How to Remember What You Study (Almost Without Trying!)

Would you like the best way to study and memorize? And you know, I know that the best is a big term, but I'm serious. What if somebody really could hand you the best way and it was the best? And I'm talking about without all the pain and the hassle of the boring scientific explanations that are themselves hard to understand. Even though we do cover them on the magnetic-mary method, but guess because if we use the magnetic -mary method, they're easy to understand because we can remember them. So for this episode, what if we just skip all that stuff and put it in everyday language? Well, you're in luck because not only am I going to do that, but I've sat for some of the most competitive exams that exist over 11 years of university and despite many personal challenges along the way, I managed to get my PhD and it picked up many other certifications along the way. I've even used what you're about to discover to help me learn languages and earn certifications for both German and Mandarin. Not only that, but I've got a case study, so you're going to hear from Eric today about what he's doing with these principles to help him learn Greek. So whatever you're studying, I'm qualified to help you get some quick wins. This is Dr. Anthony Metivier. You're listening to the magnetic-mary method podcast from magnetic-mary-method.com. And if you're ready, let's dive in. I'm going to give you some robust strategies that will take you approximately one weekend to learn and practice and we're getting started with the most powerful. Now before I name it, let me set the stage. Negativity is maybe one of the biggest reasons that so many people fail. They're playing a little story repetitively through their minds about how hard everything feels. Instead of focusing on the task at hand, they visualize in a multi-sensory way their stress and all the problems that they face in the future. And they think about all the things that they were worrying about yesterday and they worry about the consequences of failure. And I think you already know that this is not helpful. And you already know that there are people out there who are in flow who don't have that issue. So what's the alternative and what's the strategy? Well, I don't know the strategies that everybody under the sun uses, but one that is known to work for many, many people is relaxation and adopting a mindset of being willing to let go of the outcome. Because you know what? Even the most relaxed person, even the most prepared person can't predict the future. They don't know what's going to happen. And I know a lot of memory competitors and I've talked to many of them here on the magnetic Murray Method podcast and I've known some of the best who still didn't win. And they thought that they would. They'd won year after year before. And yet it just didn't happen for whatever reason. Nobody gets to know the future. But the key strategy is to let go of the outcome and be relaxed one way or the other. And simply being willing to fail if that's what's going to happen is the number one strategy that helped me before and during the toughest exam of my life, which was sitting to defend my PhD. And the problem was this was it. There was no way I was going to go back and sit for my dissertation defense again if I failed that exam. You know, that would be such a blow to the ego. I had to pass it. Now maybe I would have picked myself up off the floor and made it right, but that was what I was thinking at that time. So my strategy was to relax myself and get it done anyway. Now why was I able to relax myself so easily at that time? It's because I had been practicing relaxation all along. So if you want to know how to remember what you study, relaxation is the key. Condition yourself to be relaxed while you're learning so that you can be relaxed while you're sitting for the exam or you're in that moment where you need to use the information that you study, that work or what have you. And you know, you can see an example of just how relaxed I am on my YouTube channel where I just decided to see how much Ukrainian I could learn in 30 minutes. And you know, it's not epic or anything like that, but I recorded it and shared it on my YouTube channel just to help people see that you can work with a language speaker, use memory techniques in real time, and pick up a heck of a lot more because you're encoding at the same time that you're encountering stuff for the first time in your life and do quite well and have a lot of fun. And it's just, it's really conditioning to be relaxed during the learning experience so that later, and I'm going to have another session with my Ukrainian tutor, it just be relaxed again and be able to draw upon that relaxation from the last time to help me remember the information that I learned the first time with minimal amount of time to study in between because I don't have that much time to study and I have many things that I do. But it's the relaxation that turns off the monkey mind and is something that you can call upon at will that helps you perform so much better and recall what it is that you want as if you could on demand, which is exactly what you can do when you also add the memory techniques that I teach through the magnetic memory method world. But