Now let's talk about how the best students structure their days. Turns out there are great studies on this. There's a really nice paper. In fact, that surveyed close to 700 students. These were medical students, approximately equal number of male and female students and analyze the most useful learning habits.

That is the learning habits associated with the most successful students. Now, anytime you do a study like this where people take surveys, there's always the issue of causality. In fact, we can pretty much set aside any possible causality. For instance, I'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to study for about three or four hours per day.

But you could easily say, well, they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day. They don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students. And you'd be exactly right, okay? We can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation, about reverse causality and on and on.

However, none of that is the point here. The point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again, regardless of what classes they're taking, regardless of where they are in their arc of their learning trajectory. And so what we know based on this study, and I'll provide a link to it in the show note captions, is that there are at least 10 study habits that the highly effective students use.

I'm going to focus on the top five or six just for sake of time, because it turns out that most of the effect, it appears, of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits. First of all, they set aside time to study. They literally schedule time to study.

Now this probably serves several roles. The first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions. And in fact, that's the second thing that they do. They are very effective, or they make it a point of putting their phone away and off, of isolating themselves. That's right, they're not studying with other people.

They study alone, which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying, but the best performing students seem to study alone. They put their phone away. They tell their friends and families that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time.

And yes, they study for three or four hours per day, but they break that up into a couple of different sessions typically, two or three sessions. So they're not doing a three or four hour studying about all in one shot. So they're managing their time, they're eliminating distractions, and they're studying for a consistent amount of time, at least five days per week, okay?

Presumably they're taking some weekends off, although that wasn't made clear from this paper. The other thing that they do, and this is very important, is that they make an effort to then teach their peers, to teach other students in the class. Now, some of you may be thinking, and I'm thinking back to college here mostly, that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students, that teaching them the information is kind of a freebie for them and it's harder for you, meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage, or you're giving them an unfair advantage for not having done the work.

Now, while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the learners from the other students got an unfair advantage, it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation, then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them, perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students.

So don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test, this is key, to test and develop mastery of the material. Now, in my laboratory for years, we used to have a saying, which I simply picked up from the laboratories I was trained in, I didn't come up with the saying, which was watch one, do one, teach one.

And that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing, or doing an antibody reaction, or a Western blot, or things that you do in laboratories. Watch one, do one, teach one. Watch one, do one, teach one, of course, should be reserved to anything where no one's going to be put in danger by the watch one, do one, teach one procedure, right?

Some procedures, especially in laboratories, can be dangerous given the materials you use, et cetera. And of course, today we're talking about learning and studying generally. So provided it's safe, watch one, do one, teach one, is an excellent means to learn, that is to study new material, to develop proficiency and even mastery.

And over time, perhaps even virtuosity. We'll return to that later, those distinctions. So going back to this idea that the best students set aside time, they designate time to study alone, without distractions, that is sure to help them anchor their focus and attention. They know that they're going to need to use their focus and attention during that time.

And we know with absolute certainty that focus and attention are a limited but renewable resource in the human brain. The longer you're awake, the more is the buildup of a molecule called adenosine in your brain and body. It makes you sleepy, makes it harder to focus. When you sleep, adenosine levels are pushed down again.

You're able to focus again, you feel more alert. You can think of adenosine as limiting your attentional budget, which is not to say that some people don't study best in the afternoon or in the evening or even late at night, right? I recall times during university when I'd study between the hours of 10 p.m.

and 2 a.m. I don't do that any longer, but scheduling time where you know you're going to need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things toward being able to focus and attend to the material. Now, if you're taking courses, you probably are going to be a slave to the timing of the courses.

You aren't going to be able to tell the instructor, "Okay, listen, I want you to do this course at 3 p.m. because that's when you learn best or at 8 a.m. because that's when you happen to be able to attend best." However, to the extent that you have any control over the time in which you're going to study, keeping that at a regular time or times, perhaps one block early in the day, one block later in the day, perhaps two blocks early in the day and so on, is going to be beneficial.

It turns out that's also supported by the research literature, that the brain, just like with its sleep-wake cycles, that entrain to a regular schedule, that is your brain and body get used to being active and inactive at particular times based on your exposure to sunlight, your exposure to activities, your social rhythms, et cetera.

If you regularly, meaning for the course of about three days make it a point to focus and study at particular times, again, pulling your attention back, it's not an automatic process, but pulling your attention back to a specific location, perhaps on a page or that you're listening to in a lecture, your body and brain will start to entrain to that rhythm such that you will be able to focus and attend better simply by virtue of the regularity of the timing of the exposure to the material, okay?

So you probably need about two or three days to break into a regular schedule of focusing and attending and studying at a given time or times, allow yourself that transition period, but then make it a point to schedule those times to study, set aside your phone, tell people you're going offline, turn off the wifi if you need to or have to, you may need it for your studying, I don't know, depends on what you're studying, but limit distractions at all costs and learn to just focus on the material.

