okay so I'm gonna be honest with you guys I don't have a good memory a lot of people think it because I often give classes at the top of my head with just a marker and a board and because I tend to do very well in memory dance exams like the US Military and memory 10 subjects like microbiology and all that stuff right but truth be told I was never really one of those guys that reads a chapter once and memorizes everything without breaking a sweat no I'm more like the guy who goes downstairs opens
the fridge and forgets why he came down in the first place so because of the situation one of the questions I often get asked is how were you able to memorize everything you memorized in medical school right if it wasn't a matter of natural memory then what was the secret flashcards memory palaces fancy retrieval cues the special Red Sox of Destiny shout out to everyone who understood that reference well no the answer is none of that I mean don't get me wrong those tactics are awesome but they were a relatively recent addition to my study
protocol for most of my life as a student I didn't have have none of that all I used to learn were a bunch of old school learning techniques and that was that some of those techniques were good some were not that good and some were really really useful in helping me do something that some of the most modern techniques like flashcards and memory palaces often neglect which is that it helped me to transform seemingly arbitrary and random details into coherent intuitive and almost logical Concepts they didn't improve my memory they made me less dependent on
it and that was kind of my secret these sort of skill sets I just said are often neglected with all the fancy techniques we now use and love and that's precisely why I wanted to make this video to teach you guys what were my top three learning techniques to not only memorize but to truly comprehend and master what you study I'm also going to show you an amazing tool that I've recently found to implement these tactics and a few examples to show you how to apply all this stuff in real life quick warning though these
techniques are not quick fixes they don't give you instant improvements overnight no they're more like a long-term type of investment they require an upfront payment in terms of time and effort and they provide very little instant results but if you keep doing them if you keep investing and keep putting your effort then you will start to see how learning as a whole starts to get easier and easier so without further Ado let's get to it oh and I almost forgot this video was sponsored by a screen tool more about them in a minute okay so
there's a concept called reasoning from first principles you've probably heard of this Elon Musk talks a lot about this my first principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and and say okay what are we sure is true or as sure as possible is true and then reason up from there so that's first principles our reasoning approach to solve problems but you know what first principles can also be a learning technique if you learn how
to use it correctly if you get in the habit of asking the right questions in the right times now I want to clarify something here because a lot of people get this from first principles learning is not just opening a chapter on let's say high blood pressure and reading away what the normal birth pressure is why is it important what are the factors that influence it no that is just a standard learning and everyone does that the meaningful exercise the exercise that really makes a difference happens in all those situations when people usually don't zoom
out to ask the questions for instance since one time I was giving a class in diabetes and I asked my students do you know what is a typical serious adverse effect Associated to the use of Metformin everyone said lactic acidosis everyone knew that everyone knew that particular concept but then I asked why why does metformin actually cause lactic acidosis and nobody answered nobody knew nobody had taken the time to zoom out and learn the first principles behind this little detail if they had done it they would have realized that this seemingly arbitrary and random detail
wasn't actually arbitrary and random at all it was very logical and very intuitive and it links both the mechanism of action of the drug and the metabolism of glucose and it makes total sense but that didn't happen and that didn't happen because we as a students tend to study only the stuff that is portrayed clearly and obviously in the chapter that's in front of us and that's what I truly mean with first principles learning going beyond the mere explanations on the books and really asking yourself whenever you encounter a seemingly arbitrary and random detail why
does this happen the way it happens so for instance why do ecchymosis look the way they look why do ultrasounds look the way they look and produce the images they produce why do intergreen mutations lead to immunodeficiencies these are the sort of questions you need to start asking yourself these are the sort of questions that will start to transform all of these arbitrary and random things into very intuitive Concepts now you can totally do this in your head for sure but if you're one of those people who love to annotate everything you learn you will
find that starting like this is a pain in the ass because you see the very same mindset of first principles thinking makes you deviate from a topic you're trying to learn and so even if you leave spaces to annotate later or you switch notebooks or you switch folders you will find that all the solutions to truly learn first principles are either ineffective or inefficient so if you want my recommendation on how you can make this process a lot more expedient I would suggest you try out the application I told you about a minute ago this
crinkle this is a newish sort of note-taking application and I really really like it because it offers a lot of flexibility and speed when it comes to switching between ideas and perspectives so for instance let's say you're taking notes about physical injuries and you go to the part about ecchymosis and hematomas and then your first principle mindset kicked in and made you wonder why do hematomas look the way they look so instead of having to pull out our completely different notebook or open a completely different folder all you need to do in a screen tool
