However many warnings or pieces of advice that advocate spaced repetition, or the notion to begin studying and learning ahead of time, many of us still won’t.
That’s for good reason. We get busy with other things and can’t break our stride to review something even for five minutes. We have many other subjects to learn and study. We just feel lazy and tired at the end of a long day. These are all legitimate excuses.
We know this isn’t the most effective way to learn, but unfortunately it’s what we’re stuck with sometimes. There’s a saving grace ? recall that most effective learning targets long-term memory. That’s the main goal of spaced repetition, to make the leap from short-term memory to long-term memory, where you no longer have to rehearse or practice it to remember it. You can simply recall it with a bit of thought and it’s in your brain for an indefinite period of time.
To cram for a test, exam, or other type of evaluation, we don’t need material to make it to our long-term memory 먹튀. We just need it to make it slightly past our working memory and be partially encoded into our long-term memory. We don’t need to be able to recall anything the day after, so it’s like we only need something to stick for a few hours.
This chapter optimizes for learning as much as possible in as little time as possible, while also ensuring that you can retain it. It’s a difficult task, but if you’re going to pull an all-nighter, you might as well do it in the right way.
Chunking
I discussed chunking briefly in the previous chapter, but it’s more appropriate to discuss it in detail here. Chunking is the act of turning five pieces of information into one piece of information for the sake of memorization.
For example, which is easier to memorize: 3 3 5 9 1 0 or 33 59 10? That’s how chunking works. You do it every time you try to keep an account or telephone number in your memory before you use it. You simply combine information on a conceptual or semantic level such that your memory has to hold fewer objects.
Recall that our short-term memories can only hold seven items on the top range. Chunking gets around this because where there was once six numbers to remember, now there are three. That’s a type of chunking that is called grouping. You create something to memorize from seemingly unrelated and random pieces of information. Here are a couple more examples to illustrate how to use chunking to your advantage.
If you have a list of things to purchase, you can create a mnemonic device, like mentioned previously, where the first letter of each item forms a new word. If you want to buy pears, apples, bananas, and underwear, that forms the word PABU, which is easier to remember or write down.
For the same list of things to purchase, you can also just push the words together. If you want pears, apples, bananas, and underwear, you could try to remember the word “pe-ap-ba-un,” which represents all of the information on the list. You’re substituting four pieces of information for one.
Another example is to visualize a scene or environment where all the elements work together. See a picture mentally of a setting that contains all of the aforementioned items, and keep in mind there are four of them total. Where might you see three pieces of fruit and a pair of underwear? Perhaps a hoarder’s kitchen table, or an obscene grocery store. The more vivid the setting, the more memorable it will be.
In each of these cases, you’re creating something new, or referring to something already in your memory that reminds you of multiple pieces of information. Make a connection and create something meaningful, which is easier to remember. This is the reason raw data and information rarely ever makes it to long-term memory. The moment you can see a pattern form, it is easier to remember.
Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a focus technique that promotes undistracted work and planned breaks. It’s straightforward. You look at your study time in thirty-minute blocks. You will focus, turn off your phone, and ignore all distractions for twenty-five minutes, and then take a planned break for only five minutes to give your brain a break to not run at full capacity. This is one block, and immediately after, you dive into another thirty-minute block.
Most practitioners of the Pomodoro Technique make it their goal to complete eight thirty-minute blocks, but you might find that difficult if you’re new to the concept. My recommendation is to aim for three blocks at first, and see how you feel at that point.
The greater purpose of the Pomodoro Technique is to avoid multitasking, and wasting mental capital switching between tasks and backtracking, while you try to find where you were. This frequently will result in one step forward, and one step backward, and after a couple of hours, you might find that you’ve only made minimal progress across all your tasks. Complete attention and focus for twenty-five minutes, no small amount of time, will allow you to build momentum and really make way through your information.
What’s more, it’s pretty likely that you’ll overshoot twenty-five minutes, in which case, you should take a ten-minute break after fifty minutes. There is absolutely something to be said for putting your head down and grinding for a bit.
The Pomodoro Technique also brings awareness to your need for breaks and distractions. It’s natural that we can’t sustain focus all the time. You can’t sprint endlessly, you would need a break eventually before you burn out. Sometimes your mind is fried and full, such as when you start reading the same page over and over without really comprehending it. That’s when you know you need a break. It’s a natural part of the memorization and learning process, even when you are cramming.
Continually Summarize
Remember, there’s limited time and limited space in your memory banks when you’re cramming, so you need to consume and memorize as little information as possible that will impart as much meaning as possible.
The goal is to give meaning and association to smaller pieces of information. Essentially, you want to be able to cram a paragraph’s worth of information and recall into a single sentence. The way to do this is to re-write and re-summarize your notes into shorter and shorter versions, until they can ideally all fit onto a single piece of paper (or even an index card, depending on the context). Ideally you also write this all by hand, because you are forced to be economical with your words when writing by hand.
Let’s say you start with ten pages of notes, which you first summarize and condense into three pages. This will force you to analyze what’s important and filter all the clutter in your subject matter. You’ll also begin memorizing on a deeper level when you review your material with this type of goal. Then, you summarize the three pages into one page. The act of combing through your material and thinking, “Is this important and does this contribute to the overall point?” is just as important as the actual act of writing out the new summary version.
Finally, you might summarize your single page so it fits onto an index card, which will further force you to condense, filter, and analyze the important parts. By this point, you’ve essentially written your notes three additional times, but in a way that is friendly to your limited memory banks at the moment. What’s more, it’s not like you will only remember what is only on the index card. Each sentence and bullet point will have so much more meaning and information behind it because you’ve filtered it three times and thought about it deeply.
You’re working with limited space, and continually summarizing your material is going to make the most of it.
Make Connections
Raw information on the page isn’t going to make it to your memory very easily. What you must do is give meaning to it, make it relate to information you already know, and simply make it memory-worthy.
First, make sure you understand your material. When you comprehend something, it will be easier to cram into your brain than something that is a puzzle to you.
Second, actively seek to make as many connections to existing knowledge as possible by continually asking, “It’s like X, except Y…” It doesn’t matter if it’s not particularly related, just make a connection as to how they might relate. It’s this deeper analysis that hardcodes information, not the actual analogy, metaphor, or comparison. Additional questions to ask to make connections to existing information are, “It’s the opposite of X…” and “This has the following three elements in common with X…”
Third, reason out loud to yourself. This is where you use phrases such as, “So this X happened because Y…” and “Z only occurred because X…” You’re basically narrating how everything fits together. Understanding context and logical flow will help your memorization.
Use Space
You might not be able to do true spaced repetition if you are cramming at the last minute, but you can emulate it in a small way. Instead of studying subject X for three hours only at night, seek to study it one hour each three times a day, with a few hours between each exposure.
Recall that memories need time to be encoded and stick in the brain. You are doing the best imitation of spaced repetition you can with what you have available. To get the most out of your limited studying time, study something as soon as you wake up, review it at noon, at 4:00 p.m., then 9:00 p.m. ? or similar. The point is to review throughout the day and get as much repetition as possible.
During the course of your repetition, make sure to study your notes out of order in order to see them in different contexts, encode better, and also use active recall versus passive reading.
Finally, make sure that you’re reciting and rehearsing new information up to the last minute before your test. Your short-term memory can hold seven items on its best day, so you might just save yourself with a piece of information that was never going to fit into your longer term memory. It’s like you’re juggling. It’s inevitable that you drop everything, but it could just so happen that you’re juggling something you can use.
