Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And, of course, people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading. Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight. Some people call themselves auditory learners. Other people consider themselves visual learners. But guess what?

When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined, whether or not you review slides or a textbook, or you watch small videos.

It turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode. Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or motor learning, musical learning, math, et cetera.

Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode. The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information. You're trying to inoculate against forgetting. That is the way to remember things. That is the way to gain mastery over them. And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer reviewed literature.

Now before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is. I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher. For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information.

Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity we sometimes hear as neural plasticity, two words or neuroplasticity.

Those are the same thing, essentially. The change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms. One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another.

It's actually a gap between the neurons. It is technically called the synaptic cleft. It's a gap. And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons, okay?

So one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons. And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis or the addition of new neurons.

Let's just get this out of the way upfront because the addition of new neurons, again, grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion or frankly for most all discussions. It is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible for smell as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory in which new neurons appear to be added throughout the lifespan.

But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans. Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons, okay?

Now the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion. I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good.

However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections, removing new connections. Let's just leave it at this level mechanistically.

When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections. And that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of say memories or information. Just know that these are the important mechanisms.

In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort, or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent or teen.

You know, despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant, of course. And believe it or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal.

That's right, the removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust, they become much more reliable. Okay, so that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn.

And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information. So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz.

Now the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline, they start feeling stressed, but don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself. And you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question, this is a two question quiz. How many different ways mechanistically speaking does neuroplasticity occur?

Is it one mechanism, two mechanisms, or three mechanisms? Or is it four or five? Okay, can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo, which are reflective of neuroplasticity? Okay, so the answer to question was, is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity, as you recall, or as you may not have been able to recall.

And by the way, if you were not able to recall the three different modes of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity, that is fine. As you'll soon realize, recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical and very useful way to retain more information, even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know.

In fact, especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know. So the three ways are the strengthening of neural connections, second, the weakening of neural connections, and third, through neurogenesis, the addition of new neurons. Why did I provide this quiz? Why did I test you? Well, as you'll soon learn, if you look across the total body of research on how best to study and learn, it involves doing exactly what we just did, which is to periodically stop and test yourself on the material that you learned.

Studying is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you've acquired and which knowledge you have not managed to acquire, it also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any kind. And I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment. So yes, today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast.

And no, there will not be a test at the end, although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end. I'm going to provide you with an excellent zero cost, very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence of having listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast.

So if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end, there it is.