 What is up guys? Karma Medic here and today I want to make a video all about how it is that I memorize things at university and because I've been at university for six years now I did a four-year undergraduate degree in Canada and I just completed my second year of medical school. I've had many many years in order to figure out the best ways to memorize different pieces of information. Now this video is not going to be about acronyms and mnemonics and other things like that. Those are very good techniques but I'm sure you've heard of them before and I want to talk about techniques that I've sort of thought about and developed over these years and maybe you guys can find them useful and introduce them into your own memorization as well. Now obviously we might not be studying the exact same subjects but what I hope to get across in this video is the techniques and the skills and the ideas of memorization that I'm using and then you guys can go on to apply them to whatever it is you're learning. If you guys are interested in videos about studying or you're interested in medical school feel free to subscribe to my channel and you'll see all the videos from me in the future. So my advice when it comes to memorizing different facts is you want to look at the piece of information that you actually need to remember and then you want to run through a series of these techniques and skills that I'm going to show you in this video and see if any of them can apply to what you need to memorize and if they do it's just going to make the process a whole lot easier. So without further ado let's look on my iPad and I'll show you guys the techniques that I'm talking about. Okay so here on my iPad this is Notability which is the app that I use to organize all of my lecture notes at university. Over here on the left you can see progress test 3 which was the most recent exam that I wrote at medical school and then over here I created a document that I called random and this was basically a list of random facts that I just needed to memorize. It was things that I just couldn't understand or there was nothing to understand I just had to remember these different relationships. So you guys will see this is a very very long document and you could probably memorize it just by rote memorization and force but I've have figured out a couple of techniques and things that you can do to make memorization like this easier. So the first thing that I want to talk about is what I call the rule of opposites and so many times and especially in medicine you can memorize a bunch of different things just by simply remembering that something is the opposite of the other. So for example at some point I needed to remember these four valve defects and whether they occurred in diastole or in systole. So you guys can see in this table that an aortic stenosis valve defect will be heard in systole, an aortic regurgitation valve defect will be heard in diastole and so on and so forth. So you guys can see here that I have one, two, three and four different relationships to remember. However I can memorize this whole table by only memorizing one relationship. So you can choose any one of these four relationships to remember. Personally what I find easiest is that aortic stenosis valve defect will be heard in systole and then just by remembering about one relationship you can figure out the other four. So for example aortic stenosis occurs in systole and I know that for the aortic valve defect there's only one in systole and one in diastole and by that logic that means the aortic regurgitation must occur in diastole and then if we reverse that and go to the opposite, mitral stenosis can't be systolic because we already used systolic for aortic stenosis and so that must be in diastolic and then mitral regurgitation must be in systolic because mitral stenosis was in diastole and so just by remembering this first line over here we were easily able to remember and recall the other three lines. Now another very important thing that helps me with memorization is that you will see that I've taken the word aortic stenosis over here and I've converted it just to AS and I've taken the word systolic and I've converted it just to S. The less number of letters or words or sentences whatever that you memorize the easier it's going to be to recall all this information. I highly highly recommend converting everything you have to memorize into as little characters, diagrams, symbols etc as possible. So that's the first tip. Let's move on to the second one now which is talking about color, physical location and muscle memory. This table contains four different types of cancer and they're different risk factors and protective factors. So RF over here stands for risk factors and protective is for protective factors and what you will see is that the same factors are repeated for different types of cancers and they can be either risk factors or protective and so that was getting me quite confused and it caused me to get a bunch of these questions wrong so I thought I would make this table and memorize it. The first thing that I wanted to do was generate my table structure okay so we have cancer over here risk factors and protective then I needed to remember the cancers in a way that was going to be easy for me to remember so I could reproduce this table and what better way to do that than to put them in alphabetical order. So we'll start with breast cancer then cervical or cervical then endometrial and then finally ovary. This way because they're in alphabetical order it's going to be very easy for me to remember which one is in the first row which is in the second etc etc and after that I used colors in order to remember where the different risk factors were within that table. So for example you will see over here that I have colored obesity in with an orange highlighter and obesity down here again in an orange highlighter and so now when I look at this table I start to remember that orange color is in the first row and in the third row and when I look at this table more and more and more that color coordination becomes