if you're the person who reads and reads and reads for hours on end without actually taking anything in is because you're doing it all wrong my name is Zayn oif I'm a third- year medical student and in this video we are going through the exact steps one by one everything that you need to know to read and sign your topics very very quickly regardless of how difficult they are and as requested this is a live demonstration so I'll be studying a med school topic right in front of you and I swear no one does this but I will literally be showing you how I go through information how I create recall questions my entire process all of it in real time so let's get into the second video of the live studying series most of you just start a topic and start reading through it line by line word by word and then end up getting stuck 2 minutes in trying to read the same things 10 times over trying to force it in somehow but the key to actually getting through a ton of information very quickly and understanding it effortlessly is learning in layers this means that when you're studying a topic very very consciously organize the way you take in the information easiest to hardest and the fact is that no text no teacher actually teaches the information in this way you're the one that actually has to structure the knowledge that you need to understand you're the one that has to First figure out and think through what the topic is actually about that's the first layer only then do you go on to reading the general concepts visualizing the processes that's the second layer and after you've spend time understanding 80% of it that's when you now go back through all of it and look at the complex 20% details the 20% of things that were actually difficult to understand of the first go through but now that you've done all of this work it's not as hard that's the third layer that's all layering is literally think of taking in the knowledge like you're building a house the walls and the floors of the first layers then come in the doors and the furniture that's the second layer and then you end up with the third layer of the stuff the decor the paintings the house has to be constructed in a layer by layer fashion you can't just put in paintings and stuff when there's no walls the same applies to learning anyways enough foreplay let's get started with the actual studying today we are doing liver diseases the first layer is the basic concepts as soon as you start learning a topic the first step is only to take in the easiest foundational layer of information this means skimming through the entire chapter looking at keywords that you don't know watching basic videos very generally making sense of how each big topic links together in our study process we do this by first skimming through a bunch of resources and then creating a mind map instead of just reading through different concepts one by one and then afterwards trying to connect them and make sense of them what I do is I start with creating a mind map a structure that helps me link the big topics and see how they work together this is the Mind map I made for liver diseases firstly you you see that it has a very clear flow it's very visual as you can see so I'll remember it but the key key thing with this is that I found a memorable way to connect both of these conditions through one central idea which is the progression of how bad the liver gets as the as both the diseas is worse in it first say fat then it becomes fat and inflamed then it ends up being fibrosed and sosed or at least that's what I think it is from the minimal work I've done so far the reason making this initial mind map is actually very very useful is because right from the start it forces me to think about how everything that I'm going to be learning about actually works which is way better than just normally skimming through the topic and glancing over the stuff in the beginning anyways I really suggest watching the previous live video I made of me making the Mind map is linked here it shows my entire process but overall all I've done so far is I've skimmed I've read through some definitions and I've watched a few basic videos took me around 30 minutes and I already have such a clear mental model such an easy way to think about all of these conditions and now I can start to study in more detail now I'm actually going to start going through the topics in more detail now comes the second layer this is where I'm going to try and understand the general cont Concepts visualize processes and side by side create my recall questions as well I'll talk about how I create those in a minute after I've actually done some studying but do note that my aim is not to read through everything right now it's just the general concepts ignoring all the complex stuff the details that I don't need to know that I will have to memorize at a certain point my aim is to get that second layer right anyways let's get started [Music] so as you saw I was using multiple resources to learn the topic a high yield textbook online websites um I'm side by side creating my own recall questions throughout the entire process but overall the aim here was to get a very good gist of all the conditions that I need to learn to in this case without looking at that many details and of course side by side also create myall questions as I went through the investigations the management how these conditions even work I converted everything that I need to know from my exams into these recall questions it's usually a very simple list of questions that are just divided by the topic and the conditions that I need to know that week but the point is every few sentences I'm thinking okay what's important here what's important for me to remember okay how can I convert that into a question and then per section per few sentences I'm writing two or three questions down seeing what is import seeing what works editing throughout by this point I've been doing this for years now so I'm used to understanding the topic very quickly and side by side just making these questions as I go along but of course if you want to take your time to understand build the layers of knowledge first and then do these questions after you have bit of understanding that's fine as well it's just a bit slower the reason I create these recall questions is so that when I come back to revise this topic I can straight away start to test myself on it testing yourself should always be the main form of revision and these questions become the perfect resource to then actively recall and force yourself to remember what did I learn and understand that last time and there's a method for it let me quickly explain it and give you an insight into how I use these questions step one in my next revision session when I come back to look at this topic I will try and look at those questions and answer them and try and recall whatever I remember to the best my ability I'll answer them out loud I may write them down usually I don't I usually just answer them out loud and I do it without using any resources like honestly I spent several minutes formulating and thinking through the answers in my head because frankly I know the more effort I put into this the more I will actually end up remembering for the next time step two once I've tried my best to actively recall those two to four questions or whatever makes sense for the section that I need to know I'll then go back to the resources and fully scan them and check back with where my understanding was lacking it's an active process of Correction I get a few questions semi right maybe wrong and I go back and look through the entire resource and read through in context where my understanding isn't full isn't full yet this is important the reading and the question answering shouldn't be two separate activities they need to be more Interlink step three I color code these questions red orange green depending on how difficult I found them and that way when I come back to revise them for the next session I can immediately jump to the red questions the stuff I didn't know and focus on my weaknesses and lastly step four of this process is to keep repeating it keep repeating this fluid process of answering a few questions going back to the resources correcting my understanding for the next time that I come now to revise this and also by the way the quality of these questions isn't final it will improve after these first revisions because only after testing yourself will you then realize okay what have I do I actually need to recall and test myself on and what if I just put on the questions just because it was there in my resources in my future I'll constantly be adding questions I'll constantly be removing by the end this list will be completely different based on what I find is ends up being most important anyways let's continue to the final layer the details I'm going to go through things that I found difficult the complex information the guidelines that I haven't gone through yet and I'll continue to add to my recall questions throughout the process of course [Music] I know it's time lapse but as you can see I was reading through and getting through Concepts and all of their details much much quicker compared to if I was just linearly reading through the website understanding entire conditions creating the Mind M creating all these questions in less than an hour the sling is just a lot more chill and easier because my brain by this point had enough prior knowledge ready to support the new difficulty of the knowledge actually coming in because I had skin first made a mind map found a good structured way of thinking about about all of these diseases and how they work was I then able to easily understand the way these conditions progress their investigations how they're diagnosed how they're treated everything as you saw I didn't really get stuck at all I didn't have to repeatedly read anything the difficult stuff just isn't difficult and keep in mind I've never genuinely looked at these conditions nor understand them properly before the liver was always a mystery to me anyways that was my learning process using layers to understand creating questions side by side I'll definitely keep on going with this live studying series I'll show you how I test myself how I memorize difficult details and all of this sort of stuff different parts of my studying process but for now I really hope this video has helped leave a like spam the comments and I will see you in the next one