester, perhaps even on the weekend, even if you're not in the quarter or semester, keeping those regular times will entrain your nervous system to study and learn at its best at those particular times. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life. For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012 and often twice a day. Once in the morning or mid morning and again in the afternoon or evening. When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.comhuberman to claim their special offer. Right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com Huberman to claim that special offer. Before I move into specific ways to study in order to maximally offset forgetting Notice I didn't say in order to learn, but rather to maximally offset forgetting, AKA learning stably learning material there's one other point that I wanted to pass along from this really nice study on the study habits of highly effective medical students that I've been referring to, and that is when one examined or these people were asked about their motivation for studying, the best performing students had an interesting answer. They had a very long term understanding of how, or belief rather about how their success in medical school would impact their family, how it would impact their life arc, how it would change them. And they weren't particular about the ways in which it would change them or their family. In fact, it was a rather broad, abstract, aspirational way of thinking about their study efforts. So what I like so much about this paper is that, you know, in addition to having a fairly large sample size, close to 700 students that were evaluated and yes, it's purely, you know, self report and this kind of thing. Nonetheless, it bridges the two extremes of studying and learning. You know, it gets right down into the nitty gritty of how long they study when they study, the things they do to limit distraction that we just discussed. But it also gets to their underlying psychological motivations and the thing that they use in order to pull them forward through their study efforts. Perhaps especially when their desire is waning or their level of fatigue is increasing. I don't know that I'm speculating here, but this is this aspirational component of going to medical school, which it turns out in the country in which this study was done, only very, very select, few of the very best students are able to achieve that. They have to learn the information in a different language altogether, which is incredible. I always marvel at that. You know, I have friends that did their PhD thesis in Italy. They're Italian by birth. They now happen to run a laboratory in Italy. And they had to do their PhD training and write papers and give their thesis, dissertation and defense in English, even though English was their second language. So talk about a challenge. And that's just one example that I can think of. There are many examples of that. These students that I'm referring to in this study are not necessarily constantly thinking about how their efforts will transform themselves and their families, but they certainly were able to report what it was specifically that they are seeking, what they're aspiring to besides just trying to do as well as they can getting into and through medical school. So the high level aspirational stuff within you, whatever that is for you, it's going to be highly individual, is certainly important and it offers a bookend to the nuts and boltsy kind of stuff that you're going to do. I would hope, in order to best study and learn the specific material. So the specific actions that you're going to take each day to learn specific bits of information that will pull you toward those important aspirations. And now again, if you love the material you're learning, this aspirational component is probably not as important, right? I can recall during university and graduate school and so on, thinking, oh my goodness, this is like the coolest thing I've ever heard. I've probably say that about a million different topics, like, oh my goodness, circadian rhythm, seasonal rhythms, melatonin, neural circuits, dopamine. I was just awash with excitement about what I was learning. But of course, sometimes I would take a course where the material was. I don't know if it was more challenging or not, but I had a harder time getting engaged by the material, either by virtue of how it was being taught to me or the material itself. So the ability to attach to some aspirational goal to pull you through can be very valuable. You're not going to love every topic you have to learn. However, I will say that at least in my experience, some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the courses that I struggled with the most. And in fact that's the basis of the next and easily one of the most important studying tools. So a key theme in all of the excellent literature, that is the peer reviewed research on how best to study, is that studying that feels challenging is the most effective. I know nobody wants to hear this. Everyone wants to hear about flow. Everybody wants to hear about information just sinking into their brain by osmosis. I think it was a Garfield cartoon where he talked about learning by osmosis. There's this very cute real world video of a kid in a classroom, I believe it's in China, where he's taking the book and he puts it on his head. Maybe I can find this clip and he's just kind of like trying to wash it into his brain. It's super cute clip, but guess what? That doesn't work. I mean, it works to put the book on your head. It doesn't work. It's not going to get the information into your brain. Perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into neural circuits. Right now we know, we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years that effort is the cornerstone of learning. So I know there are