How to Force Your Brain to Study More in Less Time

what's the easiest way to study more in less time I spent years trying to figure this out so that you don't have to in this video I'm going to show you exactly that by teaching you a game-changing concept I call the three cognitive pillars and having coached thousands of students I've noticed that once students master all three of these cognitive pillars they're able to study much more and much higher quality and in a shorter period of time which means ultimately they get much better results in order to master the three cognitive pillars we first need

to understand why it's almost impossible for most students including probably you to study more in less time no matter how hard you try and that reason is that most students do not understand how the brain learns so here's the thing about learning it's a complicated process but if I break it down for you learning starts with information coming into our brains and the goal of studying is to turn this information into knowledge and knowledge is of course what we use for exams or for solving a problem at work or anything else so what does that

actually mean to study more in less time well it's not just about getting more information in that's easy the bottleneck is how hard it is to turn that information into knowledge and the faster we can do that the more effectively we can study and the shorter the amount of time it takes but it's not as simple as that because knowledge can be further broken down into two parts the first is retention retention is how long we can hold on to our knowledge for if we learn something today and we can still remember it weeks later

that's a sign of higher retention but there's a second often overlooked aspect which is arguably even more important which is Mastery and Mastery is the quality of that knowledge we're retaining so first example if you learn something but then you can only just recall facts and recite things word for word then your knowledge Mastery is pretty low it's quite superficial whereas if you're able to take information and connect it to other pieces of information see how it relates and then use them for complex problem solving then that indicates a higher quality or higher Mastery of

knowledge now this is important because remember our Dream outcome is not just to study more and less time the reason we want to study more and less time in the first place is so that we can get better results and so the only way that you can study more and less time in a way that actually leads to better results is to turn information into knowledge in a way that maximizes our retention and our Mastery after all there's no point covering twice the amount of content if you forget half of it or you can't even

use it in the way that you need to and so the real question is how do we we turn information into knowledge in a way that actually ticks both of these boxes and the most effective way to achieve this is something that researchers call Knowledge schemas the key to studying more and less time is being able to form knowledge schemas quickly and accurately so what are schemas a schema is basically a network of information when you build a strong schema of knowledge you're able to see how everything learn is connected together think of schemas like

the way that a city might organize its public transport system you have this network of train stations and bus stations and all these different routes and paths that connect everything together and ultimately this transport Network lets you get from one location to another location in the case of learning each location represents a piece of information or a concept I often say that it makes your knowledge integrated rather than isolated and it's this integrated of knowledge that reflects the level of Mastery that we have the quality of our knowledge more integrated or connected knowledge usually means

a higher level of Mastery which usually means you can use the knowledge for more complex application like solving harder or unconventional complex problems and so the research shows that when you're able to form these knowledge schemas correctly then it increases your retention and your Mastery and in fact the reason that top Learners are able to be top Learners is because when they see those complex problems they don't just see a problem they're actually able to pull it apart into each component concept they know where they need to start how they connect together and how they're

going to approach solving that problem as opposed to someone with only a superficial level of Mastery where they may not even know which components and concepts are relevant or even if they do know they don't actually know how to connect them together so forming scheme is super important but now here's the problem forming schemas is hard and so most people either don't form these schemas or the schemas they form are of a very low quality which is exactly why most people struggle to study more and less time without sacrificing the quality of their knowledge but

that's not all in fact it's actually even worse than that because when most people try to study more cover more content it actually makes them waste more time than before and that's because they're taking in more information but because they're not good at forming these knowledge schemas their attention of that information is very poor in fact it's going to be so poor that within just days or hours or sometimes even minutes after having learned it they already stting to forget and so now we need to spend extra time on just relearning the things that we

forgot but when we relearn it we're using the same process that doesn't give us good knowledge schemas which creates the same poor retention which means we now have to spend even more time and it's just this inless cycle of relearning and if that wasn't bad enough even after doing all of this this constant repetition the Mastery level we get is still not enough to solve those complex problems anyway it's like spending all of this time trying to plug the holes in this leaky boat and then after all of that trying to desperately stay on top

of our workload we're not even in the right boat and so if the process of studying for you looks like this then it's pretty much impossible to study more and less time at least not without changing your study methods to form better schemas and this is where the three cognitive pillars come into play the three cognitive pillars are what our learning process needs to check off to make sure that we're building highquality knowledge schemas efficiently and effectively and whatever technique you're using to study it needs to check these three cognitive pillars so I'll explain what

the three cognitive pillars are uh and I'll give you some tips on how you can make sure that you're checking them off in your studying the first pillar is something that in the research is called schema construction and schema construction addresses the the biggest problem that students face when trying to form a schema when I teach people how to do this the most common barrier they face is that they get easily overwhelmed cuz think about it we're trying to form a network of everything that we learn there are so many pieces of information and Concepts

and facts that we need to connect together and think about and hold on to it can be overwhelming and so the way that we prevent that overwhelm is with the schema construction pillar and schema construction is exactly what it sounds like it's about building our first schema but here's the tip you want to build a draft schema you're just laying the foundation for your schema to grow so here are three quick tips based on my years of experience that can help you to build a schema a little bit more easily and it's the same advice

