If you're new here, my name is Ali,

I'm a doctor working in Cambridge.

And in this video I wanna share with you

the study method, study

framework, that one of my closest friends used to rank

consistently in the top three in medical school,

and sometimes even rank one in certain subjects.

And he's a medical student at Cambridge University,

which is one of the most competitive

medical schools in the world.

We're gonna split this video up into three parts.

Firstly, I'll talk about what the method is

and how it works.

Then we'll talk a little bit about the evidence behind it,

like, why it works, the learning theory

behind why this method is amazing.

And finally, we'll go into the method in much more detail.

And I'll be showing you, using some examples

on different apps, about how you can incorporate this method

into your own study life.

(soft music)

Okay so,

the method is as follows.

Basically, instead of ever writing any notes,

instead of ever trying to summarize content

from lectures or textbooks, what my friend Aseyd did,

is that all he did was just write a ton of questions

for himself and then when he was revising,

he would just go over those questions over and over again.

And after a handful, maybe like three or four repetitions

of these questions, he pretty much knew everything

and every subject inside out.

So how does this work?

Let's hop into the laptop, as they say,

and I'll show you, these were the documents

that he made for each of the subjects.

So we've got HOM, which is physiology.

We've got MIMS, which is biochemistry.

And we've got anatomy, which is anatomy.

So let's start with HOM, which is physiology.

So essentially, he's gone through the lecture notes

and through a textbook alongside,

and he's basically converted everything into questions.

So the first lecture was about cell membranes and stuff,

so his question is,

what are some roles of the cell membrane?

Then it was about control systems.

When is ballistic control good and what's an example?

Let's scroll down a bit to, what's another topic?

So we've got muscles as another topic.

What does the size of a motor unit determine?

What is the kinetic state diagram for this?

Why is there a constant isometric force

below 2.2 to 2.0 microns?

Basically, a ton of questions, so 60 questions for muscles.

For cardiology, we've got, how many questions is this?

Wow, this is a lot of questions, my god.

This is how you rank first in medical school.

Whoa, 216 questions for cardiology,

he was a bit of a cardiology nerd.

So he kinda fleshed out the lecture notes

with some information from textbooks.

But again, never made any notes from the textbooks,

all he did was just write questions for himself.

More stuff, respiratory, questions from the lecture notes,

100 plus, 158, quick questions about the kidneys.

And as you can see, he's basically got an entire,

like 37-page Google Doc/Word doc,

literally just filled with questions.

He hasn't wasted any time in making notes

and in summarizing, all he's done

is just write questions for himself.

And the idea is that he's done this for every subject,

and then when he's sitting down to study,

he decides in advance or like on the day,

what subject he wants to study that day.

So let's say he's doing, I don't know, anatomy,

and he wants to revise the upper limb.

Then what he's gonna do, he's gonna open up

his upper limb document, and all he's gonna do

is he's gonna go through the questions one-by-one

and ask himself if he can feasibly answer

those questions in his head.

He doesn't really write anything down, he just, sort of,

tries to answer them out loud or in his head.

So how does the median cubital vein run?

Oh god, I can't remember that at all.

What do the lucidum cells contain

and where are they foreign found?

No idea, I don't even know those are a thing.

Which two layers make up the dermis?

Ooh, I probably should know that,

but I really can't remember.

Anyway, this is essentially, like,

all of the stuff for anatomy.

Again, 34 pages of just questions.

And that's basically it.

The method is, going through the lecture notes,

going through textbooks.

But like, what we all like to do by default,

is we like to highlight and like, make notes.

For some reason we think it's useful to summarize

our lecture notes, or summarize a textbook,

or summarize a revision guide.

And then, I don't know, I think the theory is that

we all read over our summaries and maybe highlight stuff,

and maybe ask ourselves questions.

But this is a purely active recall-based method.

All he's literally doing is just asking questions

and answering them.

So, let's move on to why

this method works.

(soft music)

And this whole method

is based around the principle

of active recall.

