if you feel dumb reading the same thing again and again nothing actually ever going in well then you're in the right place because I was feeling that exact same way for a very long time and despite there being hundreds of study videos out there not one showed me exactly what to do in a realistic study session in real time so that's what we're going to do in this series my name is Zay oif I'm a third-year medical student at the University of Manchester and this is the very first video of the highly requested live studying series and today's live tutorial is on creating mind maps which is the very first thing I do as soon as I start studying a new topic let me explain why and show you how remember this is a practical video where it's useless for you to just sit back and relax so your first practical action is to grab a pen and a paper and follow along with a topic of your own you should really pause with each step and do this with your own topic because that is the only way you will learn and transform your way of studying by actually doing it with me and then realizing how much of a big difference it makes the reason you're studying inefficiently is because you're missing out on the first most important step of the learning process you're doing things in the wrong order because imagine for example you're in a cash grab machine where there's paper money all around you you're in this tube that's blowing money everywhere and you're trying to grab at one note and then the next thing and then as soon as you try to grab something else that old note Falls from your hand in the process of trying to grab as much money around you you start to let go of the old money as you grab the new stuff and at the end you're practically left with nothing it's not a Perfect Analogy but that's what your brain is doing when you're learning you're just grabbing at pieces of information all around you hoping to hold on to them but as soon as you start to learn the next thing you forget the old stuff so instead of reading through Concepts one by one and forgetting half them and then afterwards trying to make sense of all of it and try and connect it together why not first start by making sense of how all the basic concepts work and how they connect together and then you start to read through the topic in the coming hours one by one going through the concepts but the difference then will be is that there's something for all this new information that you're learning all these details to attach to in your head and that's what creating an initial mind map of the topic helps with it's just the initial structure for the whole topic with the important Concepts on it and and the end result is that it speeds up how quickly you understand how much you remember it practically speeds up every subsequent part of the learning process and it doesn't even take that long as you'll see me do now and to show you and prove to you that this actually works I'm going to be tackling quite a difficult Topic in medicine shock shock is a life-threatening state with a variety of causes and it basically results in less oxygen getting to the various organs of the body and it's one of those conditions that's a bit confusing to grasp initially but that's what I need to do for this case today so the very first step that I do as soon as I tackle a new topic that I know very little about is to skim through all the resources I need to use for this condition the notes the chapters the lectures generally read and skim through everything and then side by side I make a rough list of keywords and Concepts on a paper or a document skimming by the way means reading the titles the bolded sentences the keywords the main Concepts that are going to be in that chapter and I've learned that it's important not to do the skimming randomly I guess that's an important point to mention I'm skimming through the various Resources with the purpose of gathering the bigger Concepts within shock so I'm thinking about the main concepts for me as a CL and two I'm skimming with the purpose of thinking about how the concepts are linked together how are they similar how are the different topics different I already have the general resources for shock opened up so finally let's begin let's get into it let's make the [Music] [Music] list now as you can see I've made that keyword list using some notes online using some websites and as you probably saw I did start to make a list of keywords here quite randomly just going through the websites and stuff in general cuz I didn't understand the topic properly but as soon as I even got a general sense of it I realized that the easiest and most sensible way to categorize and organize everything is simply through the types of shock and by the way yes officially the first step is to make the full list and then the second step is to categorize them that was the Second Step that I did simultaneously which is that while making this list of keywords Take 5 minutes to think about how all these general concepts link together and how you can group them the whole point of making this full list of keywords is so that you can divide all of the different difficult topics up into the subcategories and categories and just to make sense of the entire topic before you start drawing out the initial mindmap I've done this here by categorizing the main topics into the three different types of shock because each of them are caused differently they lead to different investigations and hence different treatments I didn't want to get bugged down to the details I didn't put everything on here obviously the way you categorize and group topics together is different based on every topic it even depends on how you think yourself personally and to be honest sometimes it's not easy to think about how the topics can be grouped together how I can make it into topics and subtopics while I'm doing my first skim and making that list that's why just writing the main bolded words the list of Concepts and then grouping them after does help form a better base so yeah my point is that you don't need to force yourself to combine step one and two just because I have here because I realized halfway through step one that I can get step two done straight away a quick pause in the video These take ages to plan and make while I'm studying for all my exams and stuff cuz please could you leave a like spam the comments help me out with the algorithm and let's get back right into it anyways yeah enough rambling I spent around I think 15 minutes skimming through the whole thing and then making the list but now let's get into the final step of actually creating that initial mind map the beef of this video but remember this is just me creating a basic layer of knowledge I've just done 15 minutes of skiing so far I barely know like the different types and how they work so I'm going to be doing more skimming while I make the my map I might scratch out the entire my map and start again depending on if I found a good idea or whatever but I'll show you all how it works let's [Music] begin so this is what we've ended up with here this is the Mind map that I've drawn let me walk you through how I did it and and how you can do it as well step by step see while watching I hope you understood that this isn't just me copying my keywords onto the Mind map this all has a clear structure meaning most people can walk through it and understand what the main concepts are and what the links are generally and because I made it this way they can understand the overall picture of the topic and understand in a way that it's memorable and the only reason I was able to do that was because in step one and two I put in the effort of skimming through the entire topic of Shock first then I put all of the concepts onto a list into clear groups and categories which as we discussed were the different types of shock and the most important reason that this mind map is pretty structured and clear to understand is because I took the time to think and understand the way these