Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
01:41:38 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I made your huberman and on our professor of neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. Today, we are discussing how to study and learn. That is what the scientific data say is the best way to study in order to remember information and to be able to use that information effectively in different areas of your life. So for those of you that are still in school, could be any stage of school, today's discussion will be very useful for you.

However, even if you are not formally enrolled in any kind of school at the moment, today's discussion will also be extremely effective for you to be able to study and learn Better information from, say, the internet or podcast or any area of your life where you are seeking to learn and use new knowledge. Now one of the most important things that you're going to learn today is that learning, that is the best learning practices are not intuitive. So before we dive in, keep in mind that whatever you believe about how best to learn for you is probably incorrect.

And I confessed this was humbling for me as well when I started to dive into this literature because as somebody who was a student for many years and in some sense still considers themselves a student of science and health information because of this podcast, and certainly is somebody who still teaches university courses both to medical students and graduate students and to undergraduate students at stanford, I thought I understood the whole teaching and learning process, but I too learned that IT is anything but intuitive. In fact, most of what we believe about the best ways to study are absolutely false. Fortunately, today you will learn the best ways to study.

Turns out there's a rich literature on this dating back well over a hundred years, and the data are absolutely fascinating. And incredibly, act is incredibly interesting, how the fields of education, the fields of psychology and the field ds of neuroscience have now come together to define the optimal strategies to study and learn. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate primary teaching researchers at stanford IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like the thanks sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep. Eight sleep makes smart matters covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I have spoken many times to be before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep, both enough sleep and enough quality sleep.

Now one of the key things to getting a great night sleep is that your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep and to wake up feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. One of the best ways to ensure all of that happens is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And with eight sleep is very easy to do that.

You programme the temperature that you want at the beginning, middle and the end of the night, and that's the temperature that you're going to sleep back. And I will track your sleep IT tells you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much rapid I movement sleep you're getting, which is critical. And all of that also helps you dial in the exact parameters you need in order to get the best possible nights sleep for you.

I've been slept on an eight sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and IT has completely transformed my sleep for the Better. Eight recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the pod for ultra. The pod for ultra cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the pod for cover has snaring detection that will automatically lift your head of few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring.

If you'd like to try and eight sleep mattress cover, you can go to a sleep dot com slash huberman to save three hundred and fifty dollars off their pod for ultra easily. Currently ships to the U. S.

A, canada, U. K. Select countries in the eu. In australia, again, that eight sleep, that com slash huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Better help. Better help offers professional therapy with a license therapies Carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over thirty years.

Initially, I didn't have a choice. IT was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I considered doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise.

Now there essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, IT provides good report with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, I can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.

And third, expert therapy should provide insights with Better help. They make IT very easy for you to find an expert therapies with whom you have these critical components of therapy. Also because Better help allows for therapy to be done entirely online.

It's very time efficient and easy to fit into your busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist office or for parking or sitting in a waiting room. If you'd like to try Better help, go to Better help that com slash huberman to get ten percent off your first month. Again, that's Better help dot com slash huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja sessions and more. I started practice in meditation when I was about fifteen years old, and I made a profound impact on my life. And by now, there are thousands of quality per reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood and much more.

In recent years, I started using the waking up up for my meditations because I find IT to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have chAllenges keeping up with that practice. But I am so many other people love about the waking up.

APP is that has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So IT makes IT very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations are always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of vitality. And you can always fit meditation into schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to mediate.

I also really like doing yoga eja, or what is sometimes called non sleep depressed for about ten or twenty minutes, because IT is a great way to restore mental and physical figure without the tiredest that some people experiences when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try to wake up APP, please go to waking up dot com slash huberman, where you can access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up duck com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial.

Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And of course, people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading.

Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight, some people call themselves auditory learner, other people considered themselves visual learners. But guess what, when one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away.

IT turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives, not its auditory, visual or combined, whether not you review slides or a textbook or you watch more videos. IT turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme i'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode.

Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or motor learning, musical learning, math eeta. okay. So keep this in mind.

Throughout today's episode, the best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information you're trying to inoculate against forgetting that is the way to remember things. That is, the way to gain mastery over them. And i'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data cleaned from the peer reviewed literature.

Now before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is. I promise to make this fairly brief because i've covered learning and so called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will service a refresher.

For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which, of course, includes your brain in your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves in neo plasticity neuroplasticity.

We sometimes here as neuroplasticity to words or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing. Essentially, the change that underlies nea plasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms.

One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call sync connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another. It's actually a gap between the neurons. IT is technical, called the synaptic clift. It's a gap.

And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons, were many neurons to activate many other neurons, or to inhibit the activity of other neurons. okay. So one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neons. And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis or the addition of new neurons.

Let's just get this out of the way up front, because the addition of new neurons again grabs so much attention in media articles, but is responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion, or Frankly, for most all discussions. IT is true. You have a specialized of neurons in your factory bub that are responsible for smell, as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so called dented givers of your hip campus in area of the brain that is important for memory, in which new neurons appeared to be added throughout the lifespan.

But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of his existing connections and the weakening of existing connections, or the formation of new connections between already existing, not new, neurons OK. Now the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity, is very important.

For sake of today's discussion, I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good. However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor's skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections or removing new connections.

Let's just leave IT at this level. mechanistically. When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that I could be the consequences, strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections, and that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of same memories or information.

Just know that these are the important mechanisms. In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific, typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaetzle something at that sort or anything when there are a small baby versus a toddle, versus a Young child, versus an adolescent or teen.

Despite the poor table manners of some adolescence and teens and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant, of course. And believe IT or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species, for that matter, from birth until the adolescence and ten years and adult ears, is largely the reflection of the removal. That's right.

The removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the newer connections that remain become much more robust, they become much more reliable OK. So that's the mechanistic backroads everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn.

And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz. Now the moment people here, quiz or test typically Spikes their a journey, they start feeling stressed.

But don't worry, you're gona keep the your answers to yourself and you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question. This is a two question quiz.

How many different ways, mechanistically speaking does nea plasticity occur? Is IT one mechanism, two mechanisms or three mechanisms, or is IT four or five? okay. Can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo, which are reflective of neuroplasticity? okay.

So the answer, the question was, is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity, as you recall or as you may not have been able to recall. And by the way, if you were not able to recall, the three different modes of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underline neuroplasticity, that is fine. As you'll soon realize, recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical and very useful way to retain more information, even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know.

In fact, especially if you ve got that are wrong or you didn't know. So the three ways are the strengthening of neural connections. Second, the weakening of neural connections. And third, through neurogenesis, the addition of new neurons.

Why did I provide this quiz? Why did I test you? Well, as you'll soon learn, if you look across the total body of research on how best to study and learn, IT involves doing exactly what we just did, which is a periodically stop and test yourself on the material that you learned.

Testing is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you ve acquired and which knowledge you have not managed to acquire. IT also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any kind and are going to the data that supports that statement in a moment. So yes, today we're gna get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast.

And now there will not be a test at the end. Although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end, i'm going to provide you with an excEllent zero costs, very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your knowledge in your ability to study and learn Better as a consequence of having listen to this podcast versus had you not listen to this podcast. So if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end there, IT is okay.

Let's talk about some of the other practical aspects of studying in learning. I know a lot of you out there who want to learn and want to come up with the best studying strategies are trying to think about how to structure your day or how much to study, or when to study. Let's get the most important things out of the way first.

Neuroplasticity and learning. That is, converting your studying efforts into retention of knowledge is a two step process. You've probably heard about active engagement.

That's just a fancy set of words for focus for really attending to the information that you're trying to learn. And IT is very important anytime you're trying to learn new information. So focus goes with alertness.

You can't be focused. If you're not alert, this is prev, quit. So you need to be alert and you need to be focused in order to pay attention to the information that you're trying to learn.

In fact, IT is the process of being focused and attending that cuse your nervous system, that something is important, that something different about whatever sensory experience you happen to be having when you're focused and attending why're not see information you're hearing or that you're looking at or both. That q at the level of neurochemicals in your brain and body signals to the neurons. Hey, you're going to have to change.

You're going to have to alter your connections, either make them stronger or a weaker or a combination of those things in order to make sure that your nervous system can retain and use the information at a future time. So that step one, and of course, as a part of step one, most people, when they hear about optimal studying strategies, they want to know, you know, what should they do? What should they take in order to learn Better? Well, here's what everyone should take in order to learn Better, which is a great night.

