okay guys please listen carefully to this video because it's important and quite frankly i'm not going to repeat myself again because i keep saying the same thing okay since a few of my active record videos went a lot just a tiny little bit viral um or at least a lot of people watch them i have gotten thousands of questions and basically it's the same thing usually about the fact that you guys think you don't have enough time to do active recall or it's always how do i make the questions i'm actually going to be showing
you in real life like me watching a lecture taking questions and showing you step by step how i do this so definitely watch to the end of this video because i will be showing you that after i've basically explained and answered your question so fear no more i've got the a to your q hi guys and welcome back to my channel my name is dr nella and my channel is nelly grace it is a lifestyle channel and i make videos all about studying productivity life health all that jazz and today's video as you can tell
as i've already said it's about active recall and i just want to thank the sponsors for this video for brain for brain i've talked about it before in previous videos especially my last active recall video i talked about it and you guys loved it okay so if you didn't know about full brain full brain is an auditory device that uses your voice to boost your brain it's absolutely amazing the technology is so cool because it uses the vocal auditory loop to use your voice to stimulate your brain and basically give your brain a mental exercise
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that and even for older people especially like the elderly if you want to help someone in your life that maybe is in cognitive decline right now maybe is struggling with some sort of cognitive decline this something like forebrain will help them to improve their memory to improve their cognition so this is perfect and ideal for all ages in the family and it would be a great christmas gift and if you use my code you can get 40 off your purchase which is perfect especially now that it's going to be christmas so active recall what is
it i mean you could just watch all of my videos to explain what active recoil is but just a quick definition active recall is an evidence-based learning principle that utilizes the idea of actively stimulating your memory during the process of learning but you guys already knew that right so how do you make the question so what i do is i don't take notes right this is the new thing in the study tube world stop taking notes i listened to a lecture so usually the they would they were live lectures when i was in medical school
so i'll tune into the lecture and i would participate in the lecture by paying attention so as soon as the lecture slides comes up every single lecture slide usually has a title so all i do is copy and paste the lecture slide title and make it into a question so what instead of it being if it's a statement i'll just put what or where or whatever it is that makes that question make sense this literally takes 10 seconds i'm doing i'm putting the question and then i'm engaging into the lecture so some of you always
say well how do i have time to make a question while i listen to the lecture i want i won't be able to make the questions making a question can literally take you 10 seconds it's just making the title of the lecture slide a question and then you engage in the lecture and listen to what the teachers or what the lecture is talking about or if you're writing it down write it down really quickly the lecture title you've got yourself a question and then pay attention to the lecture one of the other concerns that i
get is that this will take a really long time especially if the lecture is really long like a hundred slides long and all that stuff and i'm like sis welcome to medical school i don't know what else to tell you like that's just the reality yes it's gonna take you an hour okay then take an hour like i think sometimes in the study tube world we and i i mean maybe i'll put my hand up for this if i've been like this as well or maybe other people when it comes to learning have tried to
do hacks or or like quickly learning something or how to learn this so quickly or whatever it is right we want um instant i'll say it's a gratification but it's not gratification we want like study hacks all the time studying is hard and if you need to take two hours to go through a lecture then you need to take two hours because what else are you supposed to do what else are you going to do you're just not going to go through the lecture and i'm going to give you tough love in this video because
i feel like the questions i get sometimes is it's as if people want tick-tock studying listen tock is 10 seconds because someone has edited it to 10 seconds when you're seeing someone give a study with me in six minutes the study with me took six hours okay and then they edited it to 10 seconds so my point being that if you have a hundred lecture slide then you've got 100 questions okay now we're gonna get into why that's not a bad thing i might only get 10 out of 100 questions correct or even remember them
it doesn't matter the point is that you're trying to stimulate your brain and you're trying to give your brain a workout by trying to remember the answers to those things and if you were really engaging in that lecture you should be able to remember a lot of the information and when i say a lot of i'm being realistic here guys i'm not saying that you need to be able to reel off the whole lecture and all that stuff as long as you can at least get the idea down to answer that question then you remembered
something and the idea is not to remember everything from that lecture the first time you go through that lecture and again this uses the whole forgetting curve thing that i've talked about in my previous videos so what i do is after i make the questions during the lecture i usually don't go through those questions straight away i usually tend to give myself a couple of hours and then go through those questions or i wait till the next day and go through those questions so in total for one lecture it could take me as little as