I give in lots of my other videos and it's the one I teach in my program as well the first step is to just collect keywords for the topic that you're about to study in the real world when you're trying to study something you've got important Concepts and terminology and new information scattered all over the place it's in your lectures the lecture guide the textbook videos it splits our attention and in fact in the research it's actually called the split attention effect we can make this a lot easier for ourselves by quickly skimming through and

scanning all the resources that we've got available and just making a simple list of the keywords on a single page just by having this you've given yourself a single source to look at so that you know the general breadth of everything thing that you're going to have to learn within this topic and so when we're taking those key words and then we're trying to connect them together and wrap our head around it my second hot tip here is to use what you know for almost anything that you ever learn you're never going to have absolutely

zero prior knowledge on it you're going to have some prior knowledge about some aspect of it and it may be very superficial but it's more than nothing and we want to leverage that so start with the keywords that are a little bit more famili familar to you start with a concept that feel a little bit more comfortable and a bit more approachable you may know that there are a couple things that are already related and linked together start with that put that down as your first overarching scaffold and it doesn't have to be in the

order that the lecture has it or the book has it it doesn't matter we're just laying down some foundations to build off of later and when it comes to constructing scheme is accurately and quickly this is incredibly crucial because hot tip number three is to take a guess when you're making your first schema for a new topic that you haven't studied before you're not going to be accurate you're not going to know if for sure these things are connected in this way and you're not going to understand every single keyword because we haven't spent much

time reading or studying it yet but that's not the point we want to take a guess about what some of these relationships might be what some of these keywords might mean how they might come together and influence each other and create a network because once we've got that and we've got it on paper we can look at it and it's much easier to track our thoughts we can always change it and correct it and we should be doing that as we study more the biggest mistake I see people making is that they'll go into every

single keyword in a lot of detail straight off the bat we don't need to do that and in fact pillar number three which I'll talk about later actually is dedicated to helping you cover all of that detail you're not going to miss it don't worry if you jump into that detail too early right now you're just going to get overwhelmed and it's it's just going to make the entire learning process unnecessarily difficult so if you follow these three tips you should be able to form your first draft schema relatively easily and it shouldn't take you

too long and so once we' have formed our first schema through schema construction we now have the opportunity to upgrade that schema and upgrade our knowledge and it's this process of upgrading our schema that allows us to study more and less time without sacrificing the quality of that knowledge and so to upgrade our schema we can move on to the second cognitive pillar which is called schema assimilation schema assimilation is about taking that draft schema that draft mind map and network that we formed in the first part and then we're adding onto it we're opening

up our textbook we're going through the lecture sure we're consuming all this additional information but unlike before where we're just increasing that information and then it's just being lost because our attention is poor because we did step number one and we formed this draft schema it means that as soon as this knowledge comes into our brain we have a schema that's already drafted up for it to fit into and immediately we can start expanding and developing that schema and so the correct approach is to take in a piece of this information and then think about

how does it connect with my existing schema how does it relate to what I've already got what does it flow from and flow to and then you take another piece of information well how does this piece of information relate to the schema and with each new piece of information the schema expands now the main issue with the second cognitive pillar during schem or assimilation that I've noticed students run into is that they again get very very overwhelmed with all all the new information they're trying to assimilate like lines and arrows and relationships going absolutely everywhere

so here's my hot tips to do schema assimilation a little bit more easily the first thing is keep it simple again just start with the keywords and the concepts that just feel easier and simpler to approach as you study this more and as you learn more about it even the things that are really really detailed will start becoming simpler to think about because you just know more about the topic so you may as well just start with the parts that feel a little bit more approachable to begin with so as you're reading for example like

a textbook and you read this paragraph that feels really complicated hard to get you head around and it feels really dense and Technical and detailed just leave a little note next to it to come back to it later and just move on move on to the next part that still feels relatively approachable and when you do it this way naturally what happens is the second thing which is that you'll start using layers of learning instead of just trying to cover everything in one Massive Spirit of studying you're just going to be picking the things that

feel like make the most sense building a foundation adding to that with the next level of stuff that makes sense and then as you keep studying your knowledge gets more and more and more detailed and so when you do schema assimilation in this way you'll find that your retention of what you've just learned improves but also your confidence and Mastery of what you're learning goes up as well because you're actually starting to think about the new information in the way that you know you have to use it from the very beginning now before I get