we have a sponsor, which is Dali's Dingo Dairy and it has nothing to do with memory techniques but they were very kind enough to sponsor the show. So if you've ever wanted to drink Dingo's milk, then I highly recommend Dali's Dingo Dairy. I drink Dingo's milk myself. It's not exactly good for your memory. In fact, it might not be good for your memory at all given some of the ingredients. But Dali's Dingo Dairy, I'm just kidding. This show is sponsored as it always has been without advertisement by me, Dr. Anthony Metivier and the magnetic memory method. So if you enjoy this content and you would love to learn memory techniques, make sure to visit me at magneticmarymethod.com. I've got a free course there for you that you can sign up for. If you just want to join the magnetic memory method masterclass, that would be great. And you know, when I'm doing these jokes here and I use the alphabet to make a little bit of it, I'm practicing the memory techniques by doing it. I'm looking at the alphabet and saying Dali's Dingo Dairy and even imagining, could I use such an imaginary place as a Mary Palace to help me learn? And the answer is, it's not the best go-to strategy, but yes, you absolutely can invent memory palaces and you can use the alphabet like that to help you. So thank you, Dali's Dingo Dairy, an invention of maybe not my imagination, but how my imagination used the techniques to draw upon things in the world. We know what Dingo's are. We know that there are people named Dali. We know that there's things called Dairy's and we just put it together and it makes something that's fun and unusual and strange for the brain to do something with. And then we can use that as the number one strategy for helping us remember what we study. So that's all available to you at magneticmarymethod.com. And you know, you want to make sure that you're going through my free course so that you can get notifications of what's going on in the world. So I have a novel coming out that has a hero who needs to learn memory techniques. He's a detective and they're very essential to, well, you'll see in the novel because things get very, very harrowing and a lot of people's lives are endangered and without the memory techniques in place working, which he struggles with. Wow. Anyway, that's coming soon and I would love to have you be notified if nothing else. But I want you to take that free course at magneticmarymethod.com and just get the masterclass if you don't already have it because it is a way of learning next level robust memory techniques that are fun and easy and enable you to just not use so much mental energy because you can just look at the alphabet and say, okay, what am I going to do here and come up with ideas? So again, I didn't think of Dali's dingodary out of nowhere. I used a strategy which is to focus on the alphabet and if you've listened to previous episodes you may have seen those things play out as well. Alright, so my next tip for you is to take breaks. If you want to remember what you study, take intelligent breaks, take strategic breaks, take planned breaks. Many people force themselves to study for hours at a time. You cannot expect to succeed by doing this. At least not many of us can. Now personally, I love studying for long periods of time but I do take plenty of breaks. In fact, I use a process called interleaving which allows me to take what you might call micro breaks. But I also take other kinds of breaks. I get up a lot. I walk around. I drink plenty of water and I'll sometimes go and meditate just sitting on a bench, a park bench and you know, just, oh, nothing, do nothing in my mind or chanting something, Sanskrit, silently that I've memorized or I'll do some breathing exercises to get myself into that deeper state of relaxation and replenish my energy by giving my brain and my body more oxygen. It's astonishing how much we suffer because we don't have enough oxygen. So taking breaks is really, really important. And I know so many people have multiple jobs and it's very difficult for them to get enough time in and they feel like they have to cram. But if it makes you feel any better. So much of my university study years, I had multiple jobs. There was one year where I had three jobs. I worked at a library. I worked at a photo lab in a grocery store and I also was a janitor at a movie theater all at the same time. And that was to pay for one course that I was taking in political science, a second year of political science course at university. I barely had any time for that course. But I got the reading done. the less and I still took breaks from the reading so that I could remember more. Now I won't go through my whole history but I had jobs like that all the way up until my PhD even when I was studying for my PhD I mowed lawns to help keep my debt low so that you know I had a fighting chance later in life and it's really really important that you understand that you can still read and take breaks even if you're busy and I was able to do it so pretty much other people can as well. I mean I'm not necessarily the sharpest axe in the shed but I was still able to figure that stuff out and I've been thinking about it a lot about what is true intelligence and we talked about it on the podcast before when we talked about IQ and I still believe that