 I got a big test on Friday. I've been studying all week, and now it's Thursday night. I'm laying in bed and I'm freaking out because I feel like I don't know anything. Who's been here? Who knows what that feels like? For me, I feel like I try to lay there and I just try to recall all the information that I know all at the same time. And then when I can't, I try harder and harder and it just gets impossible and then I get really anxious about it and I feel like I don't know shit. So the problem with this is in the moment I'm not actually realizing that there's really three types of recall. There's free recall, queued recall, and serial recall. And what I'm trying to do in the moment is I'm trying to use free recall to remember all this huge amount of information all at the same time and it's just straight up impossible. It's like feeling hungry and then getting mad at yourself for not being able to eat all the food in your fridge all at the same time. The fridge broke, so I had to eat everything. And I'm not realizing that most of my information is actually stored in a way that it's best to remember using queued recall or serial recall or a combination of the two. It's just not all available as free recall without the appropriate primer or queue. But it is in there, it's in my brain. So real quick, what are the three types of recall and why do they matter? Free recall is remembering a list of items in any order. Say you have a list of medications or body parts or enzymes or something to memorize. And this is just memorizing the names of these enzymes or body parts or medications through sheer straight up rote memorization, just reading them over and over again or what I actually like to do is write them over and over again until you're comfortable with the terminology. So it's just straight rote memorization pulling these terms out of your head and just knowing that that's free recall. Queued recall is remembering one of a pair of items when presented with its mate, either a visual or an auditory queue. So let's say you have that list of medications that you memorized through free recall. Now you can use queued recall to remember each medication side effects, mechanism of action, brand name or whatever else you wanna memorize about these medications. And remember, these are two item pairs. So the medication and its side effect or the medication and its brand name or the medication and its mechanism of action, just two items in each of these, that's queued recall. And so you'd see this in like matching questions on an exam, you know, match list one through nine with A through A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. Mash items one through nine with items A through I, which one goes with which? And the best way to study this for queued recall is simple flashcards. Notice I said simple because one very common mistake when making flashcards is putting way too much information on one side of the card. So like you'd have a medication and then you'd have everything about it, mechanism of action, brand name, side effects, where it's used, who's allergic to it, where it's not used, alternatives, all that on the other side of the flashcard. And then you may as well not be using flashcards. That's not the proper way to use flashcards. The best way to use flashcards is to do simple two item pairs. So on one side, you'd have the medication and on the other side, you'd have its side effects. On one side, you'd have the medication and on the other side, you'd have its mechanism of action. Now this does mean that for each medication you're learning, you're making multiple flashcards for all the things that you have to learn about that medication, but trust me, it's worth it. And the same goes for anything else you're trying to learn, body parts, enzymes, whatever you're trying to learn. And the logic behind this is you're training your brain to use cued recall. So when you see the name of a medication, that's your cue to pull out from your brain, its side effects and whatever else you memorized using each individual flashcard. So you see the name of a medication and suddenly you're able to pull up through cued recall, whatever else you memorized, side effects, MOA, whatever. And finally, there's serial recall, which is memorizing a list of items in order. And the best example of this is like memorizing the steps in a biochemical equation like the Krebs cycle or something like that. And for serial recall, at least as it pertains to short term memory, research shows that our brains form associations between each item and its order in the list. So if an item is at the beginning of the list, middle of the list, end of the list, that kind of a thing, and also between each item and the items around it. So for example, if you're memorizing the colors of the rainbow, you know, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, ROYGBIV, that acronym that we learned back in grade school, you know, first grade, second grade, you might remember that R, red is first on the list and you might also remember that R, red is also associated with O, orange, which is the closest color to it. So you remember two things about it using serial recall, where it is in the sequence and also you remember what it's next to. And this actually explains the incredible power of using acronyms to memorize long lists of items such as every drug in a certain class of medication. And this is actually what got me through pharmacology. This is the only thing that got me through pharmacology. I would have, let's just say for example, four medications in the class of proton pump inhibitor, PPI, which is used for gastroesophageal reflux disease, heartburn, things like that. Let's say I wanted to learn these four drugs and everything about them. And they have really weird names that aren't really used in everyday language, you know, Lansoprazole, Omeprazole, Esomeprazole, Pantoprazole, stuff that just isn't in my brain already. So let's say I'm learning these de novo, you know, learning them anew from not knowing them at all. And so the first thing I would do is I would arrange these medications in an order such that the first letters of each medication in that order spell out a very simple word that's easy for me to remember. So for using those proton pump inhibitors that I just mentioned, you know, Lansoprazole, Pantoprazole, Omeprazole, and Esomeprazole, I would actually arrange