into the final cognitive pillar I do have to say that building highquality knowledge schemas is actually still just one part of an effective Learning System and I do teach the other parts of the system in my program and I can study as well as in my other YouTube videos and while I think my YouTube videos are helpful I wanted to find another way to help you guys to develop your skills even faster and so I created my free learning drops newsletter it's an email sent into your inbox every week that I type myself to try

to help you to learn these research back study methods in a fraction of the time that it took me so if you're interested make sure to check it out I'll leave a link in the description for you to sign up now returning to the cognitive pillars the third pillar nicely brings all of this together and I've CAU them pillars because you do actually need all three of these to get the benefit of n schema in fact it's actually this third cognitive pillar that is the gatekeeper to being able to study more and less time and

maintain the retention and the Mastery and unfortunately if you don't execute on this final cognitive pillar the entire process will probably stay fairly overwhelming and not as effective for you so this third and final pillar is something I call schema reorganization and so you remember how in the first uh schema construction and schema assimilation steps I said that it's going to be very messy you're going to have points uh lines and arrows flying around relationships going everywhere it's going to be very disorganized and I said that you're going to have time later to come back

and clean it up and add any details and correct things well this is the time at this point the key is we're actually not taking any new information in we're simply looking at the schema that we' have been forming the information we've already added and we're just trying to clean it up reorganize it repackage it to make it simpler and easier to follow so the main purpose here is cleaning and simplifying and the main things that we're thinking about to do this is how can we group the information in a different way how can we

rearrange the items so that it looks cleaner and the arrows aren't all crossing over each other and is there any irrelevant or unnecessary information that we added on that we can now remove and surprise surprise this step can also be very overwhelming for a lot of students and the reason that this step can be really overwhelming is kind of like if you don't clean your room for a really really long time and it is so disorganized to the point where like you don't even know where to begin starting to clean it it almost feels like

it's easier to like set everything on fire just like start from scratch and so this feeling of it being too overwhelming can actually happen usually for two main reasons the first one is if in the previous steps we actually did follow these tips correctly for example if you didn't keep it simple enough or you focused on too many little details during the assimilation and now you're just overwhelmed with all of this additional information that you don't know what to do with and it's just too much for your brain to handle like any brain to handle

like my brain like I'm not calling out your brain and so it's really important that we actually do these first two steps correctly so that we're not overwhelming ourselves when we need to go and reorganize it but the other reason that we can be overwhelmed in this final step is when we spend too long before doing the reorganization so for example if you're spending too long in the assimilation phase and you're just adding more and more and more information we're actually just piling up so much information into our schema that it becomes overwhelming for us

to work with so naturally my heart tip for doing schema re organization really well is to do it often I generally recommend that for most studying like at a university level for example you should be reorganizing your schema which means not taking in any new information just looking at what you've got and then trying to reorganize it once every 10 to 15 minutes and so a lot of students when they first try to create schemas they'll actually spend like one or two or three hours just collecting and assimilating information to create this huge detailed comprehensive

map which is good but it's very very difficult and overwhelming to try to reorganize that and so if this happens we're actually going to end up with the same problem that we started with where we've got so much information that we're just stockpiling inside these disorganized schemas and our retention isn't going to be that high yet so we're just going to forget a lot of it and we're stuck in like a new Loop of relearning but there's actually another tip that's probably even more important and this is really the thing that you need to watch

out for my other tip is don't just do it often you have to actually do it which seems like a strange tip but most students do not do schema reorganization and the reason most students don't do schema reorganization is because it actually feels like you're studying more slowly so if you're trying to study more in less time doing schema reorganization can feel like you're actually studying Less in that time and because of this feeling a lot of students don't do the schema reorganization they're put off by it but here's the reason why it feels slower

it's because during schema reorganization remember we're not taking in any new information so if your concept of studying faster and covering more content is based on how quickly you're able to take in information this part feels like you have stopped learning but it's actually the opposite we're spending that time and attention on developing that knowledge converting the information into a high quality knowledge schema and remember this is the thing that creates the retention and the Mastery and ultimately the results and this is the crucial perspective you have to have on learning especially when you're trying

to learn quickly learning quickly is is not about how much information or content you cover it's not about the pages you flick through or the lectures you finish it's about how quickly you can form highquality knowledge schemas and anything that delays the formation of the schemas or makes the schemas too overwhelming or difficult to follow this slows down your learning and conversely things like the three pillars which help you to form these gers more quickly and more efficiently speed up your learning and if you want some additional support on how to master these cognitive pillars

or other evidence-based study methods then make sure to check out that free newsletter that I mentioned in the description thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one