you can have all the book learning that you want and you can use all the memory techniques you want to use cool and fancy words like I do. I love to I love having a big vocabulary it's a lot of fun but that doesn't mean that it's really intelligence you know I think intelligence is being able to set goals take action and then get results so that you complete those goals and there are many many many smart people that I went to school with who wound up serving ice cream at Vaskin and Robbins even though they had PhDs or they worked at McDonald's and they still do or they're delivering pizza with PhDs right so how intelligent are they at the end of the day and I don't mean to besmirch their their smarts they're very very smart people but when it comes to setting goals I mean they should be able to make some living off of their intelligence but they don't they they I don't know anyway there's issues with free will and all of these things that we could talk about and and I don't mean to put anybody on the spot but it is kind of astonishing to me and it should give us all pause for consideration because there's many a high school dropout out there that is a multi-millionaire and possibly even some of them are billionaires and I myself dropped out of high school at one point and the way I got myself back into it was using true intelligence which is set a goal take action and then get results so keep that in mind and as you do you know use your hands I find that using your hands is such a wonderful way to remember what you study we often hear about different note taking techniques and mind mapping techniques and you know that they're they're okay they're they're tools in your toolbox have multiple tools by all means they get your hands involved but did you know that just using deliberate gestures helps you learn so you know you can point at things as you're talking about them to somebody else and this will help you remember better and you know people who wave their hands around a lot like I tend to do they seem to learn things a lot faster at least that's what some scientific studies have shown and I've got the link for you on the blog for this episode and you can also name concepts out loud many people don't get the information they're learning out through their mouth and one thing that you can do is really link your speaking with your fingers so you know if you were to press your thumb and point your finger together while you were talking about an idea and then focus on mentally linking the idea to the connection between your thumb and finger taking a couple of deep breaths as you focus and then revisit that connection throughout the day a little bit you probably able to remember it for the long term and just as a simple example I had Tyson young Caporta on the podcast and I read his book and he talks about this as one of the ancient Aboriginal and indigenous techniques and you just simply point your hands or you point your fingers at each other you press and squeeze the thumb and finger together and I can still remember this direct respect connect or it was direct connect no direct no it was respect connect reflect and direct that's I think was the order and you know I'm not going to edit that out because I want you to see that you can just correct yourself as you go you know to be perfect all the time to use your memory anyway it was maybe connect respect reflect and direct that's probably what it was but I can remember this and this was a long time ago now I mean it wasn't super long ago but I can remember it and I did exactly what he said is just focus on that for a couple of seconds and then come back and just revisit it a couple of times and it's just it's just a simple thing and it's a it's no different than maybe the countries that you might need to memorize so you have to memorize you know which whichever countries border Germany and so forth well you could just start you know have Poland on one finger and then check on another and Switzerland on another and France on another you know that's not all of them but it gets you started and then you can go on to your next hand anyway use your hands and and look more into this go and listen to the episode with Tyson and your own comporte and watch it you'll see me showing him that I tried his technique and used it and it was a little bit more fresh then but I managed to get it back and I'll bet you my accuracy is it's pretty good after all this time just by having done exactly that so use your hands and you know another thing that I did when I was in university is I would do something like that I didn't know about the Aboriginal techniques at the time but I would press my finger to my knee and anchor certain ideas there and it's not complex ideas which is simple things that you want to remember that are important and it just helps you remember later or it helped me and this idea comes from I got it from a thing called NLP which I don't want to get into too much and I don't want to guide people into that rabbit hole because there's a lot of junk science in it but I think that they're they're for simple things that you need to remember that it can be very very useful I wouldn't use it for everything but just this idea of anchoring things to the body and we know that the medieval and Renaissance period people