How to Remember Everything You READ

Introduction to Graduate School Learning 0:00

All of this is evidence-based all of this is used by some of the best learners and thinkers and memorizers of today and so I had to really adapt to the way that I was learning in college and and really relook at how I was going to learn in graduate school I think one of the things about graduate school is that it is different type of learning. The faster that you can adjust, the better that you'll be in terms of just being more successful and ready to take on other things down the way.

The Challenge of Heavy Reading Loads 0:31

What is going on, everyone? Welcome back to the channel. My name is Phil Sarpon. This is Phil's Guide to PsyD. This channel is dedicated to all things psychology, wellness, and graduate school. I do my best to help students not only get into graduate school, but also survive graduate school and to become successful in their early career as psychologist or therapist. One of the things that we're going to talk about today is graduate school, surviving graduate school, and specifically as it relates to the huge amounts of reading that is required for doctoral level students.

Now, if you are not already in graduate school, just get prepared and be ready for the sheer amount of reading, papers, articles, book articles. all so much reading that you will have to do in graduate school. You will feel like you're reading a book almost every week in regards to the number of reading that you will have to do. In fact, when I look back, I actually remember if I took collectively all of my courses and the amount of reading that they would require per week, it would sometimes be anywhere from 300 to 500 pages per week, sometimes even potentially more than that.

Active Reading and Self-Testing 1:44

And I think the average person will look at that and say, there's no way that I'm gonna read that much. I don't have the time to read that much. I don't think it's necessary. It shouldn't be required. I'm not going to put in the time to do that. And that's fair. I think it's better to think of it not from the standpoint of reading every single word, but reading to make sure that you get the most pertinent, important ideas out of what you're reading. In fact, you could read every word and still not retain any of it, which I think is actually what most people find themselves in, especially when they then have to take a quiz or an exam and they feel like they just haven't really retained the information that they need to actually use it in a notable way.

And so one of the things that we're gonna talk about today is how to actually read those huge amounts of pages per week and also actually retain that information to the best of our ability. using some neuroscience, using some clinical psychology skills, using what we know about the brain and neuropsychology to help us retain the information. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the channel. You can like this video. And so the first thing that we'll talk about today is going to be active reading.

When you're reading, it should not be to just read. you should be reading with the mindset of hopefully trying to answer a question in your mind. And I think one of the things that actually we see in research and data is to test yourself repeatedly.

Spaced Learning and Applying Concepts 3:14

So even if you can't take a pre-exam and then go into your readings, you can still test yourself as you read. One of the ways that you can do that is maybe read a page and then close the book or close the article or hide it from your site and then try and summarize what you just read as if you're teaching it to someone, as if you're talking to someone and even as you're saying it out loud the acoustic aspect of the learning you can also be writing it down from also a visual kinetic perspective as well but it's really important that the best way to learn as you go is to test yourself through And so writing questions about what you just wrote and seeing if you can write down the answer or say the answer out loud.

Being able to recall the information after every paragraph or every couple paragraphs or every few pages. Just being able to try and take the really big main topics and ideas of what you're reading is actually gonna be better for you in the long term in terms of retaining the information. Now you also may have heard of it before, but space learning is one of the best ways to actually retain a lot of information. If you are reading the night before and you have the quiz the next day or the exam the next day, that's not going to be a great situation.

And so if you're going to read 500 pages for that week, see if you can break it apart. See if you can do 100 pages every single day and do some form of space learning. So now that you are testing yourself in regards to the material, asking yourself questions throughout the reading, spacing your learning as you go through the week, the next thing is to start applying concepts. One of the best known study tips is building concepts from what you are learning. This means sort of creating whether it's diagrams whether it's logic maps for yourself where you're connecting different ideas and people and concepts whether you're drawing these things out writing them on a notepad writing them on paper and this is actually a little bit more of an extra step than just taking notes on what you're writing because typically if you've ever gotten to a situation where you're reading You're taking notes as you're reading, but you're not really being very fully active with the notes that you're taking.

You're just kind of taking the notes. It's going to be more important for you to, as you're taking the notes, start to apply those concepts in relation to, as you're taking the notes, how does it apply to what you just read before? what you read the day before three days ago a week ago how does it apply to some of the other people or concepts or situations that you're reading about and and start to make those dots literally start to make those dots in terms of a logic map for kind of pulling things together you can always categorize things in terms of tables and diagrams and things like that but You want to eventually start to pull all of these ideas together.

Building Concept Maps Before Memorizing Details 5:59

And this does take some time. What typically happens is that most people will actually do this backwards. And so when you think about the rote memorization, the things that you just have to memorize, the facts, the people, typically people think, I need to do those things first. And no, you should do those things last. Once you have spaced out your learning, once you have sort of taught yourself the learning materials and asked yourself the questions and kind of tested yourself and then made those concepts, it's actually going to be a lot easier to then memorize the minute things of your learning, the people, the facts, When you start to memorize those things towards the end, it actually makes sense in the layout and the concepts that you've built for yourself.

And then as you're going, finally building in those concept logic models for yourself to really better retain the information. And then towards maybe the last few days, right before the exam, you can start to memorize those small, minute details that you need to memorize. But as you're memorizing those details, it actually makes sense because you've already laid out the foundation for the work that you need to do to actually retain the information. If you have any questions, please put it down in the comments section below.

And with that, I will see you all in the next video.