more apparent and easier for me to remember because colors are a lot simpler and easier to remember than the full words such as obesity and you'll see that I've done this for a bunch of different factors here you can see smoking is in purple cocp which is the combined oral contraceptive pill is in yellow and that appears four times so that's the first thing that I did used colors in order to remember the placements of these different factors the second thing that I did was looked at physical location so I didn't actually end up memorizing any of these factors themselves what I ended up memorizing was their physical location within my table so for example for cocp I just remembered that it was one one skip to the right one one and that way I knew that cocp was a risk factor for the first two cancers and a protective factor for the second two in a similar manner I remembered that null parity and obesity were both found in the first and third row on the left hand side and also similarly that smoking was found in the middle two rows one on the left and one on the right and I won't go through all the different factors because it'll just take forever but the point is that I was memorizing where the factors were physically located in my table as opposed to the actual words themselves and so that physical location is what allowed me to remember the different places of this table so let's give that a test real quick I'm just going to cut this table over here and I'm going to attempt to redraw all those different factors so again I memorized it as so I don't actually remember the remaining factors but for almost a month after the original exam if I managed to remember what's written here I think I will have done pretty well so let's see so actually not that bad a month after the exam I managed to remember a bunch of these factors and where they're placed so it means that this was a good way to memorize it and then the third thing that I want to touch on and something that I think is so important is muscle memory so this table when I was memorizing for my exam just like you saw me do write out all the different factors I must have done that maybe six or seven times and I think by the third time maybe the fourth time it just became muscle memory when I was drawing out the table I just remembered that COCP was here smoking was here no leparate was here etc etc it just became something that I did with my hands without even thinking about it and in fact I remember listening to a song and rapping along to the lyrics while also drawing out this table so it became something that I was doing second handed without even thinking muscle memory is so so so good because it's not only something silent something that's going on in your head but it's something that you're acting out through motor skills and that will really help you remember something let's move on to technique number three which is alphabetical order or the natural order of things so when I'm looking at a piece of information that I need to memorize this is one of the first things that I will look at and the first type of association that I will try to make so for example at some point for my exam I needed to remember that the hormone glp1 over here is produced by the ileum and the hormone gip gastric inhibitory peptide is produced by the duodenum now this piece of information for some reason just happened to continue tricking me over and over and over I would keep forgetting it hence it was in my random document over here which just has all these random facts that I can't seem to remember for whatever reason so the very first thing and the easiest connection that you could make between these relationships is to think okay the word gip has an eye in it and ileum has an eye in it that is always going to be the easiest connection you can make for this case it turns out that that doesn't work because the gip is made in duodenum and vice versa so we're going to not be able to use that technique for this specific fact to memorize so the next thing that I did was to think about the natural order of these things in the body so as you will remember the duodenum then the genginum and then the ileum is the order of the different parts of the small intestine in the human body and one way that I remember that is through this acronym over here DJI which you probably know is a manufacturer of drones DJI the company and so in my notes for example in that random document and throughout all my lecture notes whenever I come up with some sort of word or phrase or acronym in order to remember something I put it in quotations and so that way when I'm reading my notes and I come across these quotations I know that that's a cue that I've made for myself in order to help memorize these different things anyways so I was thinking about the natural order of these different parts in the body and as we mentioned before duodenum comes before the ileum and then I looked back at these words and I know that I comes before L in the alphabet obviously and so that's the way that I remember that gip is going to be released from the duodenum because I is first in the alphabet and D is before the I in the duodenum genginum ileum and then vice versa or the opposite for this relationship over here another example of something that I just for the life of me could not seem to memorize was that type two alveolar cells not type one producer factant in the lungs and the way that I ended up remembering that was type two cells producer factant so type two has two T's and so the surfactant and that's the way that I remembered that so how I remember so many of these different facts is that I just look at the words and I try to create relationships between the two things that I have to memorize and any way that I can create some sort of connection is something that's going to be remembered by me much much better than if I was just trying to repeat it over and over in my head okay so moving on to the fourth tip or technique that I want to talk about it's relating to real life examples or stories in your head so when you read a piece of information when