Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,72

is an age-old study tradition that many people continue long after their school days are over. Much of this is due to procrastination and putting off the work that needs to be done for that big test or that big presentation. But many people also believe that cramming is their most effective form of preparation. Chances are good, however, that it is not.

“In reality, cramming is associated with emotional, mental and physical impairments that reduce the body’s ability to cope with its environment,” wrote journalist Ralph Heibutzki in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He cited a Harvard Medical School study that indicates that cramming leads to many unwanted side-effects, including impaired mental function.1

In addition, cramming usually requires forgoing all or at least much of one’s normal amount of sleep, and this can wind up undermining the very purpose of cramming. UCLA professor of psychiatry Andrew J. Fuligni coauthored a study on cramming and came away with a clear connection between this by-product of cramming and the expected results. “No one is suggesting that students shouldn’t study,” he said, “but an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes learning.”2

In working with students of all ages, I have learned that cramming is rarely as useful as we would like it to be. Concentrating on one subject for many, many hours makes it less likely that you’re going to retain the information. Earlier, we talked about the effect of primacy and recency on memory. If you tend to remember the first thing and the most recent thing best, cramming a huge amount of information between that first and most recent thing is only going to lead to your having more things that you forget. We’ll talk about a better alternative in a moment.

Whether you’re a high school junior taking five AP classes with the goal of gaining acceptance to a top college or a corporate head faced with the need to stay on top of your rapidly changing industry, you’re likely facing two challenges simultaneously: a mountain of information to scale, and little time in which to scale it. If this is you, you’re going to want to make sure you’re studying as efficiently as you can. Over my years of helping people to learn faster and study better, here are seven of my favorite simple habits to unlimit your studies.

Habit 1: Employ Active Recall

Active recall is a process through which you review material and then immediately check to determine how much of it you’ve remembered. This allows you to draw the distinction between simple recognition (familiarity with the words on the page) and recollection (making the material an active part of your memory).

“Most students do not realize how important it is to force themselves to recall,” writes neurologist Dr. William Klemm of Texas A&M University. “In part, this is because they are conditioned by multiple-choice tests to recall passively, that is recognize when a correct answer is presented, as opposed to generating the correct answer in the first place. Studies of student learning practices reveal how important to memory formation it is to retrieve information you are trying to memorize.”3

To employ active recall, do this:

Review the material you are studying.

Then close the book, turn off the video or lecture, and write down or recite everything you remember from what you just reviewed.

Now, look at the material again. How much did you remember?

Make sure you have enough study time to allow yourself to go through this process multiple times. As Klemm points out, the studies showed that “optimal learning occurred when an initial learning session included repeated study and forced-recall testing of all items at least four times in a row.”4 This leads me to the next important habit to adopt.

Habit 2: Employ Spaced Repetition

As discussed earlier in this chapter, cramming has many downsides. While it is natural to procrastinate, leaving yourself in situations where you need to study a tremendous amount of material all at once makes it likely that you aren’t going to learn that material at all. The reason is that trying to work that way puts us in direct opposition to the way our brains work.

Alternatively, if you space out your reviews of the material, focusing more heavily on information that you haven’t retained in the past, you’re using your brain to the best of its abilities. “Spaced repetition is simple but highly effective because it deliberately hacks the way your brain works,” agrees James Gupta,