 So you want to know how to memorize better in medical school impact. What have I shared techniques? I got to help you double, if not triple your long term retention. If you're interested, we're going to get into all of that in this video. All right guys, welcome to another episode in the MD journey. We're here all about helping people just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine resident and making videos like this one for the last two plus years on YouTube. If you enjoy this video and you enjoy topics on memorization, let me know by smashing that like button. But today I want to talk about some techniques you can use to really double not triple your long term retention. These are techniques that I started using. They really just changed the game for me. I was studying anywhere from eight to 10 hours a day. I know it sounds crazy and some of you guys may still be in my shoes today, but I was able to use these techniques to not only learn more, but also spend less time doing it because they're more fun. So I was able to take that eight to 10 hours and convert it to like five to six to eight hours, depending about studying for exam. So if you want that kind of transformation, you want better grades. Let's get into those techniques. So the first technique that I love is sharing with medical students is called the memory palace. Now you may have heard of this before. You may have heard people talk about it, but I want to give you an example. We're actually going to use the back of my living room so I move around a little bit. So the first step of the memory palace is it requires you to find a location that you're familiar with and maybe your apartment and maybe the drive that you're making to school or to work can be essentially anything you're familiar with. And what you want to do is then you want to go in order of like one, two, three. You want to dictate different things in the room or on your route or mental route as being the first thing, the second thing. So in this example, we'll say that TV is number one. We'll say the island is number two. We'll say this chair, that one is number three. And then we'll say that this table is number four. And now when I go ahead and close my eyes again, I'm going to start thinking about the different items, but I want to go ahead and go ahead and chronologically go from item one to two to always struggle three. And so finally four. And those are going to be my placeholders because I know this room so well, I know those items so well. Once I have the items chronologically in my head, I can then start assigning different things I need to memorize to them. So if you're trying to remember a medication or a list of antibiotics or a list of, you know, maybe bacterias for your microbiology class, you can go ahead and say, okay, I want to know all of the gram-positive bacteria that I have in this list. And so I'm going to put, you know, staff worries here. I'm going to put strep here. I'm going to put bacillus here. And ideally as you're going through the different things you have to memorize, an easy way to memorize them even more is you make them a little bit more interesting. So what you do is instead of just imagining staff on the TV, try to say what does staff make you think of? Maybe you watch a sketchy micro and kind of remember the Egyptian kind of skit that they have there where he's holding a staff or you can just imagine somebody with a staff that just pops up on your TV. And you can know my first item is going to be staff aureus and he's going to be holding a staff who just opens up my TV. The next thing can be strep. You know, I think of strep throughout. So I'm just going to be thinking of somebody grabbing their throat on my kitchen island. And the last thing can be bacillus. I don't know what bacillus can be for you. You can imagine that image here. Now when you're memorizing, all you got to do is close your eyes and say, okay, what was that first thing? What showed up my TV? It was a guy with a staff. Staff warriors. Cool. What was the next thing that showed up? Oh, on my island. I remember something grabbing their throat strep throat streptococcus. And then last thing, I had that image for bacillus and I put them right here. You see how it's easy to make this both fun entertaining as well as really quick. You just add one item, try to memorize it. I had a second one. Try to memorize it and add number one and two together to make sure you can go from one to two and then just kind of do it on a flow. And this works great for medications. It works great for if you're trying to memorize a biochemistry pathway. If you can give each pathway a picture in your head or a creative description, which may take some time. Once you get that creative description down, the rest of the memory is super easy. The beauty is, is that if you can long as you can remember the first thing, it's much easier to kind of go through your memory palace. That was a quick demonstration of how you can use this technique and you can use it in many different creative ways. I'll link down below another video or kind of explain the process as well as other resources that are created specifically to do this for you. So check that out down below. And before we go into the last two memorization techniques, if you're enjoying this content, just let me know by hitting that like button. It really helps both this video as well as this channel grow in YouTube. So quick selfish ask, go ahead and hit that like button and then we can get back to the rest of the video. Now getting into memorization technique number two, I feel like this is both learning technique as well as memorization technique. And this is personally what I call my review container. And I don't have one with me right now, but just imagine you have a bunch of scrapped pieces of paper that are about yay big or like index card size. One of the things that affect our memorization the most are topics that are really hard. So imagine when you're studying, you know, you're going through a syllabus lecture and you're going to identify things that you know really well. You're going to memorize them, but then there's going to be things you're like crap. I really hope this doesn't show up on the test. And usually that's kind of where we stop. We just hope it doesn't show up when we try to learn as much as we can of the high yield material. That's easy to learn, but to really memorize the harder information, you really have to make sure that you're doing a little bit of space repetition and doing it continuously, but specifically on the hard topics. The way the review container works is essentially when you find a topic that you think you'll struggle