did this a lot there's a technique for using the hand to memorize a lot of music and you can read Anna Berger's book about music in the medieval period which if memory serves the title is medieval music and the art of memory and I'm pretty sure her name is if memory serves Anna Berger by the way in this novel that I mentioned there's a scene where the detective tells his memory champion friend to stop saying if memory serves everybody knows that you're a memory champion anyway have his court sort of taken a stab at myself there by by doing that okay so another technique that is not often talked about for memory and learning and remembering what you study is to draw and this I used in particular to help me with a weakness that I had which is that I didn't even want to look at charts and diagrams and graphs that it's just like visually overwhelming to me for some reason and it still is to this day but what I realized and this is an idea that I got from Tony Buzin was to draw the chart out myself and what he did to teach the primacy effect and the recency effect and the fun rest or effect and all these heavy science terms is he had you draw in your own handwriting what he called the most important graph in the world which is essentially the scientific graph showing how memory works if you use accelerated learning techniques and so ever since then instead of getting confused and not understanding graphs I would draw them out in my own hand and write out the words and you know use some of the visualization techniques that we talk about on this program and it just made it so much easier for me to understand something that I had previously had just rejected and ran away from not that I was fearful of it or anything like this but I just I couldn't get it I'm not a particularly visual person and I find a lot of things like that very visually overwhelming but when you look at it from the perspective of trying to reproduce it by your own hand it becomes much more manageable and one of the reasons why it becomes more manageable is because you ask questions well where do I start should I start in this corner should I start in that corner and then you focus on different parts of the image and then rather than focusing on your monkey mind chatter which comes back to relaxation that we started with you're able to have a much better strategy for getting into it because you're making your body and your mind busy with something else at the same time so really really important. Now the next thing that I would suggest is you use space repetition properly and this is a big problem that we have you know active recall is a big popular topic right now and a lot of people are talking about it in different ways and really what I find is sad about a way that a lot of people are talking about it is they're not linking it to multi sensory association and they're not linking it to solving puzzles so let's say you got a bunch of medical terms that you need to learn rather than use active recall in some sense that you know you're having an app serve back the information to you and you have it on an automated robotic algorithm and then you know just look at the information and then you fail to actually remember it so you tap the screen and then it shows you the answer that's not active recall it's not active at all it's actually robotized you know offloading onto machines and it's not particularly effective so instead never show yourself the answer until you've tried to recall the information through association and I find the best thing to do is not have the answer available to yourself at all so one of the things that I'm doing to ramp up the speed at which I'm learning some Ukrainian right now is just to draw simple little drawings on cards and have no information there whatsoever and it's just a beautiful thing I have a video on my YouTube channel. channel where I show how you do this with medical terminology and so forth. But the idea is use physical cards and have the answer somewhere else. Create an answer key for yourself. Card one, here's the answer. Card two, here's the answer. And then what you do is you make a drawing and you have some sort of puzzle elements. So it's very difficult to show you through the magic of audio. But if I look at some of my cards, I have one here where it has Robert Blank, Leslie Blank and then they have a bag of chips that says lay on it. And then it has this strange drawing of a square and it says game called blank. And the square has circles in it. So my friend Robert, when we were kids, his last name was Ho. And Leslie's last name was Day and this bag of lay chips here and this game. So the word I must have been trying to remember was Ho de laix and then the answer game called what? So that must mean that in Ukrainian something like Ho de laix and I haven't talked with the native speaker yet. So this could be incorrect. But it's from the story that I was reading in Ukrainian. I heard this word Ho de laix, something like this. And then it means to go or that's what the story said that it meant in the definitions for the story. So Ho de laix and just to remember this, I just made a little puzzle. So I'm looking at it now and I just have two smiling people, Robert Blank, Leslie Blank and they're my friends. Robert Ho and Leslie Day must be Ho