 because you did say you'd take notes in your classes, right? Then the external brain literally is completely familiar to you. It's just, of course, I had to call it something cool. And actually, I stole this idea from the Duck Pounds in University of Oregon, Go Ducks. And they presented at some workshop about the external brain and I was like, oh my God, that's so awesome. And so I love the term external brain, but it's just your notes from class. And you can build them into whatever you want. Now, you have to make your external brain. You might be like, dude, why, why, why, why? The external brain is a place where you are going to build evidence of what you know. The act of building, the act of writing your notes, making them pretty, coloring things, rewriting them possibly, labeling diagrams, whatever. The act of doing that is doing something which is studying and learning. You're more likely to have things stick in your brain if you actually engage with the content in that way. External brains are whatever you want. You're never checked for accuracy. So you better make sure that you know what you're talking about before you start building one. Most people put them in a three-ring notebook. I have one here. I never taught that class. This human, who I love, she gave me her external brain. She never put the label for the class that she took for me, which was human anatomy. But she did, so I'm just going to show you her, I don't know, can you see that? Wait, now you can't see me. Hello. Okay, well, anyway, you can't really see her notes, but look, she just, I'm going to zoom in and see if you can see it. You can see that really good, huh? Just kidding. It's terrible. Oh, look, if I zoom out, you can see it better. Just notes. I don't even know why I care that you see it, but the whole point is for you not to freak out. Look, she had a little divider in there, very organized to separate out the content between exams. She put in images that she then labeled with structures that she wanted to do. She did a little bit of color in action here. I tend to use a lot of colors, whatever. You get the idea. It's just a notebook. I say big, that your external brain should be big, but that's just because some people make it big, like, holy big, because they're generating a lot of stuff and not all that stuff in their external brain. Some people, I had a student, I'm not kidding you, like, I wish I had something. Like, he had a notebook that is smaller than my phone, like one of those tiny little, like it was probably this big and it, he put all his notes in there and it was, like, that was it. It was like how, and the writing was so tiny. I wish he would have given it to me because that would have been an epic, glorious, diverse external brain. You want to have a place to keep it. If you want it to be a bound notebook by all means, go for it. I really, I don't care. I don't care about anything except the content has to be your own. I do allow people to put images into their external brain as long as the images are not pre-labeled. So if it's a picture from, I don't know, a textbook, you can't just put it in with all, you know, the textbook labels and captions and all that stuff. All that stuff has to come out. So cut out the picture or white out the captions and the labels but then guess what? You can go through and you can relabel it all. So you can have labeled images in there. You just had to do the work of the labeling. Lab, you're going to want to put lab content in your external brain. Like you're going to want to understand what we did in lab and you're going to want to have that stuff, those notes, that information in your external brain. And I'm telling you this because that's one, you have lab handouts. You don't need to write down every single process that you do for the class, for the lab. The main ideas, the data tables, like things that you think might be helpful for you to have in an external brain exam. Twice over the semester, we're going to have an external brain exam and it's open external brain. You can use anything that's in there. That's assuming all the content is legal. So it's all you made the content yourself. In addition to those exams where you actually get to use it, every day in lab, so every Tuesday, as soon as we start lab, I'm going to come around and check your external brain to make sure that you have new content in it so that you're keeping up with it. And it is a three-point assignment that seems ridiculously low, but it makes it super easy for me to be just like, yeah, you totally rocked it or not so much. If you have taken notes, which means you've watched the videos, you've taken notes, you've added in information from the previous lab, you're golden. That's three points that are easy. There's, I think, 13 external brain checks and two external brain exams. And altogether, that ends up being 10% of your grade. So it's a pretty easy place to earn your points for the class. And what else do you want to know about the external brain? Nothing. Nothing? Okay. All right, the last thing we're going to do is we're going to go back to that schedule and I'm going to talk to you about your week so that you know how you're going to carve out the time that you need to prep for this class.