an hour or it could take me as much as four hours to go through one lecture so i know again some of you are like i have like three lectures a day and four lectures a day how on earth am i gonna have time well how else were you going through it um how else were you studying your lectures before were you i'm sure you were just making notes right so what were you doing were you not look reading through the lectures and then making notes on those whatever which is passive learning which is proven
that it's not an efficient way of studying not saying it doesn't work it's just not efficient or the best so you were doing something and you were spending that many hours so just switch it and start spending that many hours with a way that it's efficient and evidence-based and it works so basically the concerns that i get a lot of the times i just think that are not realistic in terms of studying like you are in medical school for the most part most of you that watch me it's hard it's gonna take you a long
time and that's okay that's just the reality so the next thing that i'm going to do is show you in action right because or talk talk talk and no action i don't know finish the phrase i know it's a phrase it has an ending please comment below because it just left my mind so i'm going to show you so after scouring the internet for a while and realizing that i have now lost access to my university's moodle it's okay shared it here decided to just stick to kenhub because kenhub has loads of videos that kind
of act as lectures so i'm going to use one of those videos i just picked one at random i ended up at parathyroid parathyroid gland histology and i thought i would pick histology because histology is not something that is um that i find quite easy and also it's something that is not fresh in my mind right now so it's not like i've just picked like anatomy or something which i'm quite good at because obviously i've gone through six years of medical school um so i've just placed histology because it's something that i struggle with and
i thought i would jump my memory and actually do it as if i'm learning it for like the first time in a while and i'm also going to be using good notes on my ipad this is basically how i would study okay let's go so i'm going to try and concentrate and just pretend the camera is not there all right firstly let me make my title hello there you're just in time i'm looking for a group of p-shaped endocrine glands but i'm not quite sure where to find them yikes not down there let's try a
bit higher up shall we okay yes we need to focus on the more superior part of the body you got it it's in the neck next clue it helps to regulate calcium levels in the blood well that's technically correct the thyroid gland does produce hormones that regulate blood calcium levels but okay so right now what i'm doing is i'm listening i've just listened to the lecture and i've just started making uh questions straight away so as she is speaking there's she's saying facts so for example she said what she said these pieces this p shaped
um gland in the top of your neck so i've just put what shape of the thyroid gland obviously that might never come into your exam but that's something that will help me jog my memory to think what am i talking about and then the next question is i just put where are they she says they're in the neck obviously that's not that's obvious but it's not anatomical but it's just for this lecture does that make sense so i'm right what's she saying as fact i'm writing it as questions the next thing was what did they
do she said that the parathyroid glands help regulate calcium levels in the blood and that they also produce hormones so i remember that already because i've wrote those as questions and that's what i would answer later on so as she's speaking i'm just going as she's saying i'm writing questions straight away and i'm i'm quick too with the questions because this is a fast video i'm having to write really fast but usually lectures they're slower they take longer time and spend more time on each part but you're seeing the pace up with of which i'm
doing like this and i'm really paying attention i'm really listening while i'm writing this because so that i can remember so that's what i'm doing so guys just a quick disclaimer that i use this video because it was the best thing that i could find i don't have access to my lectures anymore but when you're listening to lectures like i've already explained lectures are usually a lot slower they're not 10 minutes they're like an hour long or if not longer so you can just write your question and then take the rest of the time to
concentrate on what the teacher's saying because i'm not a big fan of multitasking um because it's just proven not to be the most productive thing to do but in this video i'm doing a little bit more multitasking as in i'm listening and writing at the same time but that's not what i would recommend um doing a lot off like i said this is particularly good for lectures this method that i'm doing because lectures are slower they are longer but i still manage to write the questions because i've got the practice um over many years of
knowing how to do both but um if you find that you are not catching information you might just need to pause videos when you're watching like this and rewind them um to get that information again so that you're not missing anything so that was done and if you could see the screen recording of that you see how frantically i was writing those questions and that's because i write questions as i go and they're not like this big big scientific questions i'm just writing what the lecture is saying so don't overthink your questions that's the first
thing don't overthink your questions if you're like me and you don't really care about this first this first draft of questions don't don't think about how cute they look and all that stuff okay you can do that later right now you're trying to learn okay you're gonna try to make pretty notes so right now as you can see it was mine right now you probably can't see if about put it here as you can see with mine like it's all over the place like i go this way i go that way there's nothing cute about