de laix, something like that maybe and to go. So this is very, very active recall because it doesn't give you the answer. It just gives you a puzzle that causes you to actively solve the puzzle so that you're able to actually build the memories faster. So please, please, please, make sure you're doing that. Another great way to remember what you study that is a little less hands on in one sense but a lot more hands on in another is to study in multiple locations. So the best part of moving from spot to spot is that it helps you take breaks. And I used to think of this as road work and I've done road work both as a student and as a writer. It has effects for both in very positive ways, not only because you're taking breaks but then you're getting new environmental stimuli and it's very, very powerful. So you know, pick a couple of locations where you're going to tackle what you're studying and it can be your room, the kitchen table, and the back porch and deliberately switch things up over every 15, 20 minutes or so. And if you're on campus, have a couple of different spots in the library, different floors that you go to. I used to change floors all the time in the library when I studied there and moved to a cafe. Look for empty lecture halls or classrooms. You can park in to read for a chapter. I don't mean don't park your car there but park your butt in an empty classroom. And you know, I don't have access to a campus anymore but I still cart books around with me and for my current research projects, I read at the beach, I read in front of stores when my wife is shopping at cafes on the bus, etc. And not only do I get a lot more reading done because I don't allow it to be downtime and I don't waste it looking at an app, but I just get the benefit of actually reading in multiple locations, which is quite known to be a stimulant for learning and remembering. So really give this a try. And I know you might need a rest and you might be thinking, oh, I don't want to read again, but then this comes back to breathing and exercise. You can be much more energized by just getting your breath under control and really focused on. Now, of course, the ultimate thing is to use those locations as a kind of game, right? And the ultimate game is the memory palace technique. So what's that all about? Well, if you don't know what a memory palace is, it's essentially a mental recreation of a building that you're familiar with. And one of my favorite memory palace networks is York University campus where I went to University. And I gamified that place to the nth degree, not to game the learning process, but to be able to do active recall in a much more effective first and then efficient manner. So I had to learn how to make it effective. And you have the advantage of learning how to make it effective much faster than I did, because you can avoid all the mistakes that I made. But one of the things that I love about the memory palace technique is that once you get it effective, it is very, very efficient. But you need to use proper recall rehearsal patterns so that you get the best of active recall. And it scales very well, especially when you work in memory palace networks as opposed to just one memory palace. One is the most dangerous number in my view when it comes to these techniques. Just having one technique is not the magnetic memory method at all. It's having a full toolbox that is overflowing with techniques and knowledge of the techniques yet to come that you could still add. And you don't have to do them all, but just knowing that they exist is itself an asset and very, very exciting. So to create your first memory palace, you just got to get started with one building. I recommend that you draw it out. And then the idea is that you're going to place information on a station in a memory palace, like the corner of a room, and then you'll revisit it later, almost like the index card without a card, and you play a game to solve the puzzle. So why did I have, you know, whatever you have there? Another word that I learned recently in Ukrainian Vuchora, which is yesterday. And so I can just think to that memory palace. And in this case, I misheard it the first time. I had Tony Buzen doing chores, and he had a clock there to help me remind of this aura. And so I originally memorized it as Vuchora, but it's Vuchora. And so I just fixed it later. But that's the beauty of the memory palace, as you can easily go in and just modify the image a little bit and fix it if you need to. Now I've been sharing some of my examples of how that I learned and remember what I studied very quickly, but it's not just about me. So I wanted to share a little audio clip that Eric sent me of his journey. And he's been in the magnetic memory method masterclass for quite some time. And he's talking about his adventure with Greek. But what I'd love for you to hear is his excitement and his passion with what he's doing in order to make massive progress with the language and how that he's applying the teaching that I have offered to the world and getting results and just the excitement in his voice. And you know, he compares it to another memory product out there. And I, you know, would not discourage you from going through that product. But I think Eric's right, the magnetic memory method has removed