I have been preaching about active recall

for literally the last two years,

and actually, even longer than that,

since before I got this YouTube channel,

just like in talks and lectures and stuff that I would give.

I'd be like, active recall is literally the best thing ever.

It's the best thing ever because active recall

is the single most efficient study technique

that's ever been discovered,

there is a mountain of evidence supporting it.

I've got a 25-minute long video, that I'll link

in the video description and in a card up there somewhere,

where I go through the evidence in much more detail.

But essentially, what active recall means

is testing yourself.

And the reason testing ourselves is so amazingly valuable

is because, the way the brain works,

it's all based around how many times and how,

how much you retrieve information from your brain.

So we all have this misconception that,

in order to study, we have to put stuff into our brains,

but actually it's flipped on its head

if you look at the evidence, the actual way

to remember anything and to make anything stick,

is by retrieving information from our brains

rather than trying to put it back in.

So let's say we read something once

and we've understood a topic, at that point

the most effective thing we can do with our time

is ask ourselves questions about that topic.

And they've done loads of studies whereby they've taken

a group of college students, or high school students,

or whatever, and they split them up into different groups.

And they'll teach all the groups exactly the same topic,

but for one of the groups they'll get them to reread it,

for one of the groups they'll get them to make a mind map,

for one of the groups they'll tell them

to read it four times, for another group they'll tell them

to make notes, and for one of the groups

they'll just give them a test on the subject.

And then if you look at the results afterwards,

like when they get tested maybe a week later,

you'll find that the people that get tested,

the people who did the active recall,

who actively tried to retrieve the information

rather than just reread it or make notes on it,

those were the people that performed

significantly better in their exams.

And again, much more evidence in my, like,

legit evidence-based revision tips video,

this is just kind of an introduction.

So, I don't think this can be stated enough.

I recently set up a Discord server,

I'll put a link down if you wanna kinda hang out

with me in the evenings on Discord.

And we've got like, a little study,

tips, chat thing on there.

And it baffles me as to

just how many people still ask the question,

how should I be studying for my exams?

It's just the only, like, it's such a good

revision technique to just test yourself on stuff,

that it still baffles me that despite even like,

watching some of my videos, and maybe reading a book

called "Make it Stick," really good book to,

how to effectively learn, and watching any of my friend's,

Thomas Frank's videos, like, all of the evidence

around study tips is basically that

active recall is the way forward.

And I'm waxing on

about this for absolutely ages

because, you know, they say that on average it takes

about seven repetitions, like, seven times hearing

the same concept to really fully internalize it.

And I think, like, the more people in the world hear

about active recall and kind of, hear about the good news

of active recall, the better human productivity

as a whole would be and the better our lives as students

would be because we'd have to spend less time studying

and more time doing the things that actually matter to us.

But, yeah, that's basically how the method works.

I'll stop droning on about this now.

Let's now talk about the method in a bit more detail,

and I'll show you how you can use various different apps

to achieve the same effect.

Before we do so, I just wanna tell you

a little bit about this video's sponsor,

and that is Brilliant.

Brilliant is an amazing, active learning,

problem solving community with online courses

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science, physics, computer science, that sort of stuff.

They've got a load of courses that you can take

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so that's in the computer science segment.

And we've also got things like probability,

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and just like, a load of really, really

well-produced courses.

And the nice thing about these courses is that,

it's not just a passively educational video like this one.

What it does is that they guides you through the concepts

and then it forces you to use active recall

to apply those concepts to certain problems.

And recently they've introduced this new

daily challenges feature where,

it only takes about five or 10 minutes,

but everyday there's a new challenge,

based on maths, or physics, or computer science.

And what they do is that teach you a little bit

about the topic, and then they throw you into a problem,

and then you try and grapple with the concepts in the topic,

and then you solve the problem.

And this is actually a similar format

to how the education system works

at universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

And as part of their interviews,

what the supervisor or the professor does,

is that they would give you a little snippet

of information, sort of, introduce you to a topic,

and then they'll ask you a question about it,

and then you have to, kind of, use your brain to figure out

and, sort of, kind of actively go from step A to B.