have you ever wondered why some people are able to absorb information really quickly while on the other hand you seemingly can't no matter how much work you put into it while I've been there I've been in your shoes I know what that feels like but I'm here to tell you it's not your fault you just were never taught the right way but that all changes today because I'm going to accelerate your pace of learning so by the time that this 10 to 15 minute video is done you're going to think it was well well worth your time my name is Jun Yu if you're new to the channel welcome if you're returning welcome back I am calling these secrets purposefully because sometimes it does feel like the school system is hiding some of these techniques because they're so well supported and they would literally completely transform your experiences in education if you could learn how to apply them so that you can reap the benefits of them so I have this great desire in me to teach you them because I wish that I was exposed to them earlier too if you have any questions throughout this video please leave them in the comments below I'm more than happy to answer to them give this video a thumbs up and of course subscribe it's really important that we start with what is learning and to do that we have to understand neuroplasticity you see in our brains we have billions of neurons that have the potential to make trillions of connections and neuroplasticity is our brain's ability to physically change in response to an experience and what is actually changing well it's the connections between two neurons and the more repetitions there are the more durable that connection becomes and this ultimately plays a vital role in our ability to encode information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory but there are ways to optimize this there are ways to look at evidence-based techniques and apply them across our stages of learning to really be able to reap the benefits of them and we're going to break this down as simply as possible in this practical video for you so that after it's over you can immediately apply them now before we get into the very first secret I do want to take a little bit of time here to share with you guys some really exciting and exclusive news you see 5 years ago I could have never imagine myself to be in the shoes that I am in today and it's always a little bit awkward to think about or even say aloud that I will be graduating with two degrees having done six Monon long internships in Pharma already been offered multiple positions in biomedical engineering even before I graduate have been able to build a super successful business that helped me pay off my student loans by myself been able to help my parents be able to pay off their debts and that's been a really really surreal experience all while being the healthiest mentally physically and spiritually that I've ever been and this becomes so much more important knowing where it started from I come from an immigrant family that first of all none of my parents really speak the language at all we always struggled financially my parents went through a really really nasty divorce that completely broke me and it made our family deal with a lot of mental health issues and to know that I came from that background to to where I am today is truly the greatest blessing and I wish that I had somebody throughout that process almost as a mentor of mine to tell me when I'm on the right track when I'm not and I really think that would have accelerated my pace of learning but the greatest greatest joy of all of this and I truly believe what my calling is is now to be able to help all of you reach that type of success and be able to do it in the right way and with this project I now have the ability to do that at a depth that was never done before whether it be relationships and it can be both platonic romantic it could be about money it could be about productivity it can be about prospective careers it can be about being an exceptional student all while developing yourself with your mental and your physical and spiritual pillars all wrapped up in a self-growth formula dedicated for all of you guys with months and months and months and months and months of preparation just right before launch and in just a few days it will be coming live and so I'm super excited to announce that if you think that's something that you're interested in sign up to the wait list below and you will be getting those exclusive announcements and also exclusive offers when the launch comes about so with that being said let's get into the rest of the video the first secret is active recall and this is a principle that has an ample number of supporting literature in its simplest explanation it is pulling information out of our brains without our source material to help us and that's why it's synonymous with free recall we are freely remembering a piece of information without a cue to help us and it's a great way to self assess and actually many of you are probably really familiar in the context of revision for active recall right because I've talked about it so much and the specific applications that I always recommend are the learning method the F and technique along with your practice test and so I actually want to spend this time approaching it a little bit differently I want to talk about it in the context of what you can do before class during class immediately after class and it's because if you can leverage the benefits of active recall in your earlier stages by the time you get into your revision you will have such a strong Foundation of knowledge that you're absolutely going to smash your revision so I think it's important that we talk about it in this light too so before your classes what I want you to do are 5 to 10 10 question pretests okay and what do we know about knowledge it builds upon itself we sometimes fall into this false narrative that the new topic we're going to learning in class is completely irrelevant it's completely new when in reality no it's probably connected to information that we've learned already in some capacity and if you had used the proper techniques before and had such a deep understanding of that topic before you you can actually surprise yourself with how well you can answer questions even without getting that full exposure in class but when you practice the active recall here you are trying to freely recall the information that you've learned in the past and in doing so you're trying to understand how this information is relevant to the material that you've learned and also you're actually going to be leveraging the hyperraum effect which states that we have the tendency to learn better when we're corrected on an answer than if we had gotten it right the first time time around and so that's how you're going to be doing it before class but active recall can also be applied within your classes by creating active recall questions so instead of passively rewriting