probably some groans about that. I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell you how to study so that studying wasn't painful. I think I can accomplish that by the end of today's episode. But in order to do that, let's take another quiz. Okay, so here's the quiz again. You can answer these questions in your head. You don't have to tell anyone, but you could write them down or say them out loud if you want. The first question is, when, during either your states of alertness or sleep, does the remodeling of neural connections occur? I like to think this is a pretty easy one. Okay. The answer is during sleep. The second question is, what is one behavioral tool that you can use to improve focus? The answer is simple mindfulness meditation, which I prefer you think of simply as a perceptual exercise. So again, just sit or lie down, close your eyes, focus on your breath. When your attention drifts, bring your attention back to your breath, and so on. Or if you prefer, you can do this eyes open by focusing on a visual target either a foot or two feet or three feet away, whatever distance is comfortable for you. Allowing yourself to blink as needed, but forcing yourself to focus on that visual target for, say, one to three minutes, maybe even three to five minutes, maybe even 10 minutes. Again, please blink. You don't want your eyes to dry. Both those tools will improve your ability to attend to focus to other material when the time comes. Okay. The circuits for focus and attention themselves are subject to neuroplasticity. And then the third question is, can you name or list off in your mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use? I can think of limiting distraction by virtue of putting away phones and telling others you won't be in contact with them. Two, and I'm getting these out of Order, I realize, is to isolate, to study alone. And the third that I can recall is to teach others in the same course. Okay, you can probably think of a few others. Now, why are we taking these silly little quizzes? Well, turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you'll remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to it over and over again. But that if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the literature, in the peer reviewed literature about how students can learn information better, it's testing. And I know, I know, I know. We think of tests as a way to evaluate our knowledge, but it turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge, to retain our knowledge, and again, to offset forgetting. Now, the study of testing as a learning tool, not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned, goes back over a hundred years. There's a classic study that was done in 1917 where grade school age children read biographies. So they read biographies, and then the kids were divided into different groups. One group read and re read and reread those biographies over and over. Another group read the biographies once and then were tested on those biographies. But get this, they tested themselves on those biographies simply by having to think about the information that they had read and trying to remember the information. Like what was the biography? Who was the person, who were they married to, what did they do? When did they go to school, what did they do in school, what did they do in the world? What role did they play in life? So they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biographies. Now keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography two, three, four times might seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that they had read just once, right? You could imagine that thinking about the biography involves more effort, and indeed it does. But keep in mind also that the kids in the second group were only exposed to the biography once. And yet, when you look at the percent of accurate recall of information from those biographies, the children that read the biography once and then made a deliberate point to think about that biography in their own mind to effectively test themselves on that material just within their heads, over and over but an equal number of times as the kids that read the biographies directly on a page over and over vastly outperformed the kids that read the biographies over and over. Put differently, reading and rereading material and rereading material is far less effective than reading material and then thinking about that material, testing yourself on that material, forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your own mind. And this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material, but also accuracy of recall of that material. And that, at least to me, was pretty surprising at first. Until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of testing as a learning tool. And then you start to realize that testing yourself is far and away the best tool for studying and learning, not just for evaluating your knowledge, but for actually studying and incorporating that knowledge into. Into your neural circuits. Okay, so I realize that anytime I or somebody else talks about a study that was done in 1917, we think of people in these, you know, like wooden shoes and in these schoolhouses that look so different and kids dress so different. Let's get a little more modern here. Keep in mind, however, that the nervous system hasn't really changed much in tens of thousands of years. Nonetheless, I think it's nice to think about a more recent study of how best to study. And this study, which, by the way, we'll provide a link to in the show, note captions, as well as a couple of reviews that include results from similar studies. Again, I'm pointing to a body of research, not just one study here looked at whether or not studying material four times. So study, study, study, study was better in terms of lots of.