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When deciding that this would be the topic of my post, the first thought that came to my mind was to open the book where I learned this important teaching: The correct way to study and competently absorb some content. But after that first thought, of using the book as a reference, I thought: You know what? Since I'm going to talk about the importance of memory when studying, I'm going to start writing the concept as I remember it, and only when I have doubts do I consult the book; it seemed right to do so, nothing could be fairer.

The book I'm talking about is called Ultralearning, by Scott H. Young, as its name implies, it's a learning model that makes us learn anything quickly, as long as we follow a script about how to learn something in an intense way. The Author calls himself Ultra Apprentice, and decided to write it after challenging himself to learn all the content of a higher IT course on his own within a year. Scott, managed to accomplish this feat and then traveled to several countries with the objective of learning the native language of each country during the three months he stayed there, the main rule in this challenge was only to speak the foreign language and never English, his language native.

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Scott cites several examples of Ultra Learners in his book, in addition to the nine universal principles that other learners typically use to succeed in their learning process. They are: Meta-Learning - Focus - Direct Practice - Repetition - Retrieval - Feedback - Retention - Intuition and Experimentation. In the book, each principle is developed and explained in one chapter each, the learning strategy that I decided to talk about in this post can be found in principle chapter 5, The Repetition.

Jeffrey Karpick and Jannel Blunt, are psychologists who conducted a study that examined students' choice of way of studying. The students were divided into four groups and were supposed to use different study strategies, moreover, they would have the same amount of time to study. Each group would have to focus on one of the following models: Review the text only once; review repeatedly; free recall and concept mapping. Then the students would have a guess about their score on the test, and the results were as follows: Students who reviewed repeatedly were sure they had the best grades, while groups who reviewed the text only once and made concept maps, believed that they had obtained good grades but not as excellent as the students in the first group. Students who did free recall, which is basically trying to remember as much of the content as possible without referring to the book, predicted that they got the worst grade of all the groups.

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What these students did not expect is that the actual results would be totally different and surprising to everyone; those who tried to remember as much of the content as possible were the ones who had the best grades! That is, studying a subject only once and trying to remember it by itself, is much more efficient than reading something over and over again or even making a conceptual map of the subject. When I heard about this research, the first thing I thought is how we are slowly harming our memory through the exaggerated consumption of information. Especially if you take into account social networks; social networks increasingly try to push us quick content that can be changed easily with the swipe of a finger: Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube Shorts; Have you noticed that when we are using one of these networks we quickly forget about the previous video we saw? We don't even try to remember what we've just seen, at most we save or take screenshots of some things we swear we'll read later, but that day rarely comes or takes a long time to arrive.


In the old days, when I was a teenager, when I didn't have the internet at home, I remember that I never had the habit of writing down all my classes, most of the time I just paid close attention and when the tests were close, I reviewed some little things that I wrote and didn't remember. I used to do really well on exams doing this, but at the time, obviously, I didn't think that was the best way to study, I just did it intuitively because it worked for me. These days, I must admit that my memory is not that good, and I often feel like I need to read something a few times in order to be able to fix the learning in my mind. I think it's easy for anyone to come to the conclusion that trying to remember content and jotting notes about it is a great way to learn, but why don't most people do that? Karpicke's research explains: Humans cannot be sure whether or not they have learned something. We need to somehow trust what our experience shows us to know whether or not we are doing well in a learning process.

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This basically works like this: If a task looks easy, we believe we've learned something, but if the task seems somehow challenging, we're sure we need to work harder to learn. In addition, another explanation for the fact that students choose other study strategies and not remembrance is that they do not feel confident enough about the subject to try to remember what they studied, in a nutshell, it is more practical to review than trying to remember. Research also shows that students who have the lowest grades often choose to review the subject before actually testing themselves, because the review gives them the false sense that they are ready. But surely, if they were somehow forced to practice retrieval through memory, they would undoubtedly learn a lot more, because remembrance works best whether you're prepared or not.


Ever since I learned about this study strategy, I've been trying to practice it, but it's not easy! And as much as the title of this post suggests this, it's not just laziness, although laziness is also involved, when we spend years with a different habit of study or even without actually studying something when starting again with a new strategy, it's much more difficult, but nothing that a good dose of discipline and consistency can't solve. I know it's much cooler to be distracted and as we well know, we live in a world where there are distractions around every corner and it's almost instinctive to fill that time that we could be remembering something interesting that we could fix in our heads, with short and silly content that nothing positive to add to our lives, but while it's nicer in the long run, it won't do our lives any good.

I hope this post makes you interested in this book that for me has been so transformative. I will also leave here the link to the scientific article in which psychologists address this subject in more depth.


Thanks for reading this far and until next time, @aiuna.

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