everything that the teacher is saying alloud which is very low utility we're going to perform something that's very high utility it's going to require you to take an additional step into the teacher's mind and ask yourself how can this information be tested how is this information relevant why is this information important in which cont context could this be applied and what are some examples that this information could be tested with and in doing that what you are doing is creating such quality questions for yourself so that after class is over you have created yourself the perfect review sheet as you look at the questions that you've created you have the opportunity to answer them thoroughly while freely recalling the information so no presentation in front of you I don't want you to get your textbooks out here I want you to literally try and reg itate the things that you could remembered and also add in any information that you can recall from previous topics before that are relevant and in doing that yes you're going to get a lot of these right but also you're going to get some wrong but this is going to scope your strengths and your weaknesses early on so you can consolidate the information that you can remember and then be able to Target your weaknesses for your revisions and that's just a great great way to be extremely efficient when you get into your revision instead of just studying all the material from scratch so recall is extremely extremely extremely beneficial stop with the low utility highlighting rereading or rewriting this is your opportunity to really make use of one of the most Wells supported techniques out there active recall secret number two spaced repetition iring ebbing house had discovered the forgetting curve and if you haven't been exposed to that before let's break it down right now so on screen we're going to have the Y AIS represent ENT retention and the x-axis is going to represent the number of days so this graph is going to show us how quickly we lose information as human beings okay so on Day Zero what we'll have is a retention of 100% now day one which is one day after you had been exposed to that information that knowledge in terms of how much you were able to retain is going to drop all the way down to 35% then on day two it's going to drop even further to 177% then day four it'll drop down to 8% and then it will start to bottom out with this exponential decay function those percentages are all going to be dependent on the type of material that you're learning how much information background you had on it how relevant it is to you a ton of different things but in general this curve points out to us as human beings how quickly and how rapidly we lose information and this actually makes sense right because think about how much auditory and visual stimuli we see on every second basis especially with our phones nowadays if our brain tried to pay attention to every single one of those pieces of information and then store it our brains would literally explode and so it needs to get good at forgetting information and so how can we make that information stick better well there are ways to make the information relevant and there's also tactics like spaced repetition which have been so well supported in literature to have a ginormous benefit and so what would this look like practically well the interval between your study sessions when the material is still new or unfamiliar to you will be shorter and then when the information becomes more relevant the intervals between your study sessions become longer and so you might study on the first day and then you might study that same topic on the second day and then the fourth day and then in a week and then two weeks and then in a month and then two months and I know know the first thought in your mind is June there's no way I can repeatedly study this topic you think I have time for that and I would tell you hold on give me a second hear me out right and so what happens in each of those study sessions well because the foundation of your knowledge grows each time you're not studying for as long in each subsequent session and more importantly in the context of when it comes down to your revision for your exams no longer are you needing to cram and learning material from scratch and spending another 3 4 days reading your textbook or looking through your lectures anymore no because you would have organized your revision Tim taes in a manner in which space repetitions were integrated in it which is super easy to do if you do this prospectively right so before your term starts when you have an understanding of your syab and the topics that are going to be covered and you can space them out this way you have such a great opportunity save yourself tremendous amount of time right before your exams to reduce that anx iety that comes with feeling unprepared and I promise you it would make a World's difference so actually make use of space practice secret number three and we can say that this one is the better kept secret in comparison to the first two because I rarely see students adopt it but it can be just as beneficial right and especially in the context of math classes so let's look at a particular example and I really do believe it would highlight the benefit of it for all of you to understand and so so let's say you're a math student learning derivatives right we all love derivatives in that case we would be exposed to all the relevant rule so you have your constant rule you have your power rule your sum and your difference rule your product and your quotient Rule and your chain rule right and so each of your subsequent classes may be dedicated to a specific Rule and then your homework would reflect that now there is evidence that shows it is beneficial for us to be initially exposed to information in that way in that format in a blocked format or a blocked approach but when it comes to us practicing that material when it comes to us revising that material for our exams we should be immediately adopting in a relieved practice and what would that look like that's you simply taking the questions from all those individual homework assignments and reorganizing them and creating a completely different order why because it forces you to step away from any passive process that you might be engaged in so what do I mean by this well let's say that questions 1 through five you know they're in close proximity together you know that you learn the product rule first and so you know for a fact that all those questions are going to be in relation to that product rule so you just have to think about the steps and then you complete those first five questions then you look at questions 5 to 10 and you think yeah those are all going to be based on the quotient rule so you immediately know that that's the application so you look at the rules for that and you immediately apply and you do the practice that way that is not going to be helpful because first of