Sleep the night before limiting your external stress, although some stress is good because IT cues up your alertness, IT actually allows you to remember certain things Better. I'll talk about this little bit later. No one can remove all stressed from their life, but we know one thing for sure, your ability to be alert and focused is going to be greater if you slept well the night before.

okay? So sleep is without question, the best new tropic, right? The word news, tropic means smart drug.

I don't really like that term because learning involves all sorts of things. It's not just about being smart, it's about being able to attend. It's about sometimes being creative, flexible with ideas and information.

Here's the point. You're going to need to get your sleep right in order to be able to study and learn at your absolute best. And I ve done many episodes, the human man that pocket about sleep.

We have a news letter about sleep, the details in a short PDF format, the famous things you can do to get your sleep optimized, so to speak. You can find all that huberman lab ed out com by putting sleep into the search function. We don't have time to discuss that material now, but get your sleep right so that you can be alert and focused when IT comes time learn.

Now the process of being alert and focused on particular material that you want to learn can be enhanced by just having a silent script within your head. silent? Mean, you're not saying IT out loud where when you sit down to earn, you're looking at a book or you're listening to a lecture, perhaps a podcast like this, you're thinking, okay, I need to learn this.

I need to learn this. You can voluntarily ramp up your level of focus and alertness by telling yourself that information is important. Don't be a passive participant in learning, this is the basis of active learning by expecting the information to be so interesting that IT pulls your level of attention and focus out of you, rather learn to engage your attention and focus voluntarily.

Violation ally OK, when we hear about adhd, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we know that people with A D H D can attend very rapidly. They can really pay close attention for long periods of time. If they like a given topic or a given experience or activity, they have serious chAllenges, however, engaging their attention and alertness if they are not excited about an activity or information.

And so IT is the hallmark of all good learners to be able to voluntarily force yourself to attend into focus. And when I say force yourself, that means a constant bringing back of your mind's attention to whatever is you're trying to learn. IT is meant to feel difficult.

I say meant to feel difficult because that train that you feel that encouraging, or in some cases, forcing yourself to attend, sometimes even putting on a hat, you know, literally putting blinders, so that you can only attend to the material right in front of you that's straining that you feel reflects in part the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine rinnin in the brain, in body, which serve to q the neural circuits that they need to change at a later time. Okay, so the string that you feel in trying to learn, the strain that you feel, enforcing yourself, to learn how to focus, that is good. That's a cute or nervous system that is going to need to change that neuroplasticity needs to take place.

Think about IT. If you didn't feel that strain and you were able to perform whatever IT is that you were doing or remember whatever information IT is that you're being exposed to seamlessly, well, then your nervous system wouldn't have to change because IT already has the capabilities within the neural circuits. So that strain that you feel, that agitation is great.

That's a queue that you are learning or that you set the learning process in motion. Now is also the case that some people don't have great levels of focus and attention. And there are, of course, for method gic tools.

I would encourage anyone that has clinically diagnosed add to talk to their doctor about whether not they should use prescription meds and or other methods. Great sleep is always going to be an important substrate for attention in focus for anybody. But especially for people with A D H D, I highly encourage anyone that's interested in hanckel levels of focus on attention to also consider the non phmc ology c approaches.

So this is irrespective of whether not you need for ecologic approaches. Yes, being well hydrated, yes, the appropriate amount of caffeine for you that allows you to be alert but not, you know, shaking and agitated can be very useful. However, the scientific data also support the fact that doing a brief, say, five to ten minutes mindfulness meditation each day, these are the data from when he s zuko laboratory at new york university showing that people who do a ten minute meditation per day, where they simply sit or lie down, close their eyes, focus on their breathing, their attention invariably drifts.

They bring their attention back to their breathing. People who do that on a regular basis improve their level of focus. They improve their memory and recall ability. And of course, there are a bunch of other positive effects of that simple, zero cost tool of mindfulness meditation.

So if you are interested in improving your levels of focus and attention for sake of learning, I highly encourage you to explore the also valuable tool of mindfulness meditation. Just five or ten minutes per day done on a regular basis. You miss a day.

No big deal. Just get right back to IT. The next day does IT matter if you do IT morning, afternoon or night. No, some people find that doing IT too late at night might disrupt their sleep.

But if you think about meditation of the sort that I just described as a perceptual exercise, maybe don't even call IT meditation, you're just teaching yourself to focus. You could even do IT with eyes open by focusing on a visual target, allowing yourself to blink. There are a good data on this sort of approach as well.

And then just making sure that your visual attention and cogan attention comes back to that visual target over and over again. It's a deliberate process of bringing your attention back to a particular location that is very valuable for improving your levels of focus. In fact, IT is known to create significant improvements in your ability to focus, which is critical for your ability to study and learn.

So I know that many people are interested in what to take, what to do at the level of kind of esoteric practices or things to buy. There is stuff out there I mentioned hydration, caffeine, great sleep and so on. But the simple practice of mindfulness meditation, or just what I describe as a focusing perceptual exercise, of bringing your attention back to the same location over and over again, deliberately, will train you to train your nervous system, to bring your attention back to whatever IT is you're trying to learn.

Now i've done other podcast about how to focus about attention specifically and adhd. Again, you can find all of those that huberman lab dot com, simply put, add or focus or tools for focus into the search function. IT will take you to the exact time stamps in those episodes that are relevant right now.

However, I want to talk about the second part of neuroplasticity, which is that the actual changes in the newer system, the strengthening and weakening, predominantly of connections between neurons that underlie learning, do not occur during the focusing and learning, or rather the exposure to the material, but instead during deep sleep and sleep like states. And again, i've done a lot of podcast and talked a lot about tools for getting Better sleep. But I just want to remind everybody that the actual reordering of the connections, the strengthening of connections between neurons that underlie learning, the weakening of those connections, occurs during sleep, in particular during rapid eyes movement sleep, which tends to predominate in the latter half of the nights.

And make sure that you're getting enough sleep for you, for some people at six hours, for some people to eight hours. And yes, there is something called the first night effect. The first night effect is the experimentally observed phenomenon.

Thereby information that you learn on a given day is mostly consolidated during the nights sleep that you have on that first night after the learning occurs. Does this mean that if you get a poor night sleep on the first night after learning something, that you are forever going to forget that information that I cannot be consolidated internet al circuits? no.

However, it's very clear that the first night after learning, you want to get the best sleep possible. So if you're learning, bets are studying is going late into the night and you're drinking a lot of caffeine, be mindful that the sleep that you get after drinking that came in late into the day, the all nighters that you're pulling those are not serving, you're learning well. So you need to structure your life as a student of any kind so that you can get focus in attention to what IT is you want to learn, and you can get sleep to the best of your ability.

And of course, people who are raising Young kids or who have stressed in their lives, for whatever reason, perhaps won't be able to optimize their sleep on that first night or even subsequent nights. But do your best to get your sleep. Pride is the single best thing you can do for your mental health, for your physical health and for learning and performance of any kind.

And it's really worth the effort. Now, with the understanding of the mechanisms, the focus on alertness and the sleep phase of neuroplasticity, what are some other things that you can do to enhance whatever studying and learning you've obtained? I already talked about a tool, a behavioral tool for enhancing focus.

What about a behavioral tool for enhancing plasticity if your sleep is great, or especially if your sleep isn't great? And there I highly recommend you explore non sleep, deeper breath or N S T R. There's a script for this in the shown note captions n sdr sometimes refer to as organ edra, though those things are similar, but different is a ten or twenty minute practice that you can do to restore your mental and physical vigor.

If you haven't slept enough, you could do the first thing in the morning when you wake up. If you feel you haven't slept enough, you can do IT in the afternoon. You can do that in the middle if you're not able to sleep and offset some of the sleep loss that you otherwise would have experienced.

N sdr is a very powerful tool in order to enhance neuroplasticity, and i'll talk more about this in a future episode. There's a lot of exciting data coming out about n sdr in gan. But if you're sleeping well and even if you aren't, I highly encourage you to incorporate a ten or twenty minute S D R into your schedule.

Some place, again, where you place IT in your schedule isn't as important as the fact that you d do IT in order to enhance neuroplasticity, that is, the reordering of connections between neurons to serve the studying in learning that you're doing. Now let's talk about how the best students structure their days. Turns out there are great studies on this.