And this is a skill, this is the most important thing to understand. It's a skill to be able to focus and study. And it's a skill that you can learn very quickly, especially if you schedule it for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which to adapt to those schedules and times and then try and stick to them as regularly as possible, perhaps even on the weekends, if you're approaching the end of the quarter or semester, perhaps even on the weekend, even if you're not in the quarter or semester, keeping those regular times will entrain your nervous system to study and learn at its best at those particular times.

There's one other point that I wanted to pass along from this really nice study on the study habits of highly effective medical students that I've been referring to. And that is when one examined, or these people were asked about their motivation for studying, the best performing students had an interesting answer.

They had a very long-term understanding of how, or belief rather, about how their success in medical school would impact their family, how it would impact their life arc, how it would change them. And they weren't particular about the ways in which it would change them or their family. In fact, it was a rather broad, abstract, aspirational way of thinking about their study efforts.

So what I like so much about this paper is that, in addition to having a fairly large sample size, close to 700 students that were evaluated, and yes, it's purely self-report and this kind of thing, nonetheless, it bridges the two extremes of studying and learning. It gets right down into the nitty gritty of how long they study, when they study, the things they do to limit distraction that we just discussed, but it also gets to their underlying psychological motivations and the thing that they use in order to pull them forward through their study efforts, perhaps, especially when their desire is waning or their level of fatigue is increasing.

I don't know that, I'm speculating here, but this is this aspirational component of going to medical school, which it turns out in the country in which this study was done, only very, very select few of the very best students are able to achieve that. And they have to learn the information in a different language altogether, which is incredible.

I always marvel at that. I have friends that did their PhD thesis in Italy, they're Italian by birth, they now happen to run a laboratory in Italy, and they had to do their PhD training and write papers and give their thesis dissertation and defense in English, even though English was their second language.

So talk about a challenge, and that's just one example that I can think of. There are many examples of that. These students that I'm referring to in this study are not necessarily constantly thinking about how their efforts will transform themselves and their families, but they certainly were able to report what it was specifically that they are seeking, what they're aspiring to, besides just trying to do as well as they can getting into and through medical school.

So the high-level aspirational stuff within you, whatever that is for you, it's going to be highly individual, is certainly important, and it offers a bookend to the nuts and boltsy kind of stuff that you're going to do, I would hope, in order to best study and learn the specific material.

So the specific actions that you're going to take each day to learn specific bits of information that will pull you toward those important aspirations. And now, again, if you love the material you're learning, this aspirational component is probably not as important, right? I can recall during university and graduate school and so on, thinking, oh my goodness, this is like the coolest thing I've ever heard.

I've probably said that about a million different topics. Oh my goodness, circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms, melatonin, neural circuits, dopamine. I was just awash with excitement about what I was learning. But of course, sometimes I would take a course where the material was, I don't know if it was more challenging or not, but I had a harder time getting engaged by the material, either by virtue of how it was being taught to me or the material itself.

So the ability to attach to some aspirational goal, to pull you through, can be very valuable. You're not going to love every topic you have to learn. However, I will say that, at least in my experience, some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the courses that I struggled with the most.

And in fact, that's the basis of the next and easily one of the most important studying tools. So a key theme in all of the excellent literature, that is the peer-reviewed research on how best to study, is that studying that feels challenging is the most effective. I know nobody wants to hear this.

Everyone wants to hear about flow. Everybody wants to hear about information just sinking into their brain by osmosis. I think it was a Garfield cartoon where he talked about learning by osmosis. There's this very cute real-world video of a kid in a classroom. I believe it's in China where he's taking the book and he puts it on his head.

Maybe I can find this clip. And he's just kind of like trying to wash it into his brain. It's super cute clip, but guess what? That doesn't work. I mean, it works to put the book on your head. It doesn't work. It's not going to get the information into your brain.

Perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into neural circuits. Right now, we know, we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that effort is the cornerstone of learning. So I know there are probably some groans about that. I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell you how to study so that studying wasn't painful.

I think I can accomplish that by the end of today's episode. But in order to do that, let's take another quiz. Can you name or list off in your mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use? I can think of limiting distraction by virtue of putting away phones and telling others you won't be in contact with them too.

And I'm getting these out of order, I realize, is to isolate, to study alone. And the third that I can recall is to teach others in the same course. Okay, you can probably think of a few others. Now, why are we taking these silly little quizzes? Well, it turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you'll remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to it over and over again, but that if ever there was a strongly research-supported tool in the literature, in the peer-reviewed literature about how students can learn information better, it's testing.

And I know, I know, I know we think of tests as a way to evaluate our knowledge, but it turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge, to retain our knowledge, and again, to offset forgetting. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)