it so what i will do is not straight away usually i'll stay a few hours like i already said and then i'll come back and i will answer the questions but i'm going to answer them now just so you guys can see what i do and then you can get like a gist of how i actually then learn i'm just going to say the answers out loud but this is what i would write down so for example the first one said what shape are the parathyroid glands i remember her saying p p shaped um she's
where are they they're in the neck here as i remember from the picture uh i would write down there in the neck if that's what the lecture said if it wanted more anatomical like explanation then i would explain that they are behind the thyroid gland there's four of them and they are on either side of the thyroid gland lobes again she said that in the lecture so basically when i write a question i will go in as much detail as i can for that question so instead of just putting where are they instead of just
putting neck i will go into detail as much as i remember like i've just said the next question is what do they do i remember um she says from the lecture she says that the parathyroid parathyroid glands create hormones like the parathyroid hormones that regulate calcium and then the question what is the gross anatomy again it's like what i said before they lie behind the thyroid gland and they are on either side of the thyroid lobes and there's four of them and they're p sized um what latin name of parathyroid gland i remember it said
um parathyroid glandular parathy parathy parathyroid parathyroidia um i'll spell it here like from what i remember what homo is made by parathyroid gland i've already answered that it was the parathyroid hormone uh what does it do it regulates calcium levels it increases the calcium levels in the blood by taking them out of the bones taking calcium from the bones and it increases the blood circulation of calcium and then it was what does it do i've already answered that what is it it what is its antagonist as in pth and it was calcitonin what stain is
used to prepare those slides it was h and e stain hematoxylin and eosin what color does the nuclei stain i think it was the hematoxylin stains the nuclei a darker purple and then what color does its proteins and cytoplasm stain and it was a lighter pink that they stained because they do the hemotoxin first and then it stains all the nuclei then they wash it off and then put eosin on top she said and then that stains the cytoplasm and the um proteins pink see i'm having to close my eyes because i'm seeing the lecture
and i'm doing active recoil right now guys like literally i have not gone through something like this in years like as in the prior thyroid gland specifically obviously like i said i do remember a little bit of it but this is purely from what i remember from this lecture so to the residential geek so i basically remembered a 10 minute video purely because i wrote questions and they made me think i had to think i had to think i'd think and now i promise you i will know that so much more than if i had
just made notes as she was speaking so like i said usually instead of saying it to you what i would be doing is writing down the answers then i will go over the to the video again and i'll just skim through to get my answers to make sure that i've got those answers correct because i don't need to watch it all again in slow motion i can just skim through it see what my if my answers were correct see what i missed out add it into my answers um correct whatever i got wrong that's it
move on to the next one you guys can see i also spoke it out loud which is where forebrain comes in what i will do is i will take the headset put it on and i will rehearse the answer answers out loud and activate that like i said that vocal audio loop activate my brain get my brain working get exercising and increase my memory so i'm doing so much to help me to learn and to remember these things and it's not just because i'm this smart person guys this just works like this is what you're
supposed to do and it works it might not work for you i understand but this is what i do and as you can tell i just remember determining lecture quite easily so yeah can i just say as well guys do not get overwhelmed okay i probably have a couple more years of practice doing this than you do so the first time you do something like this it might be really hard for you you might not be able to get all the questions all of this stuff you might come across a lot of challenges it doesn't
mean that you are bad or that you are just not smart or whatever it just means that you need more practice the first time i did something like this it probably wasn't as easy for me i know it wasn't as easy for me but i've just learned over time so give yourself time and try it don't knock it until you try it and if you do try it a couple times maybe for a module maybe for a year maybe for a few months and it's not working then it's okay you know try something else but
just to encourage you that it's okay if you don't do it as well if you take you a bit longer if it takes you a bit longer to kind of get the hang of it it just means maybe you just need more time or it might not be for you and you can just try something else like flashcards so guys that is practically how i do the thing i hope that this was helpful and i hope that it really like opened up your eyes to personally how i did active recall in medical school and this
is how i got like those hundred percent that i'm always talking about in my videos this is how i did it and this is like literally there's nothing more to it nothing more nothing less so yeah i really hope that was helpful if you have any more questions do not leave them in the comment down below because i don't know what else to tell you thank you guys so much for watching this video i will catch you guys in my next video i am going to put a playlist here all with all of my active
recall videos so that you can really watch them and i promise you if you watch them in detail and you critically think about it you really will get it and you'll be able to start practicing this in your life today thank you so much for watching once again and if you made it this far that means you really enjoyed this video so click the subscription button below so you don't miss any more videos like this and if you're already subscribed then thank you i love you very much see you in my next video bye