them in the order of Pantoprazole, Omeprazole, Lansoprazole, and Esomeprazole just so that I can form the word poll, P-O-L-E, that's really easy for me to remember. And then to make it even easier to remember, what I might do is imagine four construction workers with hardburn dancing around a telephone pole or something like that. Just something that's kind of emotional, kind of funny, kind of easy to remember. And so when I think, okay, I need a drug for heartburn, I think of those four construction workers, P-O-L-E, dancing around a telephone pole, like clutching their chest going, ah, I got heartburn, something like that. And so you make it memorable and you make it easy to remember. And then the next thing I would do is I would write out my list of medications in that order, P-O-L-E, Pantoprazole, Omeprazole, Lansoprazole, Esomeprazole, and right next to them, I would also write down all the things that I want to remember about each one. So the brand names, the side effects, when they're used, when they're contraindicated, things like that, everything I want to memorize about each individual medication in the same order that I wrote the medications. And so that way, not only am I training myself to use Q'd recall to associate the name of the medication with its side effect, but I'm also using the list, I'm using serial recall to make associations between the side effects, all of the side effects and their order in the list and also the brand names, all the brand names and their order in the list and also where they are next to each other. So associations between each brand name and the brand name next to it and the side effects and the side effects next to it. In that same order that I made the drugs originally. And so that way I'm maximizing serial recall in order to learn all those items. So practically, how would I apply all these lessons to practically learning a long list of medications or body parts or enzymes or whatever you gotta learn? How would I summarize how to do all of this? Here's what I would do from start to finish. First, I'm gonna use free recall to remember the names of the items I'm trying to learn and just get really comfortable with them by reading them over and over again. Or like I said before, I prefer to write them over and over again until I'm just really comfortable with the names of the medications, the enzymes, whatever I'm learning. Then I'm going to use Q'd recall by either making simple flashcards like I mentioned before and learning everything that I need to learn about each of these items. So one side of the flashcard, the medication, the other side of the flashcard, a side effect. One side of the flashcard, the name of the medication, the other side of the flashcard, its brand name. And so on and so forth until I have every single thing that I need to memorize about these medications made in flashcards so I can maximize Q'd recall. And then if I just have a really, really long list of things and it's just not practical to make that many flashcards, what I could do is use serial recall and make acronyms for everything I'm trying to memorize by arranging my long list of items into small groups where they're with other items that they're closely related to such as each class of medications, the PPIs, the H2 blockers, all the classes of medications. So just group them into these smaller groups and then write an acronym like I mentioned before for each of the groups. And then write everything that you need to know about each medication or enzyme or whatever in that same order. So you're memorizing not only the acronym with each group of items that pertains to that acronym but also everything you need to know about each item in that same order so that way you're maximizing serial recall as well as Q'd recall. And of course on the day of the exam, you usually get scratch paper. So what I'm gonna do before I even start answering any questions or even looking at any questions, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna write out all of those acronyms that I came up with and practiced and rehearsed over and over again. I'm gonna write all those acronyms down on that sheet of paper and then I'm just gonna use that as a reference. So let's say I get a question about what would I use with this patient with heartburn? I remember my little scene of the four construction guys with heartburn like dancing around the pole and then I look at my acronym, P-O-L-E. Oh, I would use pantoprosal and then I would either write out or remember, okay, well here's the side effects and here's the indications for pantoprosal and then I would pick which proton pump inhibitor is appropriate in the case that I'm being presented with in the question. So basically that long list of acronyms that you came up with in practice kind of becomes your reference of all the material that you've painstakingly memorized and now you know and you can be confident is in your brain. All you have to do is find the proper cues that'll help you pull it out of your brain and onto the paper and get the A-plus. So there you have it. All the basic techniques I use to learn ridiculous amounts of information, both in my pre-medical post-bac and also in PA school. And just to return to that scene from the beginning of the video, I'm laying there and freaking out because I just can't recall all the information at the same time. All I have to remember is these principles of recall that if I have a cue, I can pull it out. And all it takes is to do very well on one or two tests using these techniques and then you can be confident from then on that if you did study, if you did form high quality associations between the items and everything you're trying to learn about them, if you did make high quality, memorable acronyms for everything that you're trying to learn, you can be confident that when it comes to test day, you'll be able to pull that information out of your brain, you'll be able to put it on paper and you'll get that E plus and then you'll move on to the next exam and ace that one too. So, if you'd like to get my help personally with your PA school application or anything else, go to BorisThePA.com. If you have a question about PA school, studying, health and fitness or anything else I talk about on this channel, just post a comment below or send me a message on Instagram or Snapchat at BorisThePA. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.