you think about a piece of information something that is most beneficial to me when I'm trying to remember it is thinking back to the hospital thinking to my the GP and trying to remember a time or situation where I saw a patient with x disease or where I saw a patient with x sign and that helps me remember this information the best and so an example of where I use this when studying for my exams we had to remember a lot of different changes that occur in a pregnant woman so for example cardiovascular changes respiratory changes hematological changes and as you can see here there was a very long list of them each one of these lines was something that we needed to remember whether it was increased or decreased and so for example here you can see that the heart rate is increased that's HR CO cardiac output is also increased total peripheral resistance blood pressure respiratory rates etc etc and so the way that I remembered this was just in my head picture some of the pregnant women that I had seen when in the hospital and on the wards and so a lot of these pregnant women were breathing quite deeply and so that reminded me that the tidal volume is increased so that's tidal volume here they were also larger in size because obviously they were pregnant and that's how I remember the different hematological changes that occur for example increased blood volume increased red blood cells which then leads to a decreased hematocrit because of the dilution so this is how I remembered all these different little things that you guys see here is just by picturing the different pregnant women that I've seen in the hospital and trying to relate that real life story or real life image to the information that I'm trying to memorize moving on to the last three tips here number five is just cutting down everything and this is something that I touched on before but you want to convert whatever it is that you're memorizing into the most simple basic form as possible you want to turn complete sentences into words you want to turn words into just letters or characters small diagrams etc you want to be able to cut down the amount of information that you're trying to remember this is honestly probably the most underrated tip this is so so so important everything you can convert into acronyms or little diagrams or symbols or whatever and it just makes everything so much easier to memorize number six is colors I've touched on colors before in this example that you saw here it can really help to create a visual connection that you might not otherwise get with just reading text or words and in addition to that an example of how I've used colors throughout all my lecture notes is that for example let's go to aging and talk about Parkinson's disease anytime that I've come across treatment or medication I always always always right to in a bright green color everything written in this bright green color over here so that's what you guys see here is talking about treatment or medications and so now in my head I associate treatment and medications with the color light green so when I'm in an exam and I'm trying to recall different medications or treatments my mind immediately goes to a list that I have of only bright green things that I've written down in my lecture notes now that might sound kind of crazy or weird but honestly it works if I'm thinking about treatments or medications those are the words that I think about because I know that they're the only ones that are written in bright green in my lecture notes okay moving back to that random documents that we can go on to our last tip which I think is very very important is creating words or sentences in order to condense and remember information so a very good example of how I used this in my most recent test was for remembering that damage to Broca's area in the brain resulted in expressive aphasia and damage to Wernicke's area in the brain causes a receptive aphasia and so here are the two relationships that I needed to remember Broca's and expressive Wernicke's and receptive and the first thing that I do is cut down all those words cut down this sentence basically into just two letters Broca's expressive and Wernicke's receptive and that's all the information that I need I don't need all of these different words if I'm trying to recall this piece of information in my head BE is so much simpler and easier than Broca's expressive so the next thing that I want to do is take a look at these words and think about how I can combine them into something easy and simple to remember in order for me to remember these two relationships here and what I ended up coming up with was the word beware so be where and the BE stands for Broca's expressive and the WR stands for Wernicke's receptive this E here should be small and so just like that I've taken this relationship here that I just for whatever reason could not seem to remember and I've turned it into one simple word which is beware and I'm never going to forget that when I'm trying to recall this recalling this one word here is so much simpler than remembering Broca's expressive aphasia Wernicke's receptive aphasia so the power of converting these big sentences or big things that you need to memorize into small words symbols or characters is really underrated okay guys and I think that's everything that I wanted to share so let me move back to my original position and I'll sign you guys out all right guys so those are the techniques that I wanted to tell you guys about in this video I hope that you found some of them useful and that you can incorporate them into your own learning and your own memorization of different facts do leave me a comment down below letting me know if you did find this useful and if you enjoyed the video do leave a like on it and subscribe to my channel so that you guys can see more videos from me if you're interested you can also follow me on instagram where I post a bunch of photos and videos about my day and life as a medical student and researcher anyways guys that was just a quick video I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next one peace