different concepts the different types of shock and their different details are related to each other so the first part of this step is to find a way to link the big main categories through one central idea and that's why in The Next Step I didn't just draw shock put put a circle around it and put arrows to cardiogenic hypmic and distruptive shock I took it a step further and found a memorable way to link these categories together I realized that the different types of shock here all affect one thing the blood circulation system except each one of them affects it in a different way and that's the key main idea that I Ed to link the different types of shock together I ended up doing a pretty rough but memorable drawing of the blood circulation system and the main thing is that I visually showed how each type of shock affects this C circulation system in each of the different ways septic shock is caused by the dilation of these vessels hypmic is a hemorrhage of a vessel and cardiogenic is issues with the heart or the lungs and so is the obstructive the next part of this method after you've linked the main Concepts into one central idea is to now represent 90% of the subtopics and Concepts and processes of the topic that you're learning visually now as you can see instead of writing on eptic shock is a condition where your BP drops to a dangerously low state where it's life-threatening caused by an infection such fungi bacteria whatever I'm obviously not going to write any of that because making a mind map with a heavy amount of text is something that's never going to be memorable it's never going to be helpful to me I know I need to make it as Visual and weird as possible and that's the whole reason we skimmed initially to understand the general broad ideas in a good enough way that we can easily represent those definitions and the basics that we learned onto this mindmap only if we draw it out visually will it be clear and memorable enough for us to refer back to and think about when we think about this topic so here the Infectious pathogen is represented by this spiky ball that's why the an inflammatory response is happening that's why this vessel is on fire and then I added a zoomed in drawing of how the endothal cells get damaged in the blood vessel how they become leaky increased amount of cyto kindes and inflammatory cells come through vasil dilation occurs leading to low vascular resistant leading to low profusion of the organs and hence septic shock shock is quite a simple thing to understand conceptually but for harder topics I could have made this even more visually weird and story-like with characters for example making the virus evil or something like that apply because we're much more likely to remember it then I didn't do that here but I could have the next thing I want to emphasize is that while making the Mind map there has to be extreme levels of clarity and flow of ideas this isn't something I've done super well I think but you can visually see what's generally happening with each type of shot now I'm going to quickly go through some important tips to add more flow and Clarity into a mind map number one I've made the arrows Bolder and thicker I've added more emphasis to the drawings to show the important Concepts number two the main concepts of the Mind map need to be bigger I should have made bigger drawings for the middle especially and for some of the outer Concepts number three use color to make it clearer and more memorable I haven't really done that today but you can see how much Clarity it would add if the Hemorrhage here was bright red if the heart had like a gray outline showing necrose tissue if the virus was green and the fourth final suggestion I have is to group the topics into sub and Sub sub and Sub Sub sub topics as much as possible never just add like five different arrows around one concept you're not going to remember that and the concepts won't link together in your head at all so if you do have five things around the same one concept all coming off it then find a better way to group those five things and the way you can do that is by finding clearer relationships between those five things and the main concept so the rule is to not have more than three to four branches coming off the same topic while speaking through all of this with you guys I realized that a lot of my arrows aren't clear they're going the wrong ways I should have probably made a lot of the drawings bigger there should be less text on here like literally with septic shock septic shock doesn't cause an infection an infection and all of this causes septic shock which is caused by the low resistance and the low profusion I just did it the wrong way see this is quite good that I actually wasn't able to make it perfect because that shows that me rethinking about the initial idea I have of the topic and clarifying it in this meta conscientious way is actually helpful the fact that I'm re clarifying and finding mistakes and improving this will help me remember better at the end of the day all that matters is that it's reasonably clear logical and memorable because this is the way my brain is going to be thinking about this topic while studying for the next hour or two this is my Baseline that will speed up every other part of my my revision it doesn't matter if it doesn't make perfect sense or it's completely wrong even because if it is wrong I can think okay what in my thought process did I miss what can I change now to make it make better sense on the other hand if the way I'm thinking about is completely right then I'll keep building on it either way overall I'm relating whatever I'm going to be reading now and while I studi the topic of shock and sepsis and everything that relates to it back to this mindmap I'm linking all this new information I'll be learning about the treatments the investigations the Diagnostics everything to do with shock I'm linking it all back to this initial mind map of the types of shock and what it all means and how it works which is why my studying is going to be so efficient now like I already have this pre-existing knowledge in my head to link the new information too just because I spent a total of like 28 30 minutes making this mind map and priming myself with the topic there's a lot of experts out there like Justin Sun Peter J Brown their students like they make really good videos on how to make efficient quick mind maps they probably do it a lot more effectively than I would I watched their videos a few months ago and that's what got me into this that's why I started to use them in my study sessions but to be honest I always do find find it quite hard to replicate something I hear about on YouTube into my studies and use it practically so I know for sure if I saw this video I would have benefited so much to learn from a beginner like myself you know at that point honestly I really recommend if you didn't follow along which most of you probably didn't just to follow and do this with your own topic because there's nothing that's deepened my understanding of conditions and clinical knowledge these days than this method anyways let me know what you think about this new series how can I make these live studying sessions better how can I improve them for your learning I definitely want to make one live video for every important part of the studying process but to get a detailed overview a step-by-step guide that details every single part of the studying process from as soon as I start tackling a topic all the way to memorizing completely then check this video out it is the full study guide that goes through every part of the studying process how to make it efficient how to add practical steps in it you can study a topic while you watch it it's everything I've learned into one 30 minute video and I'll also add the playlist of the live videos that will now be coming out here as well please do leave a like spam the comments help me out with the algorithm thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one