is type the plus sign and open a new card to annotate the first principles of the topic in that new card you can annotate freely everything you want about four friends which is the reason why ecchymosis took the way they look without disrupting the main focus of the note you were originally creating you can open the new card and leave it blank in case you want to search the first principles but later or you can totally delve deep into the rabbit hole and end up learning about poor friends and him and bilirubin and why does
our urine look yellow and all that kind of stuff but the point is that you can do all of this rapidly and while also staying organized two of the things that are very hard to do using the typical usual note-taking systems and yes in case we're wondering the new notes are reusable meaning that if one day you're studying another topic let's say Guild bird syndrome and you also want to link that note to the card on performance you can do do so by again just tapping a plus sign and selecting the card you've already created
the end result is that you're not end up looking like a hyper indexed Library like the ones you typically find in platforms like ambos where one thing leads to another and that to another and to another and so on and so forth and I don't know I just think that's quite awesome okay so back in 2018 I was still a medical student right and but at the time I was going through my pediatric rotation so one day when I was in the ER a patient with chronic granular motives disease arrived and I was a student
in charge of taking that history after doing this I presented it to my attending and then I received the typical comment of read about this disease and we'll discuss it tomorrow morning if you're a medical student you know that this happens a lot and that it can be really stressful as one afternoon is often not enough time to properly learn everything you want out of a complex topic like chronic granular limit is disease right so I totally understand why many medical students go home and focus a hundred percent on learning just the details they need
on just the topic they need however I for myself to use the completely different approach when I was learning I try to learn as much as I could from the general context that surrounded the topic as I possibly could for instance in the case of chronic granulomatous disease what I did was take about an hour or two of my afternoon to learn about the general classification and the Gen General features of the main primary immunodeficiencies now why did I do that why did I waste an hour of my precious time in learning about a bunch
of arguably unrelated topics that I'm probably not going to get asked tomorrow morning well because sometimes learning the big picture and the big patterns is precisely what one needs to properly learn and properly remember the little details and the little facts there's a famous chess experiment that proves this and veritasium has an amazing clip explaining it so I'm gonna play to you in 1973 William Chase and Herbert Simon recruited three chess players a master an a player who's an advanced amateur and a beginner a chessboard was set up with around 25 pieces positioned as they
might be during a game and each player was allowed to look at the board for 5 seconds then they were asked to replicate the setup from memory on a second board in front of them the players could take as many 5 Second Peaks as they needed to get their board to match from just the first look the master could recall the positions of 16 pieces the a player could recall 8 and the beginner only four but then the researchers arranged the board with pieces in random positions that would never arise in a real game and
now the Chess Master performed no better than the beginner after the first look all players regardless of rank could remember the location of only three pieces the data are clear chess experts don't have better memory in general but they have better memory specifically for chess positions that could occur in a real game the implication is what makes Chess Masters special is that they have seen lots and lots of chess games and over that time their brains have learned patterns so rather than seeing individual pieces at individual positions they see a smaller number of recognizable configurations
so that is sort of what I try to do with my study instead of focusing on the individual pieces the individual syndromes I focused on learning the big patterns the big categories of immunodeficiencies doing this not only helped me to ground each individual syndrome and remember it better but it also helped me in training my mind how to approach an immune deficiency case doctors use this sort of pattern recognition approach a lot you see a feature you decide which category it resembles the most and then you start to think about the individual syndromes that could
be at play here now to apply this technique all you really need is to ask the question to ask the question of what's the context here right how does the big picture of this subject look like and you can certainly do this in your head for sure but again if you want a tool that can help you be a lot more explicit in your approach I suggest using a screen tool you see in a scrinder you're able to do a couple of things first you're able to take the usual notes you usually take and where
you can dump information and images and videos and links just like in your typical note but then you're also able to minimize that note and use it as a moving piece in a huge white board this feature coupled with the ability to connect notes with one another allows you to create some of the most flexible and versatile big picture structures app ever seen so for instance here I have a board that has some of my notes on the primary immunodeficiency syndromes and what I did was basically organize the canvas into different sections with different maps
and each map represents like a different pattern of an immunodeficiency syndrome so for instance here I have my map on the diesel disorders and here is my map on the basal disorders and here's my map on the mixed disorders and so on and so forth now if I go ahead and zoom into the for example the diesel disorder map I can appreciate that there's a central note with all of the general features of this pattern right so I can appreciate like the general features maybe the all of the diseases and peripherally to that note I