There is a really nice paper, in fact, that surveyed close to seven hundred students. These were medical students, approximately equal number of male and female students, and analyze the most useful learning habits, that is, the learning habits associated with the most successful students. Now, any time you do IT study like this, where people take surveys, there's always the issue of caught.

In fact, we can pretty much set aside any possible causes. For instance, i'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to study for about three or four hours per day. But you can easily say, well, they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day.

They don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students. They need be exactly right. okay? We can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation, about reverse causality and on and on. However, none of that is the point here.

The point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again, regardless of what classes they're taken, regardless of where they are in their art of their learning trajectory. And so what we know based on this study, and i'll provide a linked to IT in the shoonoo captions, is that there at least ten study habits that the highly effective students use. I'm gona focus on the top five or six just for the sake of time, because IT turns out that most of the effect IT appears of being a Better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits.

First of all, they set aside time to study. They literally schedule time to study. Now this probably are several roles.

The first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions, and in fact, that the second thing that they do, they are very effective, or they make IT a point of putting their phone away and off of isolating themselves. That's right. They're not studying with other people.

They study alone, which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their study. But the best performing students seem to study alone. They put their phone away, they tell their friends and families that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time.

And yes, they study for three or four hours per day, but they break that up into a couple of different sessions, typically two or three sessions. So they're not doing a three or four hours studying about all in one shot. So they're managing their time.

They're eliminating distractions and they are studying for a consistent amount of time, at least five days per week. okay? Presume ly they're taking some weekends off, although that wasn't made clear from this paper. The other thing that they do, and this is very important, is that they make an effort to then teach their peers, to teach other students in the class. Now some of you may be thinking, and i'm thinking back to college here mostly, that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students, the teaching them the information is kind of a free bee for them and is harder for you. Meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair advantage for not having done the work.

Now while this paper did into an analysis of whether not these students that served as the learners from the other students got an unfair advantage, is very clear that students who make IT a point to learn material in isolation then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students. So don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test. This is key to test and develop mastery of the material.

Now in my laboratory for years, we used to have a saying, which I simply picked up from the laboratories I was trained in. And I didn't come up with the saying, which was. Watch one, do one, teach one.

And that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing, or doing an anybody reaction or western blood or things that you do in laboratories. Watch one, do one, teach one. Watch one, do one, teach one.

Of course, should be reserved to anything where no one's going to be put in danger by the watch one, do one, teach one procedure, right? Some procedures, especially in laboratories, can be dangerous given the materials you use. etta.

And of course, today we're talking about learning and study generally. So provided IT safe, watch one do and teach one is an excEllent means to learn, that is, to study new material, to develop proficiency and even mastery. And over time, perhaps even virtuosity, we will return to that later, those distinctions.

So going back to this idea that the best students set aside time, they designate time to study alone without distractions, that is sure, to help them anchor their focus on attention. They know that they're going to need to use their focus on attention during that time. And we know with absolute certainty that focus on attention are a limited but renewable resource in the human brain.

The longer you awake, the more is the build up of a molecule called a density in your brain and body. IT makes you sleepy, makes you harder to focus when you sleep. Identify levels are pushed down again.

You're able to focus again, you feel more alert, you can think of a dency as limiting your attentional budget, which is not to say that some people don't study best in the afternoon or in the evening or even late at night, right? I recall times during university when I study between the hours of ten P M and two A M. I don't do that any longer.

But scheduling time where you know you're going to need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things to our being able to focus attend to the material. Now if you're taking courses, you probably are going to be a slave to the timing of the courses. You are not going to be able to tell the instructor, okay, listen, I want you to do this core set.

You know, three pm, because that's when you learn best. Or adam, because that's when you happen to be able to attend best. However, to the extent that you have any control over the time in which you're going to study, keeping that at a regular time or times, perhaps one block early in the day, one block later in the day, perhaps two blocks early in the day and so on, is going to be beneficial.

IT turns out that's also supported by the research literature that the brain, just like with its sleep wake cycles, that in train to a regular schedule, that is, your brain and body get used to being active and inactive at particular times based on your exposure to sunlight, your exposure to activities, your social rythm at sea. If you regularly, meaning for the course of about three days, make IT a point to focus in study at particular times, again, pulling your attention back. It's not an automatic process, but pulling your attention back to us fc location, perhaps on a page, or that you're listening to an elective, your body and brain will start to in train to that rythm such that you will be able to focus and attend Better simply by virtue of the regularity of the timing of the exposure of the material.

So you probably need about two or three days to break into a regular schedule of focusing in attending and studying at a given time or times. Allow yourself that transition period, but then make IT a point to schedule those times to study. Set aside your phone, tell people you're going off line, turn off the wifi if you need to half to you may need IT for your studying, I don't know, depends on what you're studying, but limit distractions at all costs and learn to just focus on the material. And this is a skill, this is the most important thing to understand. It's a skill to be able to focus and study.

And it's a skill that you can learn very quickly, especially if you you schedule IT for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which to adapt to those schedules in times and then try and stick to them as regularly as possible, perhaps even on the weekends, if you're approaching in the end of the quarter semester, perhaps even on the weekend, even if you're not in the quarter of semester, keeping those regular times will in train or nervous system to study and learn at its best at those particular times. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, ag one. By now, many of you've heard me say that I could take just one supplement.

That supplement would be A G one. The reason for that is ag one is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that IT contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, probiotics and adapted giants to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.

For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally process foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals. Micro neutrons ended up in from food alone. For that reason, I ve been taking A G one daily since two thousand and twelve, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid morning, and again in the afternoon or evening.

When I do that, IT clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and I got micro. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance and much more. If you'd like to try A G one, you can go to drink A G one dot com slash huberman to claim their special offer. Right now they are giving away five travel packs plus a year. Supply a vitamin d 3k two again， that's drink A G one dot com slash huberman to claim that special offer.

Before I move into specific ways to study in order to maximum offset forgetting notice and say in order to learn, but rather to maximum offset forgetting A K A learning stably learning material, there's one other point that I want to pass along from this really nice study on the study habits of highly effective medical students that i've been referring to. And that is when one examined, or these people were asked about their motivation for studying the best performing students, had an interesting answer. They had a very long term understanding of how, or belief, rather, about how their success in medical school would impact their family, how IT would impact their life out, how IT would change them.

And they weren't particular about the ways in which you would change them or their family. In fact, he was a rather broad, abstract, aspirational way of thinking about their study efforts. So what I like so much about this paper is that, you know, in addition to hammer a fairly large sample size, close to seven hundred students that we're evaluated, yes, it's purely in self report.

And this kind of thing none's IT bridges the two extremes of studying and learning. You know, IT gets right down into the needy, greedy of how long they study, when they study, the things they do to limit distraction that we just discussed. But IT also gets to their underlying psychological motivations in the thing that they use in order to pull them forward through their study efforts, perhaps especially when their desire is winning or their level of fatigue is increasing.

I don't know that i'm speculating here, but this is this aspirational component of going to medical school, which IT turns out in the country in which this study was done. Only very, very select few of the very best students are able to achieve that. And they have to learn the information in a different language altogether, which is incredible.

I always marvel at that. You know, I have friends that did their P. H. D thesis in italy, their italian by birth.

They now happen to running laboratory and in italy, and they had to do their PHD training and write papers and give their thesis, dissertation and defense in english, even though english was their second language. So talk about a chAllenge. And that's just one example that I can think of. There are many examples of that.

These students that are referred to in this study are not necessarily constantly thinking about how their efforts will transform themselves and their families, but they certainly were able to report what IT was specifically that they are seeking, what they are spiring to besides just trying to do as well as they can getting into and through medical school. So the high level aspirational stuff within you, whatever that is for you, it's going to be highly individual. It's certainly important.

And IT offers a book end to the nutz emboli y kind of stuff that you're going to do, I would hope, in order to be studying and learn the specific material. So the specific actions that you're going na take each day to learn specific bits of information that will pull you toward those important aspirations. And now again, if you love the material you're learning, this aspirational component is probably not as important, right?

I can recall during university, in graduate school and so on, thinking, oh, my god ness, this is like the coolest thing i've ever heard. I say that about a million different topics, candian, rythm, seasonal, rythm, military and neural circuits. Dope, mean, I was just a wash with excitement about what I was learning, but of course, sometimes would take a course where the material was.