the obstacles that are almost created by many of the other competitor products out there. And it has been my pleasure to have been called the mechanic by a few people over the years because I'm fixing the problems that are created by some of the other products. And you know, it's just each teacher out there uses the techniques as they use them. And hopefully they're only teaching them based on what they've actually done. And the reality is that a lot of people, they don't use them for study at the level of intensity that we tend to do. So I hope that you will get more robust memory techniques if you need them. But that's not to say that the other ones can't also help you achieve certain goals. Hey Anthony, good morning or good evening. I don't know what is the time in Australia is. Hey, I want to share some success that I had with story number two. I'd memorized the vocabulary for story number two last week. And then last Saturday I sat down to listen to it. And I was a little nervous because when I sat down Saturday morning, I said, well, can I recall any of the vocabulary is like total blank. I'm like, well, this might be a failure. But I played the audio file and then I'd listen to a phrase and then I would stop it and then I go, okay, oh, that's that word. And then I pieced together the phrase and I pieced together the sentence. And every so often I have to go rewind 15 seconds and play it again. But it's able to go through the entire story with above 90% comprehension. I had three words I had trouble on and I have them here. Cut the 3B and cut the TZ. And those I could actually remember the objects that told me what the words words sounded like. But I couldn't remember them as a semantics, a meaning of it. But then when I played how loud the file would play more, I was able to figure out what the meanings were because cut the easy means to sit and he sat under the tree. Upo, Upo, Toe, Dendero, then the Hey Su cut see I just couldn't get it. It was totally blank. No pictures, no mega, no magnetic memory, no image and stuff. And then I went back and then I played the entire file, I played the audio file from the beginning and just read along. Super easy, it can make sense to me. So this is really great. I do want to let you know that so my plan is from Athanasia 1. I want to memorize the vocabulary of a story before I listen to it and then go through this book this way. And then in the meantime, I am actually working on Athanasia 2 with the back of the book of vocabulary. So I want to memorize the entire vocabulary before I actually start story number one. That way my plan is just to burn through the story and read it like a normal novel. So I'm having wonderful success. I had a lot of trouble with the Kevin Tudos mega memory because There were just a lot of roadblocks that you paid, you have removed those roadblocks. So I'm just so super excited to want to share my success and say thank you. Bye bye. Well, thank you very, very much for that, Eric. And if you would like to submit at any time, any of your progress updates, I'd love to feature you on the show. I think it would be amazing to have many more. We've had many people on the podcast in the past and it's been a while since we've done a student feature. I would love to have more clips like these and to do more conversations with you. So if you'd like to be on the podcast, please reach out and I would love to speak with you and record and share your journey with the world. It is so encouraging to have wonderful perspectives and sharing from all kinds of different projects that people are engaged in when they're using their magnetic memory to help them learn. So it's just wonderful how quickly that you can learn using these techniques. But if you're wondering why can't I remember anything I study? Listen, you got to work on your mindset. You got to take breaks properly. You got to use things like interleaving that I shared with you today. You got to get your hands involved in multiple ways. And if you come across graphs that you can't understand, copy them out, see if that helps you understand them better. I bet you that they will. And speak to others, get it out through your mouth, maybe record yourself and hear back what you're saying and that'll even help you. I did this a lot when I was in university. I had a very, very heavy philosophy to study and I would record it and listen back to myself. And this was back with microcosets. And it helped a lot. It was well worth it. And then of course, we want to use active recall correctly to make sure we're actually solving puzzles so the information can turn into memory a lot faster, change your locations, and then use those locations as memory palaces and treat it all as a game. This is such a powerful way to learn. And if you just use two to three of the tips and get started with them, you're going to find that your ability to remember will quickly soar. So what do you say? You ready to get up there and start to enjoy more out of your study sessions? This is really the best set of techniques that I know that I put together all in one episode. So I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope we'll see you at magneticmarymethod.com very, very soon. And thank you, as always, for listening. And until we speak again, keep yourself magnetic.