can appreciate all of the other individual syndromes that are branching off I can open any individual note I want and I can read or I can type information I can also make it full screen if I annotate better or I can also minimize it and just get a glimpse of the note I can close it I can show a preview or not show a preview I can do a lot of stuff right as a matter of fact I can even do stuff like this I can start hiding away some of these links and I can
start reorganizing the big picture as you can see here not as into Maps but into like tables into multiple tables or single tables and make my columns I can also search for nodes that I've previously created like for example the one on four friends I can just search here for poor friends and I can drag and drop into the canvas if I want to have it be part of my big picture structure for some reason or another so yeah the app has a lot of features that help you explicitly train that big picture mindset that
we're discussing here also in case you're wondering squintel offers you the possibility of creating different spaces or boards to organize your notes and organize your information for instance here is my board on the primary immunode deficiency syndromes but if I wanted for instance to create a board on let's say Immunology as a whole I could do so as well by selecting all the notes I'm creating a new board with those notes in that way the the notes the cards the maps on the immunodeficiencies appear both in the primary immunodeficiencies board and also in the Immunology
board as a whole all right and the last learning technique I want to discuss here is something I like to call connecting outside the box and in simple terms is basically figuring out ways to apply the last couple of techniques to subjects where people don't usually think is possible to apply the last couple of techniques so take something like geography for example geography is actually a really good example because it's one of those subjects that people usually believe that is entirely up to memory because I mean how do you remember that Belgium is located in
this part of the map that this is bullet like do you ask why Belgium is located here do you search for the first principles of why is it located here do you search for the general classification and do you try to contextualize the classification of European countries that's not very helpful right so in these cases what I try to do is search for the first principles or the context by thinking or by trying to connect outside of the box this as far as I can tell is not really a teachable skill it's not something you
learn by watching a video it's something you learn through practice through doing but I'm just going to give you an example of how I would be able again to just memorize why Belgium is located here to show you what I mean so I don't know if you know this but in World War one and also World War II Germany invaded France well it actually emitted a lot more countries but one of those was France but the way it invaded France was not the typical way you and I would imagine if we looked at a map
why because if you look at a map you will realize that Germany and France are very very close together but the interesting thing is that Germany almost never attacks directly through their border what they do is that they first sneak into Belgium and then they attack through their border with Belgium that was a favorite move by the Germans back then and for me it's kind of interesting right it's for what it's kind of like one of those things about strategy and about war that almost seems like part of a movie so these sort of story
is really easy for me to remember and what I realized a couple of years ago was that whenever I listened to a story like this and I looked at the map I went ahead and looked them at the map the the location of the countries stopped being a random isolated detail and I started being like a very almost intuitive concept to remember now when I look at an European map locating Belgium is not hard at all because I remember the story and the story traced me back to the location now again that was just one
example but it goes to show you that sometimes there are non-intuitive ways to learn context or principles that directly help you to learn seemingly arbitrary details and facts now again you can do all of these sort of tactics and these sort of techniques by just using your head or just using your basic note-taking system and that's fine but as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the video applications such as screen tool do help and can help a lot if you want to be a lot more explicit and expedient with your learning process now how can you
use a screen tool in case you're interested well you have a couple of options first you have what they call An Early Access plan there you pay five bucks per month and you receive all of the current features available in the platform and that option is really great if you're truly interested in the app because those who signed to the Early Access plan will lock that price point at five dollar per month price point and join an exclusive community that has a saying in how the app is developed and where it goes so if you
want some special feature to be added or something to be changed about the platform this is where you want to be so that's one option but another option for those who are not exactly sure if they want to use the up or not that it seems promising but they first want to try it you have an option to join the wait list by joining the waitlist you you basically get out one month free trial where you can use and test all of the premium features of screen tool to see if they are what you're looking
for or Not by joining the waitlist you can also become part of the referral program and if you become part of this program you can pretty much earn cash for everyone who signs up to sprintel using your link so that's another cool option to have in mind but anyways I hope the video was useful thanks for watching and check out squintel using my link if you're interested and I'll see you in the next one [Music]