I don't know if he was more chAllenging or not, but I had a harder time getting engaged by the material, either by virtually how was being taught to me, where the material itself. So the ability to attach to some aspirational goal to pull you through can be very valuable. You're not going to love every topic you have to learn.

However, I will say that at least in my experience, some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the courses that I struggled with the most, and in fact, that's the basis of the next and easily one of the most important studying tools. So a key theme in all of the excEllent literature, that is the peer reviewed research on how best to study, is that studying that feels chAllenging is the most effective. I know nobody wants to hear this.

Everyone wants to hear about flow. Everybody wants to hear about information just sinking into their brain BIOS mosi. I think with a Garfield cartoon where he talked about learning bioswales is there's this a very te real world video of a kid in a classroom.

I believe it's in china where he's taking the book and he puts IT on his head. Maybe I can find this clip and he's like trying to wash IT into his brand. Its super cute clip.

But guess what? That doesn't work. I mean, IT works to put the book on your head.

That doesn't work. It's not going to get the information into your brain. Um perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into neural circuits.

Right now, we know. We've known for hundreds of thousands of years that effort is the corner stone of learning. So I know there are probably some growing about that.

I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell you how to study. So that study wasn't painful. I think I can accomplish that by the end of today's episode.

But in order to do that, let's take another quiz. okay. So here's the quiz again. You can answer these questions in your head. You don't have to tell anyone, but you could write them down or say them out loud if you want.

The first question is, when during either your states of alertness or sleep, does the remodeling of neural connections occur? I'd like to think this is a pretty easy one. okay? The answer is during sleep. The second question is, what is one behavioral al tool that you can use to improve focus? The answer is simple, mindfulness meditation, which I D prefer you think of simply as a perceptual exercises in jus sit or lie down, close your eyes, focus on your breath when your attention drifts, bring your attention back to your breath and so on.

Or if you prefer, you can do this eyes open by focusing on a visual target, either a feed or two feeder, or three feet away, whatever distance is comfortable for you, allowing yourself to blink as needed, but forcing yourself to focus on that visual target for, say, one to three minutes, maybe even three to five minutes, maybe even ten minutes. Again, please blink. You don't want your eyes to dry.

Both those tools will improve your ability to attend, to focus to other material when the time comes. Okay, the circuits for focus and attention themselves are subject to neuroplasticity. And then the third question is, can you name or list off in your mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use?

I can think of limiting distraction by virtue of putting away phones in telling others you won't be in contact with them too. And i'm getting these out of water, I realize, is to isolate, to study alone. In the third, that I can recall, is to teach others in the same course. Okay, you can probably think of a few others now.

Why are we taking in these silly little quiz as well? Turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you will remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to IT over and over again but that if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the literature, in the peer reviewed literature about how students can learn information Better, it's testing. And I know, I know, I know we think of test as a way to evaluate our knowledge, but IT turns out the testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge, to retain our knowledge, and again, to offset forgetting.

Now, the study of testing as a learning tool, not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned, goes back over one hundred years. There's a classic study that was done one, nine hundred and seventeen, where grade school age children read biography. So they read biography, and then the kids were divided into different groups. One group, red and reread, and reread those biography over and over. Another group read the biography once, and then were tested on those biography.

But get this, they tested themselves on those biography simply by having to think about the information that they had read and trying to remember the information, like, what was the biography? Who is the person? Who are they married to? What did they do? What did they go to school? What did they do in school? What did they do in the world? What role did they play in life? So they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biography.

Now keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography two, three, four times might seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that they re just wants, right, you can imagine that thinking about the biography involves more effort, and indeed IT does. But keeping mind also that the kids in the second group were only exposed to the biography he wants. And yet, when you look at the percent of accurate recall of information from those biography, the children that read the biography once and then made a deliberate point to think about that biography in their own mind, to effectively test themselves on that material just within their head over and over, but an equal number of times as the kids that read the biography is directly on a page over and over, vastly outperformed the kids that read the biography over over.

Put differently, reading and rereading material, and we rereading material is far less effective than reading material, and then thinking about that material, testing yourself on that material, forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your own mind. And this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material, but also accuracy, a recall of that material. And that, at least to me, was pretty surprising at first, until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of testing as a learning tool, and then you start to realize that testing yourself is far and away the best tool for studying and learning, not just for evaluating your knowledge, but for actually studying and incorporating that knowledge into your neural circuits.

Okay, so I realized that anytime I or somebody else talks about a study that was one in one thousand, nine and seventeen, we think of people in these you like wooden shoes and in the schoolhouses that look so different and kids draw so different. Let's get a little more modern here. Um keep in mind, however, that the nervous system hasn't really changed much in tens of thousands of years.

None the less. I think it's nice to think about a more recent study of how best to study in this study, which, by the way, we will provide a link to in the shown of captions as well as a couple of reviews that include results from similar studies, again, and pointing to body of research, not just one study here, looked at weather, not studying material four times. So study, study, study, study was Better in terms of locking that information into people's minds, allowing them to use that information flexibly, which is an element of creativity, essentially given the mastery of the material.

Then a different group which studied once, studied the material twice, studied the material three times, then was tested on the material. Or a third group that studied material once, then took one, two, yes, three tests on the material. Now, so what I just described was three groups, all of whom read a passage.

This was a passage about animals, about biology, some other topics, to, in different experiments. Again, three groups. One group studies four times.

They study the material one, two, three, four times. Then later they take a test. The second group studies one, two, three times, takes a test on that material, and then later takes a test.

The third group studies the material once, then takes three tests on the material, and then later takes a test. So what's analyzing compared between these different groups is their performance on that final test. okay.

What I put in as the fifth been there, right? Because I was think about IT as S, S, S, S. So study, study, study, study, and then later test.

Or S, S, S, T, study, study, study, test, and then later test. Or S, T, T, T, study, test, test, test, and then later test. So what's comparing?

Contrasting is performance on the test, some period of time later. Now, some experiments made that final test of the material. A couple days later, other experiments paid IT.

A couple weeks later, other experiments made IT much later, months or even a year later OK. The point here is too full. First of all, based on everything i've told you thus far, you can probably guess who performed best on the test that occurred some period of time later.

Okay, right? The performance on that final test was essentially proportional to the number of tests one had already taken on the material. That should be pretty much obvious given the way we've been going today in this description of test as a way to offset forgetting.

okay. So the more test that you take as a way to expose you yourself to the material, the Better you're going to perform in that material at some later point. Now of course, at some point, you have to be exposed the material for the first time, right? That's why it's studying and learning.

But after one exposure to new material, taking more tests on that material, even if you don't perform that well on those test, as long as you're able to see the accurate answers to those tests and compare your answers to those answers will lead to Better performance on the ultimate test and retention of that material at some later time. Put differently, it's not about how many times you study the material or how many times you're exposed to the material. It's about being exposed to the material, doing your best to focus and attend that material and then self testing yourself on that material.

Or as the case may be, of an an instructor is the one giving you the test, but none. There's taking test on that material, not just once, but ideally two or three times. That's what really locks the material into your neural circuits.

That's what's going to lead to the most pervasive change, the most durable change, we should say, in your neural circuits that Carry that material, that hold that material in your mind, what we call neural encoding. okay? So the more times you test yourself for that, you are tested on material, the Better your attention of that material. Now some people will immediately say, well, goodness, what if I learned IT and then i'm tested and i'm somehow consolidate the wrong or inaccurate material? But IT doesn't appear to be the case as long as you learn what the correct answers to the test or even if you're getting you know four year or fifty percent or less accurate on those test that you take immediately after the studying period, that's still going to be a Better strategy than rereading the material, which ought to be somewhat surprising and certainly was surprising to me.

But you know what? Even more surprising and a little scary, and that we all should know when I was H, I had learned when I was like in the second grade, is that if you ask students how confidence are you in the material that you just learned, how well do you think you would perform on a test? What you see consistently in these studies, i'm struggling because it's a mellowing, is that the students who study the material, that is, who are exposed to the material four times think that they are going to perform best on the ultimate exam.

However, the students that study the material once and then are tested three times on that material, they think that ultimately they're gna perform least well, for instance. And they asked them their confidence, how well do you think he would perform on a test of this material in two weeks? Or in a year, or in six months or even tomorrow, they report, that is, the sues in the study test, test test group report much lower confidence in the material, much lower sense of mastery of the material, compared to the students that were exposed the material four times who are saying, yeah, I think I would do pretty well or very well.

