7 Study Tips for Better Memory 🧠

Okay, let's get limitless. How do you study anything quickly? How do you cram correctly? And this episode is for students of all ages and all stages. This is for parents that want to help students. This is for if you're going for your MBA, you're in medical school, or you're a student of life. You have to prepare for a meeting, a sales call. You need to absorb a lot of information in a very short period of time. Period of time. So it's abbreviated. So how would I approach studying new material in a short period of time? So one of the first keys to learning anything faster, any subject, is to really have a goal. And so when I sit down, I want to ask questions. I want to have a target in mind. A lot of people don't learn something because they just don't know what they're looking for. They don't know when they're going to be successful. And remember this, questions are the answer. Questions are the answer. So ask yourself numerous questions. You'll notice You'll notice that in our Limitless book that all the chapters start with primer questions, right? Questions stimulate that part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS. Mm-hmm. It really directs your focus and your awareness. It gets you alert, and then you're like, oh, there's an answer, there's an answer, there's an answer. So first, prime yourself with questions. Now, I would also say, remember this as a reminder, as a quick reminder, that all learning is state-dependent. All learning is state-dependent, meaning that if you learn something in a bored state, you know, information by itself is forgettable, but information combined with emotion becomes unforgettable, right? So you have to up the emotion. And so how can you add some fun into your studies? How can you add some, a little bit of more joy? How can you add a little bit more interest and excitement? You know, and part of it is different for different people. Some people, before they start studying, they'll play music in the background. Yeah. You know, they have a soundtrack to their life. You know, I don't know if you have a song that puts you in the mood to get you focused, to get you motivated, right? Get you excited about something. Some people do some jumping jacks or some cartwheels. They do some rebounding. They move their body. They put a smile on their faces because you have to up your emotion. Because if you're in a bored, sedated state, the information will not be encoded very strong. And so you're not gonna be able to retrieve the information outside of your mind. So just remember that. Now, it's not just your internal environment. My next tip would be to really, really optimize your external environment. What do I mean by that? Your workspace. And I would highly recommend, if you could avoid it, do not work on your bed. I see so many people of all ages working in their bed. Here's the thing. The environment that you're learning something in gets encoded with the information and the feelings and the emotion that come with that. And really, some people actually have sleep issues because they work in bed. And they can't differentiate that between that and actually going to sleep. Or if you associate bed to going to sleep, you're not going to be very efficient in your study. So either way, it's a lose-lose, right? And so really, what's, what's an ideal environment? It's never going to be perfect. All right. There could be kids around, there could be distractions, there could be noise, but do the best you can. Some people are learning remotely or maybe they're working remotely. Do the best you can to have a dedicated environment. So that when you go in that space, then you go into— you're in the zone, right? This is where you're going to be studying, right? Every area of your home or your office should really be dedicated, ideally, to certain behaviors that when you go to do, you know, whether it's like, you know, watching something on your iPad, it just puts you in entertainment mode, right? Or you're going to the gym, you're just going to work out. You're not on your phone doing social media, right? Whatever environment It really puts— sets an internal environment to put you in a place where you're just really optimized for that spurt in behavior. Now, what I would recommend, so always studying in the same place ideally. Ideally that you have good lighting. We've talked about this in previous podcast episodes, meaning, you know, the fluorescent light, probably not the best because it has been shown to really make people tired. There's some eye strain there. Indirect sunlight is optimal. Temperature, find something that's not putting you to sleep, that keeps you alert. Sometimes for most people, It's a little bit on the, on the cool side also as well. Good airflow because oxygen is so, so very important in the process. So you're getting a good environment plus your environment. Do the best you can to free yourself from what the enemy of your focus, which is distractions, right? Tell your family that this is your study time. You know, lock, lock the door, put a sign, you know, close by, you know, in your office cubicle saying, you know, do not disturb. And, you know, until this time, turn off, close, turn off your phone. Right? Put it on airplane mode, or even better yet, put it in your glove compartment of the car, put it in another room. Because even if it's there, like even at the dinner table, you feel like you have to kind of check it, right? You know, out of habit. Turn off all the alerts, maybe close different browsers, right? Just focus on that one thing. So that's your external environment. Now, when you're actually sitting there to study, you know, I have my notepad here. I do my capture create. But what I'm looking to do is set a timer. Right. And it could be on your phone if you're using— if you still have your phone there, or it could be an analog timer, right? Something you could get online, very inexpensive. And I'm looking to study like 30, 45 minutes. I set a countdown timer for 30, 45 minutes, and they call this the Pomodoro technique, right? It's after that amount of time, after about like the amount of time of a sitcom, your focus concentration starts to dip. You start to lose some energy, right? You need to get refreshed. My final tip for you is really active retrieval. This is your retrieval practice. We know that studying the human brain and then adult learning, that brains don't always learn best just consuming information, right? It actually learns better through creativity, through creation or co-creation, where it's not pushing information inside your mind, it's actually pulling information out, right? We've talked about memory a lot in our podcast, and many of you are part of our programs. You know, there's 3 stages. You encode information, You store it and you retrieve it. You encode it. You see it. You feel it, right? You store it. We use the location method or the peg method or chain linking, right? The pie method. All these methods we teach for storage. And then you retrieve it. Well, did you know when you start actively retrieving information, pulling information out, it actually helps you to learn it better? So simple things you could do at the end of a study session and the beginning of a study session is quiz yourself. You know, quiz yourself at the end of what you learned, or when you're— after you're coming back from your brain break, start your beginning the next primacy recency, your next study session, by asking yourself questions about what you just learned, right? This is a way of forming active retrieval or retrieval practice to help you to really ingrain and test yourself to see if the information is really there, right? Sometimes when we write things down, and it's okay to take notes, obviously, we feel like it's there. but we don't have to really know it, right? And as a, just as a final bonus, besides active retrieval and quizzing yourself, remember, if you want to learn something faster, learn with the intention of teaching somebody else. They call it the explanation effect. You get to take advantage of the explanation effect when you're studying whatever you're studying for school or for work, or you're helping your child to be able to do that. Remember to remind them and yourself that if you learn it with the intention of explaining to somebody else, you're gonna learn it so much better. Because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. All right. Now I gave you a lot of quick tips in this episode on how to learn more rapidly, how to study something, and you're gonna get so much more out of it. Better comprehension, better organization, better actual retention of the information. And these little tips, little by little, they become a lot.