on, either you missed a question or when you're reviewing your syllabus, you just don't understand it well enough. You can remember it maybe a week or two later when the test may come across. What I like to do is I just write the topic on the top and then I write my explanation or if you want to save time, just write the name of the topic. The way this works is you have a container where you have a bag, a Ziploc bag or part of your desk where you can just kind of stuff all of these notes and scrap pieces of paper over time. And then each night spend like five, ten minutes, nothing crazy. Grab a random piece of paper and ask yourself maybe the topic is Staff Warriors. We're just going to use that example. Ask yourself how much of Staff Warriors do I know from the slides from lecture? If you're looking at the piece of information and it still doesn't feel like it's clicking, maybe you don't have enough to say about Staff Warriors, maybe you're just kind of saying it's a superficial piece of knowledge you already knew, then it's a good indication that you can spend another five minutes and just look up something on Staff Warriors, pull up the PowerPoints and try to memorize a few of the things and maybe use the Memory Palace to help you understand the different features of Staff Warriors and kind of go a little bit more meta using Memory Palace on the Memory Palace. But the beauty of the review container is every night you spend five to ten minutes, nothing crazy and you randomly grab concepts and you try to teach yourself and once you go ahead and grab a concept and say I know this well, I put it in there, but I feel comfortable, you take it out. And if it's still difficult, you put it back in. And so the only thing you have left in your review container are information either you haven't reviewed or information that's still tripping you up and the more you go ahead and spend repeating your focus on these hard topics, the easier it's going to be to approach them on test day and the less topics you're going to have that say, oh crap, I really wish this doesn't show up on the test. You're going to spend so much of your time, even if it's a little bit every day getting through them that there's not going to be a lot of hard topics left for you to be tripped up by. So that's basically the review container before we get into one of my favorite techniques for number three. If you enjoy the review container or if you want to know more about studying, go ahead and comment down below. Let me know what questions you have about how to study better or what memorization techniques you personally use. Have you used something similar to the review container in the past? Comment down below. And my third memorization technique may seem again like a learning tool, but it really can help you understand if you memorize something effectively. And this is the brain dumb technique that I've taught in a lot of my videos. Basically how this works is you go ahead and you grab a blank piece of paper. So here is my paper for the day and you choose a topic that you want to teach yourself and ask yourself can you essentially reiterate the lecture on paper and scratch and kind of in a shorthand form? Essentially, can you get from the start of the lecture to the end of the lecture after you've kind of gone through the lecture and you've reviewed it? You understand what the flow is. You understand the pieces of information they've taught what the main headings are. So ask yourself if you can recreate that. We're going to continue with their staff worries example. We're just going to say maybe you had a full lecture on gram positive bacteria. Well, let's say you're going to go ahead and now use the brain dumb to recreate a gram positive bacteria lecture. You remember the different bacterias that they try to teach. Now what you want to do is say how much can you regurgitate from your head from that lecture on to the piece of paper without using any other references? And the beauty of this is it's not really about how much you know, but when you start to find a piece of information that you kind of know but not well enough to write down. What I like to do is essentially just put a star next to it and I move on and I try to recreate as much of the lecture as possible. And I spent like 10 minutes on my first time. It's nothing crazy. I'm just trying to show myself how much I know and how much I don't know and all those stars and highlights or whatever you want to put really indicate you really don't understand this lecture. And then I spend, you know, another 10, 20 minutes, however much I need to review the lecture and regain that information, maybe review my lectures, review my outlines. I try to do it again on the other side and it's not about being neat. No one, no one has to be able to read this. You just have to be able to say, okay, I'm going to, I know this was a part of the lecture. I'm going to start writing this down and eventually you feel trapped. You don't know how to go from point A to C because that B piece of information is missing from your brain for whatever reason. That is a beautiful memorization technique to really both connect dots and then identify what you don't know. So using the combination of the memory palace, the review container and the brain temp. Those are just some of my favorite memorization techniques and learning techniques have really helped double and triple my retention rate and medical school and I still use some of them to stay as a physician. So I know in this video guys, that was a lot. Hopefully you found a lot of golden nuggets and you found them helpful. If you want more resources on how to study better of a few places that I recommend you go. One, we have a whole playlist of my other videos I've made on how you can study better, how to become more efficient. But if you really want like a step by step, somebody holding your hand and teaching you, this is how you can make the perfect study system for yourself. We do have a three week study program on MD journey dot com called level of your studying. If you want to know more, if you want to know what our students have already experienced after they've gone through that course, there's a lot of positive reviews. So I'll just link it down below if you're interested. But if not, you know, there's a lot of free content that you can still check out on the YouTube channel. I'll link that playlist down below. If you're interested in checking out level of your studying, I'll put it right here. But that's pretty much it for this video, guys. Make sure before you leave like and subscribe to really help this video as well as the channel. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.