And guess what? The exact opposite is true. Put differently, when you are exposed to material over and over and over again, you think you've learn the material. In fact, you're confidence that you've learn the material increases with each subsequent exposure to the material.

But actually, you haven't learned IT IT all compared to the people that are exposed to the material and then take test on the material, often times straining to get the answers right on those test. In fact, sometimes getting those answers dead wrong and then realizing they get those answers dead wrong, or sometimes they just sense IT. But guess what? Testing yourself once, twice, maybe three times prior to the ultimate test of your knowledge of that material is far n away the best way to lock that material into those neural circuits.

Now I say, I wish I learned this when I was a student, because to some extent, I used a self testing approach. The one most salan example of that is I took a course when I was in college. I still remember he was bioscience is one sixty nine l neuron atomy laboratory taught by ben race. He's still there, I believe.

And he was known then, and i'm sure still now, if he's still teaching as extremely chAllenging professor, extremely chAllenging, not as a person, not as personality, but a ton of detail and rigor and high, high, high expectation for this laboratory course in neuron atomy, which involved lectures IT involved in a neuron atomy textbook where you d look at, you know, essentially panels of different brain sections from different species, different types of stains of different brain tissue. Mind you, this is undergraduate course. And then there was a laboratory component, hence the l in one sixty nine l where you would have to go for microscope station to microscope station, identifying structures based simply on what you can see down the microscope.

And therefore you had to know what the stain was, you, what was essentially visible to you on the slide, because certain stains reveal certain things like the, what we call the cell body of neurons versus the wires, what we call the actions between neurons, IT said. I remember thinking this is a really hard course. IT was a very difficult course in my mode of studying for the course involved, of course, going to class doing the dissection.

We detected a sheep brain at that time. Um so we're literally dissecting an actual brain. We're doing microscope work. We're learning about IT from the textbook and from lecture. And there was a ton of new knowing creature about rosta coal doors or adventure, all the stuff of neuron atomy.

And then at some point I made the decision, perhaps on the basis of sheer overwhelm, to study for nor anatomy by lying down on my bed in my studio apartment with the loan and closing my eyes and flying through the nervous system from different entry points through the ear, review my cocoa anatomy through the eye, review my retina anatomy through the dorso surface of the brain, talking about the social and jeri, and then the corporate cholos m and then, and I can still see IT in my mind's eye. So my process of studying for neuron atomy, yes, involved exposure to the material, but IT involved hours upon hours of thinking about the material within my own brain. So a little bit meta unto itself there as a consequence, I like to think in fact, I believe um with some confidence that I have a very high mastery of neuron atomy in different species as well.

Now that's my particular area of expertise. I don't think of any kind of savana with respecting erano omy. I just spent hours upon hours learning the material and then reviewing the material within my mind to another words, testing myself.

Here's what I would do if I were moving down the trajectory of of a neural track, for instance, between, say, the the hip campus in labouring structure. I didn't know what was next. I would then go look at up in the textbook, and then i'd go back to this.

Your mental exercise visualization type study, IT really wasn't studying, is the point. The point is that I was testing myself. I was trying to find the points in which I no longer had the knowledge to do further through, in this case, my mental image of the brain, but through the material.

And this is the key aspect of testing. It's not about just knowing how many things you get right, how many things you get wrong. It's about recognizing exactly what you know and don't know.

And an important component of testing is running up against those things where you say, I can't remember, I don't know what comes next or i'm certain that, that structure is the simba and then you go, you're looking, it's not the fimbria. But guess what? I'll never forget, for instance, the location of the human ella or what IT looks like.

A structured, by the way, since these names are kind of esoteric. C, at that time, we didn't know what IT does IT turns out it's involved in disappointment. It's key to the depression circuit.

So the circuit is underly depression in some individuals IT is um suppressed by viewing of morning sunlight. We know that too and by getting too much artifical light exposure in the middle, you enhance activity of the human. Ella, beautiful work not done by my laboratories, but other laboratories demonstrates that.

So what I just did for you there was hopefully teach you a little something about new anatomy and depression. But more importantly, to just illustrate that how you test yourself can be highly individual to the ways in which you learn best. Now that contradicts or what I said earlier, which is that this notion that people have different learning styles, and you know, some people are verbal learners and some people are auditories learners in its ata, doesn't really hold up so well anymore.

But which, by the way, is not to say there is into any research to support IT is just that is heavily contradicted by other research that contradicts that idea. But your approach, your mood of best, testing your cell phone material for sake of offsetting the forgetting process and for identifying where you have gaps in your knowledge or where you thought you knew something but you don't or you knew something but it's wrong, that can be accomplished through the approach that's best for you, which in my case, turned out to be lying down and thinking about the material of my head. And still, to this day, when I read a paper, I try, I don't always do this, but when I try to do is then take a walk in my yard outside.

And I trying to think about the key components of that paper, think about some of the graph that are especially important, which is what i'm gonna. Now i'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors. element.

Element is an electorate drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electronic sodium, magnesium um and potato um in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function. Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance is also important that you get adequate electronized in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electoral ghz, sodium, magnesium and paci um are critical for the function of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.

To make sure that i'm getting proper amount of hydration and electoral light, I dissolve one packet of element in about sixteen to thirty two hands of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning, I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise i'm doing, especially in hot days if i'm sweating a lot and losing water and electro lights. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element dot com flash huberman spell, drink L M N T dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink micks. Again, that's drink element dot com slash huberman to claim free sample back.

okay. So i'd like to think that we're establishing that testing yourself for testing your students or being tested by your teacher is the best way to offset forgetting. Let's look at the literature that actually supports that statement directly because in the previous experiment I described, IT was either study, study, study, study, or study, study, study test or study test, test, test.

And then later everybody takes a test at the same time, a variance on that was done where they had one group of students study material. So this is new material. And when I say study, I mean, they were exposed to the material for the first time.

And I realize this is a little bit of problem because we're using the word study when in fact, i'm trying to make the point that testing yourself is studying. Okay, so forgive me, but this is the way it's mapped out in these experiments and these papers. Should you look them up in our shoonoo captions, one group is exposed to the material, what we're called studying, and then takes a test immediately after they are told what they got right, what they got wrong on that test in what the correct answers are.

And then some time later, after a delay, they take a test of the same material. Another group studies that is the exposed the material, then there's a delay OK. That delay could be days.

IT could be weeks. Does experience been on every which way? If IT seems by now, then they're tested and then there's another delay and then they take a test at the same time the group wounded. okay. So again, it's study test long delay test for group one or study delay test delay test for group to remember, the final test is taken at the same time by everybody or group three study, that is that exposed to the material than a long, long, long, long, long delay than a test.

And then the ultimate test, okay, the test that everybody takes at the same time, can you guess which group performed best? And the essence of this experiment, if you're listen to this and it's not clearing your mind, is you're either exposed the material and tested very soon after, and then take a test after a delay. So a week or two weeks later, or you expose the material, there is a delay of a few days, then you take a test, and then another few days, then then you take a test, it's more evenly space.

Or if you were signed of the third group, you'd study, you're not going to see the material or be tested on IT until a day or two before the big test. Then you're tested on IT, you your answers back and then tested on IT again. You could imagine that the last group might perform best because they're really exposed to the material.

They're told what the correct answers are. So they know what they got wrong, they know what they're got right. And then the next day, they're taking the test again.

I would have thought that group would perform best. But IT turns out the opposite is true. It's pretty well. The best performance comes from being exposed to material. What in the six experiment are called studying.

Okay, so they read a passage where they learn a math material or language material or music material or motor learning. Then they take a test very soon after, even same day or next day, and then there's a long delay. And then they take the test that that group performs best.

Put differently, test yourself very soon, if not the same day, certainly the next day or so, very soon after being exposed to material for the first time as opposed to the last group which performs worst, they perform worse, being exposed to material. Then there's a long period of time, then you're tested on that material. You are told what you ve got right, what you got got wrong.

And then the next day, you take a test again, even with overlapping questions. So the test you took just the day before, and that group performs worse in the group that studied, had a gap test, had a gap test. They perform somewhere in the middle.

What does this tell us? What IT tells us is so important. Visio neuroplasticity V V best learning strategies. This is something that goodness I wish I had learned when I was in graduate school, when I was an undergraduate, when I was in high school and elementary school. Goodness, even when I was in kindergarten, I wish I learned this.

