Learning over Content Consuming | Studying like a PhD

most of us spend a lot of time consuming content whether it's articles notes or lectures but the truth is we retain very little of it and we produce even less from what we have learned as students today we tend to absorve massive amounts of information passively we read we listen we watch but how often are we actually challenged to create something from scratch or to build on the knowledge that we have learned not as often as we should be I think so the question is should we first focus on learning and then create or should

we dive straight into the creating from the start one thing I have learned during my PhD is that if you cannot reproduce something whether it's an argument a formula or a concept you haven't fully fully learned it and the act of creating forces you to engage with the material on a deeper level and reflect on the knowledge that you've actually retained when you start creating you actually realize where your knowledge gaps are suddenly you find yourself stuck when trying to reproduce a fear or to explain A New Concept because your understanding actually isn't complete and

you haven't fully learned these Concepts from the beginning in this video I'm going to teach you techniques that I have used during my PhD that help me internalize information much more quickly and also truly allow you to focus on creation and production rather than passive consumption so let's dive straight into it so the first concept I want to focus on a little bit is the act of learning through creation so I truly believe that the best way to learn something is through creating something for example if you've ever been asked to regate an argument that

you have just heard and maybe even improve on it slightly you'll understand what I mean cuz a lot of us aren't even able to reproduce an argument that we have just passively listened to and I suggest you make it a habit to engage in this process at the start and at the end of your day so dedicate some time to organize your thoughts writing down some notes and actively reflecting on what you have heard or what you have learned about a topic and this can for example be done at the end of a lesson or

at the end of a lecture so during my time now as a researcher I go through many lectures and what I tend to do is that after these lectures I make little notes of what I have actually listened to and then sometimes I use these notes as well for my blog post for a website that I have created on Neuroscience which I will link down below if you're interested but I noticed that doing this it allows to truly understand the argument that a researcher is trying to present to me and not just passively observe whatever

they're trying to explain and if you develop this kind of information retention or this kind of note taking as really a habit you will notice that over time that your retention of certain types of information gets a lot better so the next part is then to really focus on like Active Learning techniques versus passive learning techniques so passive learning techniques are just listening but you actually don't create anything yourself whereas Within in active learning techniques you're also trying to reproduce part of the information let's talk about a few study techniques that I have really used

during my PhD and the first is to listen and learn from experts so if you want to learn a new topic and I've read this in a blog post somewhere but I don't really remember where I got this from but if you find it please link it down below I would like to um site this person as well because I think it's such an interesting technique so I imagine that you want to learn a new topic the first thing that you would do is to find the top 10 to top 100 if you're really motivated

or maybe a PhD student and you have to write on this topic so you find the top 100 people that are the renowned experts in this or on this topic and whether that's Neuroscience psychology or another discipline and then you try to consume all their work so what I would do is I would listen to their interviews for example on podcasts nowadays a lot of researchers are there I would read their research so I would read the latest papers that they wrote and I would also go on YouTube and try to find if they have

some lectures and then I collect all this information in a common space and this common space can be anything that you find Handy and I personally like notion but also you can use Evernote or anything like that so in notion I then create this common space for one type of topic and I list from all these experts all of the notes that I found and then as you go through this work I try to think critically and ask myself what would be the next topic I that these experts should work on to like hands their

research CU a lot of times if you're a researcher a research is never complete so there are always little gaps that are missing in whatever they're trying to explain or whatever they're trying to do and by asking yourself this question what is the next topic these researchers should write on you are actively engaging with the topics that they are presenting so the next step that I would then do is kind of from the faman technique and faman is this famous physicist that was also a teacher and he was really renowned for his teaching Style and

what he would do or what in general the concept entails is that when you identify a concept so you choose a topic that you want to master you would write down everything that there is to know about this topic and that you already know so if you've done the previous step you already have some information about the topic and you would almost write this as a mind map in my case so I would do it on the Whiteboard and this will help you see what you've already learn and what you're already familiar with and what

you're uncertain about and then the next bit which I think is the most powerful and the hardest but is to teach it so then you explain the concept that you've wrote down just now as if you were teaching it to someone else and if you're in a common space such as I am at my University I work in a common space I cannot just start talking out loud I quite often just do this in my head so I am just thinking over the sentences in my head but I would sometimes also try to get like

a quiet room or like a focus room where I could actually talk out loud as if I'm teaching it to an audience and this really forces you to simplify complex ideas and to also narrow down on which parts of the ideas you don't fully understand because for example I had to teach for this computational Psychiatry course and even though I've worked with some of these Concepts that I had to teach for years like for example what is an elastic net regression I know this concept I use this concept but to explain it to someone else

and really deep dive into the details really forced me to almost revisit all of the basics of these topics and then as you're doing this you can review and refine so you can go back to your sources and fill in the blanks so every time you don't know something I wouldn't necessarily look it up immediately but just like highlight it or put that question down and then read up on it again and then again te it to an audience and you would keep refining your explanation until you can teach the concept clearly without hesitation and

as I'm telling you now this may seem like a really long process which it is but I do think it will allow you to learn about Concepts on a way deeper level and also added to that sometimes you will identify gaps in your knowledge that are actually gaps in the general knowledge so you think for example like oh why is this constant written here and then if you deep dive into where the formula came from or the paper that came up with this formula you actually they find that it's maybe like a random Conant and

they haven't actually really thought about it thly and then you have your next research question for if you want to write a paper about it so finally something that you can then do in your daily life is also to apply these type of active learning strategies as you're reading or engaging with other types of materials so for example something that I currently really like to do is to read up about case studies or people that have experienced the disorder that I'm currently researching So currently I'm focusing on schizophrenia as my primary disorder of research and

I apply certain computational Psychiatry methods to see if we can understand this disorder at a more individualized level but the thing is that sometimes the type of algorithms I'm using are really abstract and it really almost divorces me from the topic that I'm researching even though I know people in my environment and in my life that I have encountered this so what I try to do is to also read up on people that actually have experienced these disorders in their life and see if I can actually understand some of the research questions that I'm applying

a little bit better this way so instead of just reading the theory apply your learning to real life scenarios for instance you can read case studies or look at real world examples related to your Fields like neurological disorders or brain injuries if you're studying neuroscience and then you can write a summary or answer questions about the case applying what you've learned in a practical way and this will really help you to almost solidify the knowledge that you have learned and I think an added benefit to this is that the books that you read can really

spark your interest as well and that will give you momentum to keep on reading and keep on researching what you're doing so one of the books I'm currently reading is the center cannot hold which is a brilliant book by a professor at law or in law and she writes about her experience with schizophrenia and I would highly recommend it if you find this an interesting disorder or if you're in general interested about mental health so these are just some of the methods that I have learned during my PhD to allow me to remember information better

and also produce this information clearer to for example a new group of students that's trying to learn this but let me know if you have a way or a favorite learning technique because I'm always interested and also if you have some books that you really liked about learning I would also love to hear about about those and if not I will see you next week bye