all you're you're not going to be tested that way right you would never be tested with a professor prompting you on which technique to use especially when you're into higher education in engineering that's never the case we're completely given a different application or different context and we have to synthesize new knowledge by being able to distinguish characteristics of those problems and know which tool to utilize from what we've learned right and so we want to ensure that our practice simulates that type of experience and so when you completely reorganize randomly these question questions what happens is you have to actually actively engage with the material and ask yourself that so you look at a question and think to yourself What is the characteristic of this question that prompts me to use a specific rule that I've learned and you start to recognize the differences amongst the types of questions but you can also start to form linkages across the similarities too and that's when you get the really deep comprehension that you're looking for and of course this is significantly harder than doing the blocked practice but there's also a phenomenon called desirable difficulty and it states that the harder it is for us to learn something the better it will stick the more we challenge ourselves the better and so this is our opportunity to simulate an experience that will actually emulate what is going to be on our exams but also what's going to be in our real world scenarios and our professional careers and it it allows us to leverage that desirable difficulty and also interleaving doesn't solely apply to the topics but also the modes of learning too and so perhaps one day you are utilizing the blurting method or the fing technique and then you want to complement that with drawing a diagram to understand the linkages or perhaps you watch a YouTube video or perhaps you watch an online module that's from an external source and all of this is going to provide you different perspectives of that topic at hand or of that material so it can be extremely beneficial so inner leaving is really powerful and I hope that you take advantage of it and sec number or the most important one of them all the one that if you neglect nothing I ever tell you will ever matter it is sleep it is deep rest and before you tune me out and think that this is Trivial I promise you it's not and I know this because I see a lot of students cram and pull all nighters and that is literally the opposite to what I'm about to say here if you understood the importance of deep breaths you will now you would never do that ever again because it it's probably the worst thing you could ever do so let's look at what I'm talking about so neuroplasticity everything that we talked about in that introduction can be initiated yes absolutely by deep focus and so I love that you're prioritizing your study sessions I love that you want to optimize your study sessions but guess what the actual rewiring of those neurons those connections as they become repeated and strengthened all of that that memory consolidation that happens it occurs in your sleep it occurs in your deep breath and so neuroplasticity how you learn is a two-step process it's not just the deep focus but it's also deep rest and so when you are pulling all nighters and you're cramming the reason why it's so so inefficient and ineffective is you will learn the material or you will think that you learn the material because you've put active Focus towards it and then you will pull the on nit you might even had done well on the exam the next day if you are in maybe perhaps a lower class in high school yes the exam might have been so easy enough that it was regurgitation questions where you could go ahead and just literally remember what you had just looked at an hour or 2 hours before but when you get into higher education this will definitely not fly right and moreover ask yourself how many times when you cramm or pulled in all night do you remember the information the next day after you eventually go to bed probably rarely probably zero times do you ever do that right unless you went ahead and then you repeated the material you slapped and then you had gone over the material again but what happens so much is that we don't prioritize the knowledge that we have after the exam is over we think that the grade is so important and again to excel in that exam in the first place you should have slept to consolidate the information and hopefully if you had used all the other techniques up to this point you're not necessarily feeling like there's this requirement of you to pull an on Niner right you don't need that additional 6 7 hours as you sleep it's a better usage of that but also think about the knowledge that you'll have after the exam is over you're doing the right thing about consolidating this information and so that as we know that information builds upon itself you're going to be able to recall that information again and we know that this is so important not just in our academics but also in our professional career so don't get in the bad habit of cramming and actually prioritize ize your sleep even I I tell everyone that work with this I would personally prefer to get an additional one or two hours of sleep then get an additional one or two hours of studying or last minute studying because usually that last minute studying isn't high quality studying and moreover if you have a high performing brain that day you have a better ability to recall past information and to be able to create these linkages and information where you know if you've created this Web of Knowledge that is so so welldeveloped with the linkages across even if there's gaps in information across those linkages you can fill those gaps in you can almost be able to guess really well if you will because you have all this context of information right so you want your brain to be in its best performance state to get your sleep and there are so many ways to optimize your sleep and I'm really considering just doing a whole video about how to optimize your sleep there are ways in terms of of course caffeine cut off time having a regular sleep schedule whether it be in your weekday or at your weekends whether it be about lowering the temperature in your room there are so many ways you can optimize your sleep if that's of interest to you i' be more than happy to do that so with that being said those were the four secrets that I will transform the pace of your learning and hopefully now you have the context of how and it's up to you to go ahead and apply them and if you have any questions as you apply them again leave them in the comments below I'm more than happy to help you I know that you have great potential in you and if I can guide you or help you in any capacity I'm more than happy to do that give this video a thumbs up and of course subscribe so until next time take care of yourselves I love you guys so much and I'll at the top [Music]