Test yourself on the material that you are just exposed to very soon after your first exposure to IT, because that offsets the natural forgetting of new material that the brain is exposed to. This is absolutely the hallmark of all the impressive data about testing as a tool for learning, testing oneself or your students, or being tested. If you're the student, buy your teacher as a tool, not just for evaluating performance, for knowing what you know and don't know, but for consolidate that information in your neural circuits.

And when I say consolidating that information in neural circuits, I realize it's a mouthful. What we know is that this business of putting the testing soon after exposure to new material is about offsetting the forgetting of that material. So you might say, wait, if that's true, how comes studying the material and then waiting and then taking two tests right back to back where you're learning the material again during the test, that should be the best performing group? Uh, well, there seems to be something fundamentally different about first exposure to material versus testing yourself on that material.

And we don't know exactly what that is. There are some interesting neural imaging data in humans. This has to do something with this notion of familiarity with material. This is very simple. So this is easy understanding.

Although IT involves a little bit of memory neuroscience nomenclature, familiar with something recognizing IT is not the same thing as having agitated with that thing of having mastery of that thing is not the same thing as having mastery of the material of having committed IT to memory. Okay, so when you read something over and over and over, you see IT over and over. You hear IT over and over. You think about IT over over. Of course, you're reading IT or you're hearing about IT and you think that you're learning the material, that your neural circuits are changing, but it's a pretty passive process or even if it's a difficult chapter to read or difficult passage of music.

The difference is when you're tested on material, something happens in your performance of or recalling of if it's just you know cogniac or you're writing IT down or you're told to play the music or do the the motor movement, something happens in the error, the getting wrong of certain things that cuse your nervous system to lock in the information that you have right and to remember what you have wrong so that you then correct IT, which is funny, different, then exposure and response, sure. And reexported. okay.

So it's a prerecorded learning that you need to see the material for the first time. You can just start testing yourself on material. You never been exposed. You I expose, you could, but you're going to get IT. I would imagine mostly wrong, were all wrong.

But this business of using testing very soon after first exposure to material as a tool to study in order to offset forgetting is clearly tapping into this difference between familiarity with something for which we know certain brain areas are activated versus recollection, being able to take that material and bring IT to memory, bring IT to focus attention and use that material. I realized this is a bit abstract, and some of this is still being parsed. If you're interested in the neuroscience of familiar with something versus your ability to actually recall something and have mastery of that material, there's a really nice review that I provide a link to in the shown of caption.

It's polishing the journal hippo campus. I always chocolate the fact that there's a journal that named after a brain structure, after all, as far as I know, there isn't to a journal called retina or amiga. And I have a brief anette from graduate school, whereby i'd learned that there was this journal hippo campus, and I was at a IT, was my first graduate student gathering in graduate school.

And the guy who hosted IT, turns out is a luminary in the field of learning and memory. And I was saying, this is ridiculous. Like there's a journal called hip campus here.

And first, your graduate student, yeah, there is and I said, silly like who who are like are the idea that name a journal after a brain structure? Turns out there is also a general called three record tex. And there's probably one about spinal courts that turns out I was the idiot saying this.

And the guy I was talking to, who, of course, was the host of the party, said, yeah, actually that's my journal I found in the journal hippocampus, so you can look them up. So at this point you're gonna take a test and its a super easy test. okay.

I realized where a bit into material, and we're all probably for teen in a little bit. Marvelling, I hope, at what an incredible tool testing, in particular self testing soon after being exposed to new material is. And the question is this, by the way, this is an open ended question.

You're not supposed to know the answer because I haven't told you the answer yet, but I want you to think about this. If one looks at the majority of data in this whole field of testing as a studying tool, how much improvement do you think you get from testing yourself once on new material? Do you think it's, you know ten percent improvement, twenty percent improvement.

So here, i'm just comparing to testing yourself once on material that you were just exposed you for the first time versus not testing yourself at all. Kay, how how much you think you improve? The answer is about fifty percent five zero.

And I can say that on the basis of the fact that in studies of musical learning, a mathematical learning, of language learning, of motor learning, when subjects are exposed to new material and then tested at some period of time later, the percentage of information they get right or that they are able to perform something correctly diminishes over time, especially because they're not doing any practice and no testing in the intervening time. This was built into these experiments. And then you simply ask how much of the material was forgotten if they just were exposed to the material.

So in the case of, say, music learning, this would be, you know, your teacher sits down next year and shows you the scales on the piano, but then you're not practising them in between us. Or perhaps another example would be somebody gives you a lecture about a particular phase in history and then you're not being exposed the material again and you're not self testing verses. If you just take one test as even a self directed test of the material immediately after, irrespective of how well you perform, you have the amount of forgetting.

okay? I want you to think about self testing in this way because we're thinking about optimal studying strategies. You have the amount of forgetting that would Normally occur.

This is also so important. In fact, I don't even know that most neuroscientists think about learning a neuroplasticity this way. Most everybody, including neuroscientists, are taught, were taught, continued to be taught that you're exposed to new material.

You focus okay than during sleep. There's remodeling of the connections. All that's true.

But we really need to think about how most information that comes into our nervous system each day is forgotten. Most of IT is completely discarded. There are some rare clinical deficits where people remember everything.

And i'll tell you, these people's really struggle in life. They do not do well in work and relationships. They remember every little detail of everything.

And IT is incredibly disruptive to the quality of life is nothing you want. You want have a great memory for the right things. So when you self test material, you have the amount of forgetting that occurs compared to if you're just exposed to the material.

I want you to keep that fact in mind because that fact is the one that really hit me outside the head and made me realize, goodness gracious, how I wish that I self tested myself on material that I wanted to remember over time, rather than reading IT over and over. I had this a elaborate process for studying that I use all through college and graduates going to work pretty well for me, where I read and highlight. Then I write out my notes, then I would write low paragraphs about that stuff.

Now, some of that probably mimic self testing. Indeed, I had to have. And then, of course, I would take the quiz es, and I would go off for hours.

Now, once I got serious about school, I got really serious about school. Of course, I still forget things. I've made errors on this podcast before, in part from going too fast.

They are making a joke that people didn't perceive as a joke. Whole story there. But in any case, of course, I make errors.

Of course, i've forgotten certain things, and sometimes I misspeak. I always strive to get things accurately. We correct things in the shown ote captions if they're called out to us.

We're now using A I to review the podcast and adjust anywhere using insertion or we're actually replacing those words if we need to and so on and so forth. But yes, we all forget things. We all make earth. But if I had just known that testing myself on material while walking out of class or soon after getting home, or later that evening or the next day, would allow me to perform so much Better on an exam, a mid term or a final exam, and of course, I still would have study because I was committed, and you should still study as much as you feel as necessary to get mastery of the material for you. However, if I i'd known that testing oneself or being tested soon after exposure to material would have the amount of forgetting even out to a year later, I definitely would have saved myself a lot of time.

Let's talk about some specifics of ways that you can self test, or if you're a teacher, or if you have good dialogue with your teacher and they are open minded, perhaps they are open to hearing about what are the best forms of testing oneself as a tool for learning. The best tests are open ended, short answer, very minimal prompt tests, not unlike the type that we've taken today during this podcast. As compared to multiple choice test, multiple choice questions allow for familiarity of names of facts.

No IT can be A, B, C, D, and sometimes is you know a and c and someone and so forth. And within each of those, A, B, C, D, E answers. And you're looking for the right answer.

You're looking for the familiar, the recognition of something. Yes, this, not that. Okay, that's the best answer. You circle, see. Okay, this kind of thing, as was a an open ended question where you have to write out your answer, you have to recall the information, right? IT requires a much greater degree of mastery of the information, then does familiar or recognition of the material.

So the best test as study tools are going to be open ended, short answer questions or even long answer questions. Now there's one exception to this, which are multiple choice tests that include tricks OK. If you've ever taken the G R E, the graduate school entrance exam or the l SAT, or the m cat, there are some questions in there.

There are very straightforward, but in those standardized test, they tend to include some great trick questions in which those questions don't allow you to just recognize the correct the answer and distinguished from the other incorrect answers. But rather, they have answers in there that, on first blush, look like the right answer. And people have a tendency to circle those and move on, or to select those and move on.

But if you think about the material a little more deeply, turns out those obvious answers are actually the incorrect answers. So there are all versions of multiple choice test where IT requires a greater degree of mastery of the material, where simple, familiar won't serve you, and you actually have to be able to recall the different components of information leading into that. But those are a bit more rare certainly in the context of other kinds of learning like musical learning, although I suppose for music theory that could be relevant.

But when I say music learning, i'm just kind of defaulting to the idea of the mechanics of musical learning. But of course, there's music theory at set. So what i'm effectively saying is the ultimate exam, the final exam, the midterm exam, exam that administer to you.

Rarely do you have control over the format of that exam. Sometimes it's mixed format, but the different ways in which you self test as a form of studying are really key. And ideally you would make these open ended.

In other words, you would not simply rely on multiple choice. You would rely on a formal self testing or that you give your students so that your teacher gives you, that requires you to think about material with some degree of depth, with some degree of effort. And of course, you're going to get certain things wrong.

Now I would hope that if testing is being used as a learning tool as opposed to just for evaluation. But here we're talking about using testing as a learning tool that IT wouldn't impact, at least not at that moment, your final performance in the course or whatever IT is rather IT is testing for sake of learning. Now we know from the literature that students don't like pop quiz es.

I gave you a few today and forgive me, they don't like pop quiz es, and we know this in the form of the reduction in teaching evaluation scores. Okay, uh, having received teaching evaluation scores of different a values over the years, and I always take the feedback seriously, one salient comment that just lept into my mind was the first that I end up mentioning my bulldog costolo, too often in class. So here i'm mentioning him again.

Just get back at that one student that said, I mentioned to, I mention as much I want. The point here is that when students evaluate their teachers, they tend to punish their teachers for pop quizzes. Does that mean pop quiz is aren't effective? no.

But you know what's more effective telling students at the outset of class or telling yourself at the outset of any kind of learning expedition? Because this isn't just about the classroom that you're going to take a bunch of exams, that you're going to use testing or quiz, whatever you want to call them as a form of teaching and learning and that you can expect five tests or five quiz es during the course of being presented the material, or that you are going to test yourself every day after the material. Now sometimes you have to go from one class to the next class.

There isn't an opportunity to test yourself. But guess what's not going to be helpful walking on a class and getting immediately on to your phone? We know that, that probably inhibits your your ability to remember the material because it's going to enhances forgetting because you do have this key opportunity right after being exposed to new material to help offset the forgetting by testing yourself on that material as soon as possible after being exposed to IT.

So again, even though I did not attend school in an era where we had smart phones in texting, I recall walking at a class and just walking at a class and going to my bicycle. But of course, there were people to talk to. There were things to attend to.

If you're really serious about learning material, take a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes after being exposed to that material and think about that material, test yourself on IT. And if you find that you don't know the material, you're confused by IT or overwhelmed by IT, great. You just accomplish the first step in queue, your nervous system, to the fact that he needs to learn that material.

And you created an opportunity for enhanced neuroplasticity, which is really what all of the stuff about testing as a form of studying is about. You're gone to test yourself so that you figure out what you don't know, so that you then look up that material, test yourself on IT again, so that ultimately you forget very little love IT, if any. Now there are other components to learning a neuroplasticity that i've talked about on previous podcast that are just too interesting not to mention, but i'm just going to mention them in brief, things like gap effects.

Gap effects are also cool, and we've been demonstrated for lots of different forms of learning. Gap effects are what I just did, which is to take period pauses in the learning of material as short as five to ten seconds, but even as long as thirty seconds, during which, guess what, your hip campus, the neurons in your hippocampus, repeat information that you've been exposed you for the first time at a rate twenty to thirty times faster than typical, just as IT does during rapid di movement sleep. So if you are a teacher, and or if you are a learner, periodical throughout an episode, a class or whatever, of trying to learn new motor skills, or music kills or whatever kind of learning, pause and let your hippocampus generate more repetitions of that material than IT would otherwise if you just try to barrow through.

So I realized, as we've gone through today's discussion, that words like test in quiz, evaluation, offsetting, forgetting all of that stuff can, you know, Spike people's court is all I can give us. Flashbacks to uncomfortable classroom experiences related to being called on cold, cold for the answer, a vicious trick that instructors play. Keep in mind that testing as a form of studying whether or not self directed or given to you by a teacher, is not for sake of evaluation at the level of, okay, you know, you get an exam at the end of a lecture, and then you do your best to answer those questions, and then you turn IT in and impact your grade.

No, this is about being told or revealing to yourself how much you know and don't know, and then of course, being told the correct answers so that you can compare your answers to the correct answers, and doing this frequently, ideally very soon after being exposed to the material. That's one of the key things that I keep coming back to again and again here um because it's something that Frankly, was not done while I was in school for whatever reason. And I think that's largely because when people hear the word testing, they think of evaluation and if anything, at least in the united states over the last thirty years, but in particular over the last fifteen years, there's been this tendency to shift away from formal evaluation.

You know, I personally believe that one can learn in many different styles, in many different context. I, of course, as a university professor, believe that for certain topics, in particular science and medicine and health, but other topics as well, of course, that formal, rigorous course work is by far the best way to learn information for me. But that regardless of whether not you're learning just from youtube or you're learning from podcast, or you're learning from books or you're learning from the school of life is IT were from experience that testing as a form of studying is absolutely key. And gosh, there's such a beautiful body of research.

In fact, I linked to several studies, including a review entitled testing enhances learning a review of the literature as well as a beautiful article test enhances learning um which gets into this and there's a wonderful book about this that will also provide a linked to in the showed te captions um all of course authored by researchers who have worked squarely in this field and compare the data on testing as a studying tool to other forms of studying and learning so it's a really impressive literature that I do believe we all should have known about and that's why i'm passing IT on to you now. Now before we wrap up, I want to make sure that I emphasize some of the other key components to study in learning that have nothing to do with testing as a studying tool. And those are the role of emotion, the role of story and the role of what's called interleaving.

Now, in terms of emotion, I think we all inherently understand that more emotionally laden experiences are remembered more durably. We tend not to forget them. In fact, this is the basis of things like P, T, S, D, post traumatic s stress disorder.

IT is the reality that one trial learning, that is, exposure to something and never forgetting IT occurs very readily when the thing that we're exposed to is negative or has a very heavy negative emotional sAiling. So could be something we read or something we see. Sometimes it's something that happens to us.

You know, I don't like the idea of that, but this is true. Your nervous system is wired. Such neural plasticity is such that stressful experiences, because they deploy such massive amounts of a drennen epinephrine as well as other neuromodulators, allow very quickly for the menu, the environment of the neural circuits that LED up to that experience to strengthen their connections with one trial, so called one trial learning.

This is why, sadly, although at the same time, from an adaptive perspective, we say, fortunately, if you were to step outside today and. Got forbid, see somebody hit by a car. You would remember that, chances are you would remember that forever. Now that does not mean that the emotional components of that memory are necessarily going to stay within you.

There are tools for the treatment of P, T, S, D, such as the different ones that come to mind, or you know, systematic exposure therapy, where you reexported to that idea or memory, sometimes even circumstance, with, of course, the support of a train professional, typically psychology psychologist, and the emotional load of that experiences, gradually a uncoupled from your memory of the experienced things like em, D, R. There are from ecologic approaches. Some of these are combined with the sorts things i've described.

I've done entire episode stress in P, T, S, D. Again, you can find those huberman lab dcom by putting stress P, T, S, D into the search function. However, we know that this is the same, no modulators, mainly epinephrine or epinephrine ploy, ed, at massive amounts in those moments where something very stressful happens, that allows the neural circuits that LED up to the circumstance, as well as the neural circuits that encoded that visual scene and seems like IT or sounds like IT, to be locked in and linked to the stress response.

Now what this is really all saying is that negative stuff is remembered typically the first time in every time, and very dabble over time as compared to positive experiences which as far as peak experiences go right birth of your first child though a wedding, a wonderful um professional or personal experience. Those two can be one trial learning and memory. But most things that we are exposed to are not at those extremes, either negative or positive.

However, we know that any kind of story, any kind of emotional emphasis on material, either in the delivery of that material, but certainly in the way that that material is perceived by you like getting really excited about something you want to learn, or thinking something is really awful, is likely to be more readily and stably committed to your memory. And that's because of these neuromodulators like up an f an and nor up an effort, but other neuro dulas ors as well, that why are those experiences into your neural circuits? Again, these neuromodulators up and ever, nor up an effort.

We also hear about to see a Colin dopy at sea. They can Operate at low levels in sort of background levels. They can create subtle fluctuations in mood, focus and attention. Or they can create massive shifts in mood, focus and attention depending on their levels. They are timing.

And much, much more point here is that if you're a teacher and or if you are a learner, paying attention to your internal state as you're trying to learn is very key. We've all had that teacher, that lecture, that just kind of draw things out in monitor. If you need to learn the material coming out of a source like that person or otherwise, you're going have to ramp up your level of internal attention consciously in order to bring about some emotional silence, some intensity to the way it's perceived.

And you can do that just through your own thinking as opposed to the situation, whether you have a super dynamic teacher who who's telling you things with White eyes and privacy, even cracking jokes, by the way, the teachers that cracked jokes get lower teacher evaluations than those that don't crack jokes or swear. Did you know that the teachers that crack jokes and swear their perceived as more likeable, but they get lower overall evaluations. Typically, they're seen as less professional and therefore less good teachers by their students.

So I try not to make too many jokes or swear in my lectures. The point being that we all have those really wonderful dynamic teachers. Yes, it's much easier to learn and remember that material. You still need to test yourself on IT, but it's much easier to learn that material for the very reason I say before, it's a lesser example of more deployment of the neural delatour in you, the learner that is exposed to that material. okay.

So emotion matters so much so that in a beautiful review about learning a memory from the great James mega, one of the luminaries in modern neuroscience and psychology of memory, he talked about a medieval practice, this is prewar d whereby people and kids, kids are people, of course, but adults and kids were taught information and then thrown, literally thrown, into cold water. Why to deploy a general and consolidate memory of the material they were exposed to? Now I know we've covered delivered cold exposure on this podcast before.

No, i'm not saying you need to do a cold plunge after being exposed to new material, but guess what they were doing that many hundreds of years ago. And IT makes sense logically based on all our understanding of the news biology, underlying things like P, T, S, D, underlying emotion laid in memory formation and consolidation, and our ability to remember things that were emotionally laid in much Better than things that were less emotionally laid in. So if you want to take to a cold shower after learning some material, or even Better testing yourself mentally on that material, well, in a cold shower or cold plunge, you certainly can just don't stay in there too long, use best practices.

If you want to know what those best practices are for a deliberate cold exposure, you can check out our deliberate cold exposure newsletter at huberman lab. Dt comments completely zero costs. You don't even need to sign up.

You simply go to newsletter in the menu tab, and you can find that PDF. And now, because you are becoming proficient in an understanding of neuroplasticity and learning and testing and newer modulators like up in F, R, yes, drinking caffeine will increase your levels of ean afan. Not strikingly so, but enough that IT probably helps you learn things a little bit Better.

You drink the coffee after listen. That's getting a little bit too down in the details. The most important components to learning are that you would be alert so that you can attend so you can pay attention to the material you're trying to learn and then testing yourself later.

And of course, the other component, which is getting sufficient amount of great sleep each night, and I highly recommend doing nsd R. I mentioned gap effects before. That was a very, very cool.

I just used another one now. And the final tool for studying that, I believe, is not discuss enough and is a bit counterintuitive. So it's a fun one to just mention and that perhaps you can explore in your own studying and learning and adventures is interleaving of information. This one's kind of wild actually turns out that if your instructor or you takes information about something that they trying to teach you or you're trying to learn, maybe it's piano, maybe it's neuroscience, maybe it's how to learn Better, and everyone's in a while throws in an anette about something let's just say or mentioned something about the olympics or incorporate something that seems suda random because it's not actually related to the material you're trying to learn.

Turns out that that acts not as a gap in the same sense that gap affects which are times in which you do nothing in order to get more repetitions of the material you just heard in your hippocampus, but rather those breaks of interleaving information, not just getting a steady garage like drinking from a firehose of new information from start to finish, turn out to enhance overall learning ability. Probably, we think, at a mechanistic level because the neutral circuits s are able to generate more repetition, similar to gap effects, but actually in a very interesting way, also because by injecting other information that seems totally unrelated, random maceda. Random IT allows the brain areas that are responsible for encoding information to take whatever new information you're learning and to incorporate IT with existing knowledge or even distantly related knowledge.

So does this mean that you should learn math and history in the same lecture? Well, I think that might be a bit overwhelming, kind of like drinking from two firehouses. Here we're talking about interleaving chAllenging information that new to you with little anette little bits of information that perhaps are new to you but don't require a lot of chAllenge, which is of course, why everyone's and while I throw in a little anette about my bulldog or learning o anatomy or something of that sort, it's not just to provide a break, is to provide examples that are related, but not central to the material that we ve been talking about today, which is all about how to study and learn optimates.

Okay, so I realized that many of you are not students any longer, although some of you are. But in many ways, we are all students. We are all constantly being exposed, all sorts of information out in the world, in goodness knows, thank goodness we don't remember at all.

But there is, of course, information that we would like to remember, that we would really like to consolidate in our memory and be able to have some mastery over. earlier. I said I would distinguished between unskilled, skilled, mastery and virtuosity.

I'll do that now. Unskilled, of course, means that we have limited understanding, let alone ability to use information. Skilled typically means we know and can recognize and use information in basic ways or even advanced ways. Mastery typically means that we have no close to the full depths of acknowledge in a given area, and that we can use IT pretty flexibly.

And virtuosity, at least my definition of virtuosity is where we actually have such mastery of material that we can use IT in ways that we still don't even know how we can use, meaning that we can inject elements or we even invite elements of uncertainty and kind of point native into the use of that material. Here, i'm thinking of great musicians. I'm thinking of great athletes where they know all the place, they know all the moves, it's all scripted into their nervous system, and they can deploy those at any time.

So they have real mastery. But in order to display their incredible abilities, their virtuosity, they actively invite in the x factor the uncertainty such that sometimes they find themselves playing their instrument, or singing, or performing athletically or mathematically, what have you in ways that even surprise them? And that, of course, is a lot to expect of ourselves.

Most of us would be content to have skill and mastery of the things that we care about, and, you know, should we achieve virtuosity and wonderful. But one of the main points of today's discussion was to army with an understanding of neuroplasticity in the context of studying and learning, to really understand that so much of learning stability and consolidating information over time is to offset the forgetting process. And that testing is not just a tool for evaluating our knowledge, but rather a tool for evaluating and reinforcing and building our knowledge.

Put differently, that testing is an excEllent tool, if not the best tool, for studying. And I think that's an important reframe that others have brought about and that I really want to highlight. Underline in bold face during today's discussion is one that I certainly wish I had applied more in my educational trajectory, and it's one that I planned to deploy further in my.

Seeking out of new knowledge in terms of the podcast in neuroscience, but in other areas of my life as well because from the existing literature and hopefully from the wait was presented to you today, you probably realize that IT is near infinite, if not infinite, that we can apply testing as a tool for studying self testing, testing of others, using testing as a way to really prove what we know and don't know and to really offset that forgetting process. And in that sense, IT is really nicely aligned with what we know about neuroplasticity. And it's also something that we can use freely and that you can use covertly, that you can apply in your own, seeking out of knowledge and new skills of all kinds, classroom or otherwise.

If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. Another terrific zero cost way to support us is to follow the podcast on both spotify and apple.

And on both spotify, apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.

If you have questions for me, you're comments about the podcast or guest, your topics that you like me to consider for the huberman and lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on youtube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.

It's my very first book is entitled protocols and Operating manual for the human body. This is a book that i've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than thirty years of research and experience, and that covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus on motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.

The book is now available by presale at protocols, book that com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best again. The book is called protocols and Operating manual for the human body. If you're not, array fallowing me on social media.

I'm huberman lab on all social media platforms so that instagram x formally notice twitter threads, facebook and linton and on all those platforms I cover science and science related tools, some of which over lapse with the content of the huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman e lab podcast. Again, that's hubba e lab on all social media channels. If you haven't always subscribed to our neural network news letter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that has protocols which are one to three page p dfs that described things like optimising your sleep, had to optimize your dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes resistance training sets and reps in all of that, as well as cardiovascular training that supported by the scientific research. And we have protocols related to neuroplasticity and learning. Again, you can find all that at completely zero cost by going to huberman lab dot com.

Go to the menu tab in the right corner, scroll down the news letter you put in your email, and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about how to study and learn. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.